Everything i need i get.., p.1
Everything I Need I Get from You, page 1
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A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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For Sophie
Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.
—J.C.R. LICKLIDER AND ROBERT W. TAYLOR, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” 1968
if i die tonight tell one direction I’ll see them in hell
—LISETTE HERNANDEZ, Twitter, 2014
Introduction
If you can stand it, I’m going to describe a six-second video.
It goes like this: the British boy band One Direction is onstage, on tour, in the summer of 2015. You can’t actually see them—the camera is too far back in the crowd. You can only kind of see one of them, the then twenty-one-year-old Irish singer and sometime guitar player Niall Horan, bottle-blond in a black T-shirt, blown up on a stadium monitor and washed out into a bright white mess owing to a crappy cell phone camera attempting to record another screen. You can hear a downbeat in a sweet if unremarkable ballad about young love from the band’s fourth album, Four, and then you see Horan wringing his hands as he steps to the mic to sing the line “We took a chance.” It comes out wrong and we’ll never know why. The a is an o. He does not usually do this. He usually sings “chance.” Odd, but you wouldn’t necessarily notice or care if it weren’t for the fact that—in the tiny space between this phrase and the next—you then hear another voice, coming from at least several yards behind the camera and begging, credulously, in a molar-crunching scream: “What the fuck is a chonce?” She must know. She won’t. The end.
This video was posted originally on the Twitter-owned short-form video app Vine shortly after the concert, and was adopted as the One Direction fandom’s latest and greatest in-joke. It was reblogged and retweeted, the footage was downloaded and reposted. Within a few weeks of the first upload, Harry Styles acknowledged the moment onstage, singing his line of the song as usual, then tossing to Horan for his part, and muttering into the mic, “But don’t say ‘chonce.’” At that, the crowd screams as if they have just found out they’re alive. On Tumblr, fans shared this clip—with all-caps “ASDFGHJKL” and similar expressions—and from then on, there were clips of Horan at subsequent shows, nodding and laughing as tens of thousands of people sing at him, in unison, “chonce.” Though Vine has since been shuttered, “WTF is a chonce” persists on YouTube, where the comments years later are one-note: “Why do I still find this funny even though I’ve seen it millions of times?” The joke is not funny, but it is for insiders, and it has a special bittersweetness to it because the original footage was taken just a few months before One Direction’s final public performance.
The internet’s ephemera is often better left unexamined, not just because so much of it ends up having a disgusting or depressing backstory, but because so much more of it is impossible to explain at all. One Direction was known for its onstage mishaps and physical accidents, made funnier by their contrast with the band’s otherwise meticulously managed and physically grueling stadium tours. There are entire supercuts of Harry Styles falling over in catastrophic fashion, and of sophomoric pranks that involve two or three of the band members ganging up on another. Yet “chonce” became the single-syllable talisman, clung to even after everything was all over.
Four years after the first clip went viral, I scrolled past a tweet from an account with the handle @isasdfghjkls:
me::(
niall: we took a chonce
me::)
I retweeted it, even though the majority of the people who follow my Twitter account would have no idea what it was referring to.1 It was a plain statement of fact—they could edify themselves if they wanted to live better. “We took a chonce” is so dumb—so pure a joke at the expense of someone who can take one and would love to—the weight of life lifts off of my shoulders when I’m reminded of it. Watching this video smacks me with a lingering hit of dopamine, like a gumball-machine-sticky-hand landing on a windowpane. When I need to, I can watch “We took a chonce” and experience what some people feel when they put their faces in front of a seasonal affective disorder lamp. What a different sort of person feels when they jog. If it so happens that we arrive at a dystopian future in which always-on screens are embedded directly into our retinas, I’ll spend every crowded train ride and mandatory all-hands meeting and one-year-old’s birthday party washing my eyes with “We took a chonce.” That’s the only way I can describe what One Direction does for me without saying something as useless as “I love them.”
Even now, the serendipity of the Tumblr feed leads me to treasures: a watercolor painting of “WTF is a chonce?” in curling bridesmaid script; a flyer with tear-off strips at the bottom that read “Chonce”—get it? Take one!—supposedly hung up by a pair of friends in their local bowling alley. “The only problematic thing about my fav is he can’t pronounce ‘chance,’” reads another post reblogged into my feed. “Other than that he’s a chill little sun drop that loves sports.”2 A commemorative T-shirt cost me a mere $19 plus shipping on Etsy—“WTF is a chonce?” printed in white bubble letters, on pale blue. If you’re the type of person who still peruses Urban Dictionary, you might notice that “chonce” is defined there: “An alternative for the word ‘chance.’ Commonly used by One Direction’s Niall Horan.”
