Out of the community
How fandom communities have ruined pop culture, and a different approach to socialization inside it
Along with “fandom”, today “community” is the preferred word in pop culture when describing the wide realm of its enthusiasts. But, in truth, community rather manifests as the main channel that allows media of all kinds to be infiltrated by subversive activism.
When this word is mentioned, this wide range of different people is pictured like a peaceful village where the grass is always green and the sun shines bright, yet always threatened by a looming menace on the margins. In the everyday context, the community is a battleground to those fringe elements penetrating the entertainment industry (hence, national and international culture), those which manipulate the nature of the public with the scope of influencing the way a business operates; the final scope is of course to use pop culture for political and careerist ends, and ultimately to make it a serving branch of the State, the industrial Ministry of Propaganda.
Now, nothing inside a supposed community is communitarian: out of the industry’s work, an idol is made, and soon social and cultural control take the lead, with rounds of exiles being inflicted on those who do not conform. All appreciators of a certain product must adhere to cults and fake values that have nothing to do with the product itself, fully commit to mirror the ideal (and sincerely dystopic) crowd that exists in the mind of the infiltrators, the self-proclaimed guardians of the community— no space is left for dissent (and dissent is targeted as a force of evil as well). Hell, no space is left for the entertainment itself, but the political aspect gets in charge of everything.
Social control never limits itself to the “fans” (I’d rather not use this term), but it extends to the industry proper: a similar kind of aggression is directed at workers and creatives, and here the stakes are of course much higher— it is of people’s jobs that we are talking about, of people who want to feed their children and do not wish to be kicked out of the industry. The general compliance of executives to such criminal behavior, in what, I believe, amounts to a debased hope to gain the goodwill of certain politicians, makes all this harder to resist. It is a gun pointed to the head, and, let us be honest, not every worker in the industry can escape it by going indie. In fact, even if most of all tried, once you are targeted by these ghouls you may never find peace.
The good news is that people are starting to notice and counter this phenomenon more effectively. Razorfist provided a good example that may spread the will to fight it more fiercely. “Gatekeep the gatekeepers” is a good slogan and a useful course of actions, because these people are indeed the real gatekeepers, and they really are the only human type that must be excluded— they would rather destroy something than let the common man enjoy things, or let him have a social and cultural life that goes beyond the Democrat party line of the day.
I have no hopes about people adjusting their vocabulary, but acting in that way should bring us out of communities and into a type of social organization which is different and that we should name differently. When the environment surrounding a certain product or media is built in such a way: through it being open to participation, but not subversion, through it revolving about enjoyment of product rather than pseudo-intellectualism and social control, it is not a community by the current sense. Communities have managers that will eventually hold hands too much with the corporate directors of the media they represent, and with political activists.
What media enthusiasts should have in mind is a scene, whose main difference lies in the absence of centralization and in sociality. A modern community has an inherent pyramidal structure that makes the average Joe depend on ever more anti-social elements along the upper levels, from the pink-haired community manager to the politicized CEO; the scene should be able to preserve the integrity of media by favoring interaction that goes beyond the generalized adoption of commercial tags, and further than the too-widespread habit of consuming product obsessively as it is released and forgetting about it in six months. What the common enjoyment of pop culture should do is helping us form social bonds and real human interactions, no matter the way they are built; a cultural environment belonging to anyone who is able and willing to respect such culture. The scene has to favor the personal contribution directed at its enrichment (even something as simple as being good at a game can be considered a contribution— I’m not asking people to work for free) instead of shrinking its cohorts in numbers and quality. We must never forget that the main purpose of entertainment is recreation and socialization, and soon follows re-elaboration, since being part of a culture, even a sub-culture, should be an incentive to add one’s voice to the choir.
When the social environment gets freed from a centralized structure, actual protection of the product is ensured by real contact among members of the public, and between public and creators. The opening of specific fan groups should never been encouraged, because the endgame of them will always be or morph into the centralizing tendency lead by untrustworthy individuals that created the problem in the first place.