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 the WELL to Directioners on Tumblr.
I’m looking for the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit. I know it was on Tumblr—I remember seeing it there. In the fall of 2014, at the beginning of my last year of college, I also remember a GIF set of Harry Styles, answering an interview question about the shrine to his own vomit, nodding diplomatically and saying, first in one frame, “It’s interesting. For sure,” and in a second, “A little niche, maybe.”
Those are my memories. These are the facts. That October, Harry Styles went to a party at the British pop singer Lily Allen’s house in Los Angeles. The next morning, riding in a chauffeured Audi, in his gym clothes, on the way back from “a very long hike,” he requested that the driver pull over. On the side of the 101 freeway just outside Calabasas, he threw up near a metal barrier, looked up, and locked eyes with a camera. He is sweaty, peaked; his hair is dirty, pulled up in a messy bun. Yet, dehydrated in gym shorts and athletic socks, hands-on-knees by the side of the road, he still exudes the elegance of Harry Styles. His cheekbones find the direction of the light, thanks to reflex or a gift from God.
The day they were taken, the photos circulated in tabloids and on Tumblr and Twitter, and a few hours later, a Los Angeles–based 18-year-old named Gabrielle Kopera set out to find the spot and label it for posterity. She drove there alone, then taped a piece of poster board to the barrier: “Harry Styles threw-up here 10-12-14,” she wrote in big block letters. The grainy photo she posted first to her own Instagram circulated later on Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and all those junky-looking celebrity blogs that are actually just search engine scams. Even more than the photos of Harry Styles, I remember that I loved the photo of this sign. Harry Styles threw up here! That’s all he did—but given that we’ve seen him throw up only once before (gross story), and we’ve never seen him do it on this strip of gravel, the sign suggested that it’s worth recording for posterity. Harry Styles threw up here! Six months prior, the Los Angeles Times reported that the then 20-year-old Styles had dropped $4 million on a five-bedroom house in Beverly Hills (a photo gallery of the home’s interior was removed from the story shortly after publishing). Yet, he descended from the Hills, jumped out of the car in fancy suburbia, and threw up in the street. Why stop at a piece of poster board? Why not a plaque?
The idea of Harry Styles throwing up on the side of a highway and the idea of a girl I don’t know erecting a shrine to it is the most precise possible representation of what I find interesting. Imagining what could make me feel most myself, I thought it would be standing on that ground. No, I would not touch it—I would just look at it, photograph it, and delight in executing the dramatic act of Photoshopping myself into a meme in the physical world. So, in December 2019, I flew to Los Angeles for two days and drove around in a rented minivan, stopping only at places where I knew Harry Styles had been.
It’s one of these patches of dirt here, I imagined myself telling a double-decker tour bus. It’s very important to remember. Then I imagined a Los Angeles ghost tour 100 years from now: This is where that journalist was decapitated by a tractor trailer as she knelt at the side of the road looking for the spot where a pop star threw up. She hovers over the 101 to this day, searching, but not unhappily. See, there she is now, she’s eating a donut. I got everything I wanted, really, because what I wanted was an opportunity to make my own digital shrine—just some photos of the highway, just some tweets about how good it felt to go in search of it. Just a little joke about how I’m getting older, and how I’m allowed to rent a car. Just something to report back to the girls on the internet.
The earliest experiments in online community had an odd gravitational pull, for whatever reason, for Grateful Dead fans. Community Memory, the first digital bulletin board, was installed in a Berkeley record store in 1973, and was tightly intertwined with the California counterculture—it was dedicated to the sharing of art and literature, and full of Deadheads. The same year, the Stanford University artificial intelligence researcher Paul Martin created the distribute command “dead.dis@sail” to collate his lab’s email conversation about the Grateful Dead into a proto listserv. In early 1975, he made the mailing list semipublic by putting it on ARPANET—the U.S. Department of Defense’s experiment in communication protocols that would eventually lead to the invention of the internet as we know it—and researchers from other universities started joining. Martin programmed automatic news updates that crawled for information about the Grateful Dead and sent them out immediately to all subscribers, and they, in turn, crowdsourced information from other fans in a manner and with a purpose strikingly similar to the pop stans of today. In 1975, for example, based on group intel, several members of the dead.dis@sail mailing list crashed a wedding at a country club outside Palo Alto after learning that Dead guitarist Bob Weir had been hired to play with his side band Kingfish. (They were allowed to stay.)
