From fan citizenship to ‘fanspiracies’: Politics and participatory cultures in times of crisis?

In 2020 and 2021 the ‘meme stock’ phenomenon rattled the US stock market. Meme stocks are shares of a company that become volatilely popular against all market expectations. They are driven, in part at least, by amateur investors on platformized trading apps, coordinating in participatory forums like Reddit, and often drawing on memes and other spreadable media techniques to encourage others to buy and hold stocks at these unusually high prices against traditional investment advice. In so doing, investors speculatively seek to drive the prices of stocks beyond what a traditional market might value them as, gamifying the stock market in the process. It is no coincidence that many of the stocks caught up in the phenomenon – Gamestop and AMC Entertainment – had pre-existing fannish connections, but the relationship between fandom and meme stocks goes much deeper.

Though of course many involved were seeking to make a quick dollar, many user practices have crystallised into an underlying conspiracy belief about their role in confronting an all-powerful Wall Street via ‘the mother of all short squeezes’ or MOASS. In practices that are reminiscent of several similar social phenomenon in recent years, perhaps most notably QAnon, such users seek out and ‘decode’ hidden meanings, drawing those interpretations into ever-more complex narratives about how and when the hypothetical MOASS will take place. The CEO of AMC Entertainment, Adam Aron, continues to playfully engage these communities. In February 2023, he, likely accidentally, tweeted the letter M. The tweet caused widespread speculation in forums like r/wallstreetbets about its potential meaning and implications for the stock market. He later replied:

On a lighter note, earlier I said the number of movie releases in 2023 will be 35% more than in ‘22. That’s SO important for AMC’s path to eventual pandemic recovery. But then, I tweeted a cryptic M, which some of you are ‘decoding’. It means nothing, I didn’t knowingly tweet it! (Aron, 10/2/23, @CEOAdam).

This denial initiated further decoding in related forums, requiring a follow-up the next day:

Yesterday I tweeted an ‘M’ by mistake, but many of you thought I was being less than candid in the denial, and that the M must have meant something. Nope, just a tweeting error. But today I am tweeting this, and it does mean something: ‘Y’ (Aron, 12/2/23, @CEOAdam).

The deep, significant interpretations applied to a single letter published by accident, and its ability to move the stock price of a large multinational, offers a snapshot of a much broader set of practices that are embedded in contemporary life. Increasingly, something resembling ‘fandom’ – highly active and ludic interpretation in bounded social spaces; affective and repeated engagement; creative textual productivity – has come to contribute to shaping virtually all aspects of social, political, cultural, and economic life. Meme stocks are but one example. QAnon is probably the most pertinent example of this, where social media users collaborated to solve ‘puzzles’ posted by Q in a similar way to how fans attempt to unpick what will happen in future episodes of their favourite TV shows (see Reinhard et al., 2022).

Similarly, social media users took to platforms like Reddit, TikTok and Twitter to ‘investigate’ the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old influencer, in 2021, analysing Instagram posts, Spotify playlists and Fitbit data to trace her footsteps and ultimately conclude that her fiancé had killed her (Jones, 2023). And the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard court case also saw audiences watching the trial live on streaming platforms as well as offering analyses on YouTube, producing memes, and selling merchandise in support of – or opposition to – the stars (Cai, 2022). Thus, we see evidence of a broader platform of popular media fan-like engagements with a range on non-fiction texts in multiple arenas.

These phenomena speak to a fundamental point made by Henry Jenkins at the dawn of web 2.0: ‘cyberspace is fandom writ large’ (2006: 138). For all the criticisms levelled against Jenkins over the years, fair and unfair, this fundamental point underpinning his work on participatory cultures remains the pithiest and most prophetic. It would be churlish to criticise Jenkins for failing to predict quite how profound and uneven those consequences might be in an environment where ‘cyberspace’ shapes or intersects with almost every aspect of our existence. Yet two decades later that is the challenge confronting us. Social media platforms are machines for converting interpretations into textual productivities, and the networked affordances of the internet increasingly place those productivities into spaces of community and/or conflict. The continued rise of reactionary populism, the ongoing consequences of climate collapse, and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic have all given a degree of urgency to making sense of fannish practices, dispositions, and behaviours.

The urgency and anxiety surrounding this level of audience and user activity reverses an older model of anxiety about the passivity of audiences. Media and communication studies was forged in the mid-20^th century with the aim of proving and demonstrating the fundamental assumption that mass media audiences were alienated, and vulnerable to behavioural influences and effects. In many regards, the discipline has since attempted to complicate and reverse these assumptions. When researchers went out to speak to the ‘masses’ they found an extraordinarily rich and diverse set of responses to media texts: audiences spoke back to the media, challenged it, and rooted their responses in their own textual and social networks.