* * *
A coldly assembled consumer product, One Direction was an idea that Simon Cowell takes credit for having while serving as a judge on the British reality competition TV show The X Factor in 2010. The five individual boys he met on the show were too bland and young and poorly dressed to make sense on their own, so he pushed them together and made them into a litter of commercially viable puppies. They released their first single in 2011, in the moment that social media was revealing itself as our new shared reality. It was the year teenagers started getting Twitter accounts, which happened just as Tumblr started selling advertising, which was around the same time that Instagram launched and exploded and was acquired by Facebook, while YouTube was cleaning up its design so that young people would have an easier time falling into algorithmic wormholes. One Direction fans—who seemed mostly to be young women—were mocked for embracing a boy band, an inauthentic thing pieced together for money. They also used, as the means of their expression, a collection of websites that profited off them yet again.
“Women are the internet, and the internet is women,” the editors of n+1 announced to start their winter issue in 2013.3 “Supposing the internet was a woman—what then?” the writer Moira Weigel asked in Logic in the spring of 2018. The loose, woven structure of the internet, which enables things like whisper networks, reflexive personal sharing, and complex storytelling, has been more useful to women and marginalized groups than it has been to men, Weigel suggested. Men have always had easy access to other, more streamlined types of communication. But she cautioned readers not to romanticize the internet. It’s home to bad actors and misinformation, both given reach they would not have otherwise. It’s also where women are expected to perform tasks they’ve always been expected to perform, she noted: posing, preening, affirming, doing things for other people in exchange for the feeling of being loved. Women are the ones fueling the engine “for the accumulation of vast piles of capital,” Weigel wrote, and they are not the ones generally benefiting from it. “Yet the internet also provides tools that can be used as alternatives,” she pivoted. “In this sense, the internet is ambivalent. Fortunately, inhabiting ambivalence is something that women are good at, having had to practice it for so long.”4
Any examination of online fandom has to be approached with the same ambivalence. The cultural phenomena of fandom and the internet are braided together—one can’t be fully understood without the other. Both, in providing structure, have also produced chaos. Both, in providing meaning, have sometimes oversupplied it. Yet fans’ role in shaping our present culture, politics, and social life is often overlooked, and the roots of this oversight go back decades. When listing off pivotal subcultural movements, hardly anyone would think of fangirls. The mid-century sociologists who invented subcultural studies even literally considered rebellion the province of middle- and working-class young men, spending their postwar discretionary income on weird outfits and aggressive haircuts; girls—who at the time were screaming over the Beatles or sitting at home watching soap operas with their mothers—didn’t jump out as a compelling subject for study. Or, these activities did not seem subcultural. They looked generic.
Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane; her refusal to accept things the way they are is one of her defining characteristics. She is dropping out of the mainstream even while she embraces a thing that is as mainstream as a thing can get. Publicly, the fangirl wastes money and refuses to make her time useful. With the advent of social media, she started publishing thousands of messages to idols who would never read them. The constant, ambient disapproval of the general population can sequester fangirls joyfully, in semiprivate spaces with like-minded and creative groups of fast friends; or dismally, in semiprivate spaces that are still open to scorn, and therefore lean on self-policing or outward-facing aggression to protect the boundaries of a sensitive community. All of this happens on platforms with a financial incentive to produce more and more of it, but not necessarily to foster its best and most inspiring characteristics.
The labor of fans, which makes no sense because it is performed for free, can confuse even friendly onlookers. In 2011, Maciej Cegłowski, founder of the bookmarking site Pinboard, was one of the first technologists to notice the business opportunity fans represented.5 He saw that fans of various TV shows and film franchises and musical groups had created elaborate tagging systems on rival site Delicious, and he saw that Yahoo’s corporate takeover of Delicious, and YouTube’s subsequent takeover of the shell of that Delicious, had ended in the destruction of many of the tagging features that were so important to them. Fans lost the ability to build up vast collections of tags, sort them, and search them, which had been critical to the project of keeping open records of a fandom’s history as it developed. So, in a stroke of genius, Cegłowski offered them the opportunity to do that somewhere else. He published a mass-editable Google Doc and asked all kinds of people, who wouldn’t typically have any say or hand in the construction of the platforms they would later be expected to use and generate profit for, to come in and tell him what features they would need if they were to make Pinboard their new bookmarking home. The Google Doc “ended up being fifty-two pages long,” he recounted breathlessly on his blog. “At times, there were so many people editing the document that it tucked its tail between its legs and went into a panicked ‘read only’ mode. Even the mighty engineers at Google couldn’t cope with the sustained attention of fandom.” The Google Doc had rules, color codes, a full index, and a promise not to write any fanfiction about Cegłowski unless he gave the okay. “The editors of this document were anonymous, but they somehow seemed to know each other,” Cegłowski wrote. He titled his account of the whole affair “Fan Is a Tool-Using Animal,” and concluded it with praise for what he saw as a DIY, punk-y energy: “Fans transgress. Fans never sold out, man!”6
Cegłowski’s praise of fandom as a practice became a more common perspective throughout the 2010s in part because of pro-pop trends in music criticism and pro-girl trends in marketing, but also significantly because of the way highly visible online pop music fandoms played to and existed within the media’s imagination of liberal politics, as well as its fascination with the overt goodness of youth. The everywhereness of fans was remarkable; they seemed to accomplish anything they wanted. But fans are not magical, nor are they a unified group. They are people. Online fandom can be progressive, and it can also be reactionary; it can foster creativity, and it can also smooth away individuality; it can create new tools and compel fascinating action just as easily as it can provide the dull, repetitive skills required for activities like media manipulation and harassment. The One Direction fandom has done all of this, and it has meant all sorts of things to all kinds of people who share one particular affinity but might not necessarily share much else.
