How Deadheads and Directioners Made the Internet What It Is Today | Pitchfork

Normal people tend to regard stans in a few ways, either amused by their histrionic slang (“your fave could never”), impressed by their organizational dexterity, or horrified by their willingness to launch full-scale harassment campaigns. The relationship is one of intrigue and suspicion, not recognition; and so even those who self-identify as “chronically online” don’t always quite get stans’ motivations, content to see them as just a curious part of the online ecology. That’s where Kaitlyn Tiffany, internet culture writer at The Atlantic, steps in. Her forthcoming book, Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet As We Know It, dives into the trenches of online fandom—the deep-fried memes, the bizarro and sometimes dangerous conspiracy theories—drawing from scholarly research and her own personal history loving One Direction. It traces how fandom has shaped our modern-day internet: becoming our “dominant mode of commerce,” infiltrating our speech. The book’s balance of first-person experience and scholarly analysis, humor and rigor, makes it an irresistible read.Below is an edited excerpt from Everything I Need I Get From You, which begins with a search for Harry Styles’ vomit shrine and expands into a history of online fan spaces, from Deadheads on…
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