One of the biggest challenges to the notion that mediated popular cultures produced ‘passive’ audiences were in spaces where audiences were obviously engaged in the production and distribution of their own mediated texts and/or in communities that clearly adopted and adapted mediated texts (see Falero, 2016). From community media experiments to alternative media formats like subcultural zines, scholars increasingly came to stress things like ‘creativity’, ‘community’, and alternative public spheres. These theories did not dismantle media effects arguments, but they did provide some of the richest discursive weapons against those assumptions and curtailed some of its worst tendencies.

Celebrations of these aspects of audience participation and creation soon followed in theoretical work, particularly theories focussing on fans and fandoms. In framing audiences as ‘active’, fans served as useful case studies for exploring how audiences interpreted texts in creative, productive, spectacular, and visible ways (Bacon-Smith, 1991; Fiske, 1992; Jenkins, 1992). Through playful productivity, some audiences could ‘write in the margins’ and produce texts that (re)enforced extra-textual meanings, often refracted through the subcultural and social identities and subject positions of the reader. Both inside and outside of the academy such activities – like fan fiction (Busse, 2017), art, and vids (Coppa, 2008; Turk and Johnson, 2012); cosplay (Lamerichs, 2011); conventions (Woo et al., 2020); forums, wikis, and message boards (Mittell et al., 2013) – came to serve as the bread and butter of contemporary definitions and understandings of fans and fandom.

No doubt these studies were interesting, rich, and innovative, yet studies of fans very well might have stayed as a reasonably niche subfield had it not been for three overlapping trends.

First, as early adopters of technology; notably visible participants in emerging shared interest online spaces; enthusiastic research participants; and often occupying overlapping social coordinates with academic researchers, fans made for useful case studies in burgeoning internet and social media studies (Baym, 2000; Pearson, 2010). The types of activities that fans had been theorised as doing at an earlier conjuncture proved to be useful for optimistic researchers trying to make sense of emergent forms of creativity, DIY culture and communities in early web spaces. This hinge has been most apparent in Henry Jenkins and colleagues’ concept of ‘participatory culture’ which was first theorised in relation to fan cultures and then expanded to users of the world wide web and then web 2.0 (Jenkins et al., 2016). Participatory culture, and participation more broadly, has since become a ‘paradigm’ for understanding users in internet cultures (Mario and Daria, 2016; Tombleson and Wolf, 2017).

Second, what once might have been considered minority audience practices have become adopted across audience segments and all users and audiences are increasingly interpellated as fans by the media industry regardless of whether they take up those positions (Ford, 2014; Stanfill, 2019). Indeed, the business models of social media platforms are fundamentally predicated on such forms of participation. This is a set of processes that some scholars have described as ‘the mainstreaming of fandom’ (Jenner, 2017: 305). If fandom might once have been considered a type of ‘resistant’ or ‘alternative’ reading practice it might now better be understood itself as hegemonic (Hills, 2005). Audiences are encouraged to produce, participate, and engage as fans as a political, economic, moral, and social good.

Third, ‘fans’ and ‘fandom’ have been utilised as a useful lens for understanding a range of modes and forms of engagement with mediated content beyond ‘popular culture’, a process described by Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington as ‘fanization’ (2017: 22). Fandom, or at least something resembling it, is everywhere: in news (Gray, 2007), politics (Sandvoss, 2013), health (Speck, 2023), criminal and police investigations (Jones, 2023), business and investing (Stanfill and Salter, 2021), environmentalism (Amann and Doidge, 2022), and humanitarianism (Chouliaraki, 2013). Fan spaces, moreover, are increasingly the central sites of decoding the news. In this reading, ‘fans’ and ‘fandom’ are critical for synthesising ideas about the types of affective relationships audiences have with mediated texts in a deeply mediated world (Gray et al., 2017).

There are two distinct approaches to making sense of fandom’s centrality in the contemporary public sphere. One perspective is concerned with citizenship and suggests that the pleasures of popular and political culture have always co-mingled, and that popular culture can reconcile or even be a useful arena for the cultivation of ‘civic virtues’ (Van Zoonen, 2005: 63) more commonly associated with ‘traditional’ political participation (Hinck, 2019). Following Jenkins’s arguments that fannish participatory cultures might provide a training ground for civic participation, work has centred ‘fan activism’ as a space in which fandom might be brought to bear on contemporary political issues (Andini and Ghaziah, 2021; Bennett, 2014; Jenkins, 2012; Numerato, 2018). Elsewhere, political activists deploy the symbols of popular culture in protests and the logics of spreadable media in the design of political campaigns. Increasingly, audience’s own fannish engagements operate in a model of consumer-citizenship characterised by ‘ethical cultural consumption’ whereby fannish engagement is negotiated by decisions about social, political, and environmental ‘good’ (Wood et al., 2020).

