I don’t want to go too far in the direction of saying that fans are actually resisting capitalism or progressive or revolutionary, because that’s not necessarily true either. They spend all that money and time to be lulled into this sameness. One of the main things that people find embarrassing about fandom in general and about fangirls specifically is that they appear outwardly to have really been duped by the most obvious expressions of capitalism and the shiniest, silliest trinkets presented by the entertainment industry to young, susceptible people. Why haven’t we been able to capture a fuller picture of this extremely common phenomenon? The first chapter, called “Screaming,” delves into the almost religious-like ecstasy that fangirls feel toward their idols, and why that feeling is often dismissed as teen hysteria or marketing manipulation. They intuitively understood that if we’re all following each other and amplifying each other’s content about Justin Bieber or whatever, we can break the site. Fans were like the first people to really try to game the trending hashtags, kind of like spam networks. That was where you would do the public-facing part of fandom, your favorite picture of Rihanna and a link to her song so that people will buy it, and so that she’d become the most famous woman in the world, which is what you want, because you love her. It was this vacant space that fans were among the first to, like, homestead. Tumblr had this very secluded feeling and gave fans a lot of tools that they didn’t have on other websites.

It was also a counterpart to public-facing platforms like Facebook, which is not where you’d go to publish your slash fic under your real name for your parents and grandparents to see. GIFs that were invented on Tumblr became part of the cornerstone of fandom. People forget about this now, but Tumblr was pretty unprecedented as a visual tool.

Why were Tumblr and Twitter in particular so fruitful for fandoms? With the rise of social media and interaction-based platforms, women were the early adopters, and particularly fans were the early adopters to basically everything that’s been created. The internet was a lot more like the telephone, which became a domestic communication tool. Around 2000 is when researchers started noticing that women, and especially younger women, weren’t using it in the transactional or goal-oriented ways that men were using it for work or promotion, but as a social tool. There was obviously a gender gap in the early days of the web, but it started closing much earlier than people think. What were women doing on the early internet, and why were they less visible? “There are no girls on the internet” was a common axiom on 2000s-era message boards, but clearly that is not and was never the case. We recently chatted over the phone about the experience of writing the book, fandom’s fraught relationship with capitalism, and what the act of screaming for your fave can do. Tiffany (who, disclosure, was previously a reporter at Vox) provides nuanced analysis of an often-overlooked force in internet history, one dominated by the kind of young women whom the rest of the world dismissed as little more than brainless teenyboppers. That’s the subject of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s debut nonfiction book, Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, which acts as an ethnography of stan culture through the lens of a One Direction superfan.

One thing one direction