Fandom is the reason I can’t give up the internet

I can’t be the only one stuck in this loop…

Oh god, do I want off the internet. The list of things I need a phone to do is so small that I am seriously considering going back to a 2013 Blackberry. My ability and desire to read, write, and communicate have been improved by removing the ‘streamlining’, addictive influence of the iPhone from what I do – I have been emailing my friends and picking up the heavy hardback book I keep under my bed, I have been listening to music I have chosen for myself and getting back into politics, all because the qi that was sapped from me by doomscrolling is a force I can direct. I can do anything, find out anything at a speed that is appropriate for my life without being plugged into the matrix constantly… all except follow my fandoms. I can acknowledge that once a day is sufficient for news of national and international import; I have sources I trust to share key stories with me and places I can go to unravel biases in the media, but if I find out late that Taylor Swift has released CDs I’m not getting them, except at 3x price on eBay. If I’m looking for somebody to be excited about a book or fashion look with then I need to be in the space that cares as much as I do. Then, of course, if I look at fandom spaces – Substack, Reddit – I get sucked back into scrolling, and my vital energies begin to leave me once again.

Fandom feels like a juvenile word, but how else does one refer to the pop musicians and poets that are my hobbies? Back in the days of the iPod, music was not only my main hobby but what I spent basically all of my money on. To experiment in music was still to buy music, to hear anything unlikely to be on the radio was to seek it out. I still have that great archive in storage, and unlike every generation before mine I have the opportunity not to ossify into it as the proportion of my income that is disposable shrinks and I buy fewer CDs – instead, I can buy a subscription, and Peach PRC will get as much of it as The Killers, money going to my old favourites and new interests alike. [1] I appreciate fan communities, who write essays in Reddit comments about a single lyric and share Chinese fashion magazines with us so we can appreciate the photoshoots, who make and understand jokes about some niche book people in my real life might read if I harp on about it enough but also might not be to their tastes.

Practicalities can be worked around. I’ve been going without Amazon for years now, and I’ve got past the point where I miss it [2], and I’m sure I could use other forms of connection (a dumb phone plus an Apple Watch, for example) to jerryrig solutions that will stop my brain from atrophying into a pool at the bottom of a news feed. It’s the silly things, though, that are inessential but have become a fabric of my life. The meat and potatoes of life can, and always has been, able to be sustained on some level, regardless of busyness or level of connection or cost. It is consumption of candyfloss, the growing mountain of content I cannot hope to consume all of, that keeps me from logging off. There are strangers, who might be worlds away or literally sat next to me, changing my worldview and curating the infinite mess of the world before sharing it to silos of people who might be interested. They are telling me about things I care about but mainstream news doesn’t: whether sharing pop shopping proclivities or interpreting mass media overlooked by academia, this is the soul of the internet. I can make myself practical in my own way, but what will I be without the prompts to my thought process?

There’s a selfishness to this whole thing, too. As a writer I can and do scream into the void with little to no readership… but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a readership. It’s alright for Pynchon, and perhaps I too would be famously reclusive if I were living in an apartment in New York or California with people coming to my work to be challenged. It’s alright for Jane Austen, whose female found family managed chores so she could write. I live in the modern world, where novels don’t even publish without a social media following and are unlikely to sell regardless. Where I eke out time for my hobbies in odd twenty minute increments, where I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content without my tastemaker feed to present me with only the choicest morsels.

I don’t have a solution to this. I might have to replace my phone soon [3] and I still don’t know if a dumb phone is a poor investment, or how we reached a point where £1000 is a normal amount to spend on such a transient object. I really feel like the healthiest thing I can do – for myself and for the environment – is to keep this one for as long as possible, to let it grow clunky and slow in my hands. I hope to let the world speed up around me and keep my eyes open, rather than upon an object that simply serves me by doing what I need it to. As the memory fills up I can surely remove apps I don’t use, transfer pictures I don’t look at, and tail off my consumption until I engage only with the necessaries. I don’t want to cut myself off from modern life, but I also want to live timelessly. If you asked my grandparents to go back to a time without central heating they would find it perplexing; if you asked the world to go back to fumbling with coins to pay for parking instead of using an app, I think they’d be just as confused as to why. I can accept the power of the smartphone without swallowing an addiction without fighting back. But I can’t go completely without the feed for fear of self-alienation – alienation from my own self – by losing my hobbies and fascinations.

