The Stanification Of Discourse. How Online Obsession Influences Modern Politics

About eight years ago, I set out to write a book about how the internet was changing the television industry. One of the areas that I found most fascinating was the rise of online fandoms for TV series on platforms like Tumblr and Twitter, which seemed, especially the former, to be far more intense than the ones that had cropped up on Facebook.

And by “intense,” I mean obsessive.

They were often centered around shows and stars that were somewhat obscure. Either they’d never had that big an audience or they’d been off the air for several years.

This, I came to learn, was to be expected.

If you were a fan of The Sopranos or Brad Pitt, you were competing with millions of other fans. But pick a more obscure series and you were competing, at best, with hundreds of other fans.

Odder still was that these fans were rarely the fourteen-year-old girls I’d initially assumed them to be, but rather, middle-aged women. Often with husbands and children of their own.

The other thing I learned was, that in these uber-fandoms (of which there were many) one was not permitted to offer even a minor criticism of the show or the actors.

Unless, of course, the fandom had collectively decided that a certain plotline or actor or producer was “evil”, in which case it was expected that you bad-mouth them.

And by “expected,” I mean “required.”

Because if there was anything all the online fandoms had in common, it was this rigid enforcement of groupthink.

This all came rushing back to me last month when I was listening to a podcast where the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott was discussing why he was getting out of the film critiquing business.

And one of his reasons was that the rabid fandom of All Those Superhero Movies did not allow for any sort of criticism, no matter how mild. Scott had to be 100 percent down with every aspect of the movie or face a torrent of unrelenting online criticism.

This was very much in line with the behavior I’d witnessed in the TV fandoms where a casual comment about not really liking the star’s new haircut would unleash a torrent of abuse.

There’s another place we see this sort of unrelenting groupthink too: politics.

Political thought used to be more nuanced. People might support a party or candidate on some of their ideas but not all.

More than that, there was no expectation that would be the case.

Groupthink, after all, was for totalitarian states. Soviets were not allowed to criticize Stalin. Chinese had to be fully devoted to Mao.

People in liberal democracies were able to think for themselves and carry a range of opinions.

Until all of a sudden they weren’t.

It was the internet that did it. Twitter in particular.

But suddenly, anyone holding an idea outside of the Accepted Party Doctrine was a traitor.

Right-wingers who deviated from the groupthink were deemed “RINOs,” Left-wingers were deemed members of some sort of hate group, and in both cases they were essentially stood up against the wall and shot.

“Canceled” is, I believe, the correct term.

The parallels to online fandom don’t end there either.

There was the creation of “fan art,” which is just what it sounds like, artwork created by fans that serves to celebrate and glorify the stars of their favorite shows. Said artwork is of varying quality, from drawings that look like they were done by a talented fourth-grader to those that look professionally produced. But think of all the fan art featuring politicians we’ve seen over the past half decade.

There were the self-appointed Interpreters, the ones who would take a random utterance and imbue it with far greater meaning than the speaker had ever intended. So that a celebrity mentioning in an interview that they liked listening to jazz to unwind (something which, in reality, they may have done a grand total of once) would cause a frenzy among the fandom to educate themselves about jazz and find the most relaxing tracks, with further arguments ensuing around which tracks their crush was most likely listening to.

Again, think of all the times Twitter has taken a political figure’s off the cuff comment and turned it into doctrine.

There was also the belief that a perceived betrayal from inside the house was far worse than one from an outsider. So the fan who didn’t like the star’s new haircut, the pundit who questioned a policy proposal needed to be dealt with far more harshly than an outsider.

The political parallels are evident here as well—the notion that the worst betrayals come from inside the party can be traced back to Trotsky, a concept that George Orwell utilized to great effect in Animal Farm.

This then leads to the inevitable next question: how closely related are these two scenarios? Did the rise of Standom and its acceptance online lead to the increased Stanification of politics? Or did the structure of Twitter, which is decidedly not a place for nuance make both outcomes inevitable.

I’m going to go with Option C—a little of each.

The rise of social media allowed for the growth of online fandoms, especially around C-level celebrities and shows. This was aided and abetted by the growth of streaming television, which made all those old shows accessible to a new generation of fans, allowing the fandoms to constantly replenish themselves. Because sometimes all it takes is two or three really dedicated fans to keep an entire FanForum site going.

And in order to maintain control of the world they had created and so valiantly defended, the OG Stans had to enforce rules on the new ones, primary among them being “everything our heroes do is good. Everything about the show is great.”

A philosophy that was easily translated to politics.

Where shows were replaced by political movements and stars by standard bearers. With online communities in which North Korean levels of fealty were required.

So how do we get out from under this?

We wait.

Because even without Elon Musk’s intervention, Twitter was not going to be around forever. Eventually the world would move on to the New New Thing, one where outrageousness was not as rapidly rewarded.

Politicians, too, would change, becoming less like cult leaders and more like regular people doing a job.

Together, that’s likely to bring about a re-embrace of nuance, a less all-or-nothing fealty to ideas and celebrities.

It’s time.