According to the internet researcher and historian Nancy K. Baym, “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of dial-up computer bulletin board systems were launched throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and many were specifically set aside as forums for Grateful Dead fans. Here, early adopters innovated the idea that the internet might be organized by affinity. Though early internet fandom was invite-only and near exclusive to well-paid white men, it was also the first evidence of a pattern. Fans became, almost as a rule, the first to adopt new platforms and to invent new features of the internet—a habit molded by the fact that they were the people with the most obvious incentive to do so.
The WELL, the most influential early virtual community—the story of which is chronicled in Howard Rheingold’s 1993 history The Virtual Community—was founded by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985 as a general interest dial-up bulletin board system for the Bay Area in California. (Later, in the early 1990s, it morphed into a broad-use internet service provider.) Though many of the other early users of the WELL were technologists, scientists, journalists, and academics to whom computers were already familiar, Deadheads invested hours of free time to learn about the technology that would make it possible to practice their fandom together in cyberspace. Their “conference” on the WELL was known only as “GD,” and it was constantly busy with chatty fans—dissecting lyrics, discussing concerts, sometimes swapping memorabilia or tapes. It could be joined only by emailing an administrator or “host” personally, and was founded by the Deadhead historian David Gans, with the help of tech journalist Mary Eisenhart and programmer Bennett Falk, who came up with the idea at a Grateful Dead concert.
In The Virtual Community, Matthew McClure, the WELL’s first director, identifies two major growth spurts for the board: the first was word of mouth among Bay Area computer professionals and journalists; the second was the Deadheads. “Suddenly, we had an onslaught of new users,” he tells Rheingold. “The Deadheads came online and seemed to know instinctively how to use the system to create a community around themselves.” At the time, individual internet users had to pay a la carte for the hours they spent online, and being a member of the WELL—if you used it fanatically—could run up a bill of hundreds of dollars a month. These funds were necessary to keep the service operational, and the Deadheads were therefore crucial to its survival. According to Rheingold, the Grateful Dead conference on the WELL was “so phenomenally successful that for the first several years, Deadheads were by far the single largest source of income for the enterprise.”
By the 1990s, people building alternate lives through online fandom were also imagining the future of the internet. Fan sites with rudimentary features like guestbooks and photo collections were some of the most heavily trafficked pages on the internet once the World Wide Web opened up to a broad recreational users base, and in 1995, Yahoo’s free web hosting service, GeoCities, took off, filling up with thousands of fan sites that had something for everyone. The full range of these pages is difficult to see today, but amateur archivists have put substantial effort into preserving it: you can still browse partially salvaged pages for The X-Files (with names like “24 Hour News X” and “The Hall of X”), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Buffyology—The Academic Study of Buffy”), Sailor Moon (“The Moon Palace Archive”), and almost any other media property or personality you can think of. Backstreet.net, “the MOST famous/best BSB page on the Net,” was created in 1997, and though its guestbook is now littered with phone-sex spam, it is still browsable. A faux-LED “I <3 BSB!” GIF still spins around on the front page, above links to 25,000 photos, 12 discussion boards, and an RSS news bulletin that sent out 1,691 updates about the band before it ceased publication in 2012.
These pages were social networks in their own right, bound by limitations that meant conversation could happen only clunkily in guestbooks or by linking and cross-posting, but richly interconnected nonetheless. Some of the more elaborate sites had discussion boards; Murmurs, an R.E.M. fan site built using Microsoft’s FrontPage HTML editor by then 16-year-old Ethan Kaplan, debuted in 1996 and had 10,000 users and 5,000 new posts per day during its peak. When Kaplan shut the site down after 18 years, he reflected on it as “a great example of an emergent community around fanaticism.” In August 1998, David Bowie announced that he would be launching the “first artist-created Internet Service Provider.” BowieNet, as it was called, was a fully functioning ISP for eight years. Fans paid $19.95 a month for a “davidbowie.com” email address, Bowie chat rooms, exclusive Bowie content (including concert “cybercasts”), 5 MB of storage space on their Bowie fan pages, and “full uncensored” internet access. “I wanted to create an environment where not just my fans, but all music lovers could be a part of the same community,” Bowie said in a press release, “a single place where the vast archives of music information could be accessed, views stated and ideas exchanged.”