PHONE THINGS I AM LOATH TO GO WITHOUT

• Google Maps. Up-to-the-minute bus information, and those most valuable of travel tips – the ‘I thought I was here where is it’ and ‘please I am tired just get me home’ – have changed my life. I used to travel with a battered London A-Z in the bottom of my bag, and regularly miss my stop, which is much harder with directions that can be sorted out prior to travelling.
• Apple Wallet: Trainline tickets, Japan Centre loyalty card, etc. I used to have a giant (very cute Kate Spade) wallet full of coins and plastic. Do I have to go back to that, rather than searching through my emails for my Superdrug student status at the checkout?
• Banking. I love to keep my money in pots, then move it when I have a certain transaction. My grocery money is ringfenced, my ‘crap I don’t need’ budget is away from everything else, and I’m not accidentally spending my train fare on coffee.
• 2FA and thumbprint ID. This is unfair: I’d be happy to go without 2FA – please do feel free to hack the training portal where I watch fire safety videos for work, since that seems to be protected more than anything of importance to me. Beyond the insidious creep of 2FA into everything I do, though, I do recognise that it will be harder to get work done if my company card can’t be validated through my device or my 3-4 institutional email addresses and 2-3 private ones can’t ping each other confirmation codes that are all accessible in one thing I try to keep in my desk drawer rather than out.
• The motivational photos I keep as my background and lock screen. One is my husband feeding me cake on our wedding day, the other is from a temple that profoundly impacted me on our honeymoon. Both are moments I want to keep in my heart and my mind, reminders of what life can be. I could print out a tiny, wallet-sized picture (I actually do have a tiny pic of hubby in my wallet), I could put it in my journal, but to have it front-and-centre on my greatest distraction is a small reminder of what I value every day.

[1] Except, that’s not quite true: I’ve been sending money to The Killers for years, with concert tickets and t-shirts I don’t wear any more and, of course, when I purchased their music. It’s going to be much harder for Peach PRC to achieve longevity if she doesn’t get a slice of that pie, and much more exhausting for her to tour in a landscape where more is expected (based on, partially, the ‘great’ artists of my generation doing more than just turning up and singing – I blame Gaga) and less profit goes to her, especially in the arena world. The economics and power dynamic of music from the perspective of the musician is a different issue to the access a fan has (and demands) in the modern world.

[2] I was once given a voucher by work and had to get somebody to order Tomoe River paper on my behalf to my flat, and I do still buy from Abebooks because where tf else am I supposed to get desiccated tomes on dusty subjects cheaply?

[3] If Lana del Rey can walk around with a cracked phone, I don’t see why I can’t. I am not giving the black mirror the credence of being shiny and new like it’s important. It is dying in other ways too, though, and apparently a 6-year-old phone is ancient.

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On This Topic:

• I’m considering switching to Discord, or an RSS reader. I have friends who I know use those as fan-to-fan sharing platforms, perhaps they can remove me from the news feed?
• I’m trying to take all my shit million tabs and store them somewhere else. I have places I store books I want to read, words I want to remember, and the endless papers I find, and I do not need to keep them as ghosts in browser tabs!!
• The phone is part of Ms del Rey’s aesthetic. There are pictures of her phone being broken from after this, and fans know that the cracked screen stuck around for around four years.

To-Do:

• Buy a birthday present for my mum.
• Get old radiator collected
• Read the rest of this term’s books (the ones I’m not lecturing on)

Today’s Culture:

• This has been an indulgent month, and so hot on the heels of Christmas and a long, poor January means a frugal March and April.
• I’ve been journalling less lately – lots of notetaking, not many feelings – and I want to get back into it. Maybe I’ll change the ink in my pens?
• I have actually rested a lot this half term (mainly due to illness) but I do not feel rejuvenated. I feel like another week of holiday would do me good, but this coming half-term is probably my busiest because of World Book Day. Wish me luck.