* * *
Often described as the third British invasion—post–Spice Girls and post-Beatles—or part of a new 1990s-like boy band boom, One Direction was unlike either of those phenomena. The closest thing One Direction has to a predecessor is not any transatlantic act from a previous century or the tightly choreographed boy bands of the generation prior, but Justin Bieber—discovered on YouTube in 2007, made famous by young women on MySpace, elevated to stardom by the relentless tweeting of millions of people who had boundless affection and plenty of free time. Bieber’s first album, My World, released in 2009, debuted at number six on the Billboard charts. One Direction released their first single in September 2011 and arrived in the United States in February 2012. A few weeks later, Up All Night made them the first British group to enter the U.S. charts at number one with a debut album. (It took four years for Beatlemania to hit the United States, and even longer for it to spread globally.) Their next three albums did the same, which had never been done by any group at all. “We all sat and watched the film of the Beatles arriving in America, and to be honest, that was really like us,” Harry Styles said in 2014. “None of us think we’re in the same league as them music-wise. We’d be fools if we did … Fame-wise, it’s probably even bigger.”7
Five boys: for the time being, they all dress approximately the same, like mall kids who have only ever seen zip-up hoodies and loose khaki pants. Harry Styles is the youngest, with a baby face and the liveliest hair; he is the focus of tabloids and gossip accounts because he is often publicly dating. Liam Payne has the second-floppiest hairdo and a sweet obsession with rules, as well as an expressed fear that nobody will ever love him separately from his fame. Niall Horan is the Irish and fake-blond one, with the most boyish sense of humor—a love of farting and pulling down pants. Nominally, he knows how to play the guitar. Zayn Malik is the most interested in asserting that this is not a regular boy band, it’s a “cool” boy band, and he is regarded as the mysterious one, possibly because he is quiet and possibly because the media is inclined to cast the band’s sole Muslim member as the odd one out. Louis Tomlinson is the oldest, the least often spotlighted singer, the one with a longtime unfamous girlfriend, and the class clown, pulling pranks and shouting swear words.
Before One Direction, becoming a pop star took time, sacrifice, restriction, discipline. The boys of NSYNC lived on $35 per diems under the thumb of a notoriously manipulative and coercive manager who also stole tens of millions of dollars from the Backstreet Boys and wound up in prison.8 The Jonas Brothers, the next iteration of the boy band idyll, were the Disney-approved version, expected to give moving testimonials about their commitment to remaining chaste and drug-free.9 One Direction had a punishing touring schedule and a strict album a year as contracted deliverables, but they were never beholden to the traditions of the genre in quite the same way—they were always permitted to eschew choreography and matching outfits and conversations about purity rings. They were “anarchic,” Cowell said in their 2013 documentary.10 They had tattoos. They had sex. They even smoked! Niall Horan, unfamiliar as he was with the way Irish slang would translate in an American cultural context, was filmed shouting at some photographers at an airport that they were a “shower of cunts,” which became another fandom catchphrase.11 This was all allowed, it seemed, mostly because it was what the fans wanted.
By the time One Direction reached the United States, they were the biggest subculture on Tumblr, a platform designed to let affections snowball through a dizzying system of additive reblogs and visual stockpiling. Each member of the band had well over 1 million followers on Twitter. Within a few years the platform was defined by the rivalry between Justin Bieber and One Direction fans, and the passions of fandom were impossible for regular users not to notice. In 2015, a four-year-old tweet from Louis Tomlinson—“Always in my heart @Harry_Styles. Yours sincerely, Louis”—was retweeted enough times for it to become the second-most retweeted message in the site’s history—edging out Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory tweet but falling short of Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscar selfie.12 At that point, it had been retweeted over 700,000 times. A number that’s now more than 2.8 million. (More on that never-ending story later.) This was a habit of the mythmaking One Direction fandom, which enjoyed selecting and recirculating key moments of its own history even as it was still unfolding. Another was from Niall Horan, in January 2010: “applied for xfactorhope it all wrks out,” he tweeted six months before he’d even heard the words “One Direction” himself. The fans dug it up after they’d made him famous, and by the time I started going to One Direction concerts, it had become common—maybe even played out—to print poster-size enlargements of the tweet and wave them at Horan if he looked your way in the crowd.
