The Hungry Ghosts of Late Capitalism

News Media Commentary
Title:	The Hungry Ghosts of Late Capitalism
Commentator:	Colin Broadmoor
Date(s):	January 9, 2021
Venue:	online
Fandom:
External Links:	The Hungry Ghosts of Late Capitalism
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The Hungry Ghosts of Late Capitalism has the subtitle: "Fan Culture's Endless Search for "Content" is Leading Us into Artistic Poverty."

The author is Colin Broadmoor, and it was posted January 9, 2021 to the site "Blood Knife," a digital magazine about sci-fi, horror, and capitalism. The author expands on this description in the text of the essay: "Blood Knife is an “anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-fascist sci-fi / fantasy / horror magazine."

A Culture of Our Own is an essay written in direct response.

Some Topics Discussed

• Janeites
• Sherlock Holmes fandom
• Harry Potter
• Lovecraft
• fanworks used to be a way to get more content, to fill in the gaps
• the relationships between canon and TPTB and fans and fanworks = money and advertising
• slash has been co-opted by mainstream material, that this has become "lazy" queerbaiting: Sherlock, J.K. Rowling stating that Dumbledore was gay, the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies are cited as examples
• slash, or at least early slash, was "were primarily written for/by women"
• "We now receive so much derivative content that fanworks are no longer necessary supplements to canon consumption."
• "Worse still is our regression on the early fandom value of preservation..."
• "what we buy now is not the thing itself but rather access to it"

From the Essay

The “hungry ghost” is a pitiable figure from the syncretic religious traditions of China and Vietnam. Originally a karmic mirror-punishment for materialism during life, today’s hungry ghosts are often just forgotten individuals whose families and descendants have failed to perform the appropriate rites and offerings that would allow their ancestor to return to the cycle of reincarnation.

To some extent, you can understand everything we see these days in terms of fandom: politics, religion, identity, consumption. During the first decade of the 21st century, the nature of the Internet shifted from a repository of information to a 24/7 entertainment outlet. Today, we get our news from social media sites like Twitter, which is really just crowd-sourced reality TV.

These early and essential goals of fandom embodied by Derleth—more content, preservation, sharing enjoyment, raising awareness—were supplemented in the 1970s with the invention of “slash fiction.” As far as anyone can tell, slash originated within the Star Trek fandom as “Kirk/Spock” fics. Slash pairings—same-sex characters reimagined as romantic/erotic couples—represent an evolution in fanfic by expanding its limits from “stories that did not happen canonically” to “stories that could not happen within the canon.” This was fanfic at its most subversive: slash allowed fanfic authors to push the “bros being bros” homosocial bonds between male characters into the socially taboo realm of homosexuality. Because these male-male relationships in canon were signifiers of a certain type of masculine ideal, recoding these relationships as sexual undermined homophobic social assumptions about leadership, bravery, and affection.

We now receive so much derivative content from media conglomerates like Disney that fanworks are no longer necessary supplements to canon consumption. Indeed, they now produce films like The Force Awakens (2015) or TV shows such as The Mandalorian, which exist only for “fanservice” and make little to no sense as stand-alone works. Fans no longer need to rely on each other to produce content because the content stream is endless, right down to the push notifications from the Star Wars app on our phones. Worse still, these corporations have realized that the existence of fan-made slash fiction means they don’t need to actually include diverse relationships in official works—which is why we get nonsensical canon “Reylo” (as the canon pairing between Rey and Kylo Ren has been dubbed) in the Rise of Skywalker, but will never see any hot “Stormpilot” (the non-canon Finn/Poe pairing) action on the big screen.

As fans, we are content creators in our own right, but what do we actually own? Movie studios have realized how to turn the cinema experience into two-and-a-half-hour Snapchats. We pay $30 for the privilege of watching Wonder Woman 1984 for a few hours, then talking about it on Twitter for a few days, and we don’t even own a copy at the end. Hard media like DVD and Blu-ray are being replaced with downloads.

Where once fandom served the needs of fans (telling new stories, letting people see themselves, offering alternative possibilities for how we understand heroes), today it serves only the needs of media conglomerates by acting as free advertising and by adding value via content and enthusiasm to the IP—a charitable donation of your time and energy to the Walt Disney Company. Nothing is preserved, nothing is owned by the fans, including the works they produce themselves.

Fans have become the hungry ghosts of late capitalism. Our appetite for content—an escape mechanism from the modern world by which we sublimate our own alienation and anxiety through participation in the spectacle—can never be satisfied because we are fed only ephemeral simulacra. We are kept distracted and anesthetized by the contentless content of the modern entertainment franchise. The communities and shared interests that promised connection and perhaps even solidarity are now fully commodified. We produce everything, own nothing, and pay multiple subscription fees for the honor. We feast at a burning banquet of paper delicacies and praise the taste of the ashes.