The reason I was so disturbed when I was inclined to look for the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit on Tumblr and couldn’t find it is because I rely on Tumblr to provide me with my memory.
Tumblr had no system in place to archive or analyze activity on its platform before it hired its first “meme librarian,” Amanda Brennan, in 2013, six years after the site launched. But luckily Tumblr’s basic premise—as a somewhat secretive space for identity exploration through multimedia—enabled a culture with a unique visual style and a predilection for “discourse” and historicizing. Stockpiling images and compiling them into “master posts,” the basic work of archiving a cultural phenomenon, became one of the more popular recreational uses of the site—today, even wading past broken links and stabbing blindly for useful search terms, there are remarkable libraries of One Direction ephemera to be found. They’re made up of GIF sets, an invention of Tumblr users, and organized with elaborate tagging systems that are possible only on Tumblr, where users can put spaces between words and write entire paragraphs legibly in a post’s tags. Though they can be difficult to find, posts that are deleted are not necessarily gone, because reblogging a post and adding to it makes a persistent copy of it—totally unlike a Twitter retweet, which disappears if the source material is erased. At various points, users couldn’t reply to posts at all without reblogging them onto their own page, turning every conversation into a public exquisite corpse.
The way Tumblr is built also explains why so many describe the site as formative in their political, aesthetic, and cultural taste, as well as their personal identity. Alexander Cho, an assistant professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara who researches how young people use social media, has credited the physical structure of Tumblr with the creation of its culture. In his 2015 doctoral thesis, he explored the reasons that queer young people of color gravitated toward Tumblr in its first several years of popularity, and how the site was used “to cultivate an explicitly anti-heteronormative, anti-white supremacist politics.” Tumblr was a creative new space that had little in common with other social media sites on which users were expected to maintain public profiles, and on which the ties between people or “accounts” were also public and could be explored in order to understand a web of connections. While Tumblr content can be seen and distributed widely, and there are certain Tumblr posts from many years ago that persist, reblogged by hundreds of thousands of people, it’s rare for a Tumblr post to become well known outside of the insular world of the platform. When a blog disappears or its URL changes, there is no easy way to find it again. Tumblr’s search feature is so bad it might as well not even exist. These design choices meant that Tumblr was impossible to simply drop in on and understand: “Tumblr, especially in the early days, seemed impenetrable, ruled by a code and norms that were never outlined anywhere officially, only intuited,” Cho writes. “[It] feels almost as if it purposely gave the middle finger to established conventions of indexing, search, and persistence on the internet.”
The same design elements and features that foster Tumblr’s singular culture make it difficult to find cultural artifacts on the site. But this too is part of Tumblr’s culture: for me, the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit is preserved primarily by my resolve to wade through shards of information and broken links to find it. What I feel when I do it is that I should have prepared better—I should have reblogged the shrine years ago so that it would forever be part of my own page and I would never have to worry. Because Tumblr’s primary interactive feature is the reblog, its primary mode of engagement is frantic stockpiling. Scrolling through the feed, users gather things to their pages—things that may be deleted later by their original creator but which anyone, after reposting, can single-handedly preserve. The small thrill of understanding a meme comes from a feeling of belonging, but when years have gone by and the meme resurfaces, the feeling is also one of relief.
In my deluded attempt to locate the precise former roadside site of a large piece of paper, I failed. But in talking about it online, I succeeded in archiving the story once more. When you search for the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit, you will see a handful of stupid tweets by me. Just an extra piece of evidence that it existed—or at least, that someone remembered it did. These tweets may fall, like so much else, into what the WELL cofounder Stewart Brand was first to refer to as a looming “digital dark age,” when cultural history that is maintained only at will by for-profit corporations erodes and falls away, leaving huge gaps in future generations’ understandings of who we were. But I like to think that someone else will make a copy of the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit. We’ll never know an internet without it—thank god! On my phone, sometimes, I replay the clip of Harry Styles laughing at the puke poster. I ripped it from YouTube and saved it to my camera roll so I wouldn’t lose it. “A little niche, maybe,” he says over and over, while the studio audience laughs.
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