Another approach is concerned with exclusion, reactionary politics, inequality, and conspiracy. Scholars have been keen to point towards fandom as spaces structured by racisms, sexisms, homophobias, transphobias and other forms of oppression (Bury, 2008; Goward, 2019; Pande, 2018; Wanzo, 2015). Relatedly, in the contemporary environment popular cultural fandoms related to film, television and video games have often been at the forefront of the mobilisation and mainstreaming of wider social and political tensions and have frequently provided the template and playbook for on and offline harassment campaigns: 2014 saw the loosely organised, anti-feminist Gamergate campaign which targeted women in the video game industry including online harassment, doxing, rape threats, and death threats (Chess and Shaw, 2015; Massanari, 2017). Global populist political leaders have also interpellated their followers as fans, and a generation of reactionary microcelebrities have cultivated a small but loyal following by saying controversial and cruel statements positioned in opposition to ‘the mainstream media’ (Lewis, 2020).

An emergent but significant body of literature working in this vein deploys fandom as an explanatory tool to make sense of cult(ure)s of mis/disinformation, particularly in relation to conspiracy theories. Certainly, aspects of science fiction fan culture and conspiracy culture have comfortably overlapped in convention halls and science fiction zines for decades; certain forms of popular tabloid culture have often encouraged the pleasures related to conspiracy ‘news’; and there is a long and rich history of conspiracy theorists utilising community and alternative media ecosystems long before social media. Conspiracy theorists might even be understood as a type of fan community in and of themselves, with their own community norms and dispositions. But these connections are more entwined than merely sharing social and cultural spaces. As Mark Fenster has suggested, conspiracy theorists engage in practices of intense interpretation and decoding – something he calls ‘hyperactive semiosis’ (2008: 95) – directed towards history, news, and politics. This hyperactive semiosis is put into the service of constructing ‘alternative’, ludic narratives that operate outside of traditional, hegemonic interpretations of the world. As scholars have noted, there are remarkably similar practices shared between ‘classic’ definitions of fandom and conspiracy theorists (Aupers, 2020; Marwick and Partin, 2022). This is what we playfully call ‘fanspiracy’: the way that fannish and conspiracy dispositions draw on similar techniques, pleasures, and practices for interpreting the world in a culture where the boundaries between popular and political communication are blurrier than they have ever been.

It’s important to not fall into ahistorical traps: conspiracy theories have always had an impact on the wider political system and have underpinned racism and antisemitism for as long as there have been printing presses. Belief in conspiracy, moreover, at least in America, seems to remain stable even if, at times, adherents had to share their theories in more private, subcultural spaces (Butter, 2020). Moral panics about how social media are responsible for the prevalence of conspiracy thinking will likely seem as quaint as those linking conspiracy theories to the ‘video age’ in the 1990s (see Fenster, 2008: 118). But the centrality and visibility of conspiracies in recent events, as well as the speed by which they bleed into and impact wider media, economic, political, and social institutions, are new, and need to be taken seriously.

Though it might be alluring to construct ‘citizenship’ and ‘conspiracy’ approaches as binaries, it is important we resist these temptations. Citizenship and conspiracy are two sides of the same coin, and one’s own categorisation of what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of participation will no doubt be shaped by one’s own political and affective and, indeed, fannish investments. Taking seriously the practices of fans of ‘low’ popular culture and refusing to conceptualise them as naïve cultural dupes was, no doubt, much easier than doing the same for white nationalists and anti-vaxxers. But it is important that we avoid reproducing older anxieties about passive audiences being manipulated by shadowy, undefined forces such as algorithms while guarding against new anxieties about overly active audiences who were safer hidden away and quiet in the unknowable mass. Cultural studies, as Nick Couldry has observed, has always placed ‘a value on representing the social world in terms that are adequate to the complexity each of us would accord to ourselves’ (2006: 59). The methods, theories and approaches developed in fan studies – of patient and ‘slow’ qualitative research; of treating research subjects as complex and sometimes contradictory individuals; of the importance of emotions, feelings and experiences in user audience research; on the need to take meaning, pleasure and community seriously – remain more important than ever for making sense of this cultural terrain.