You might almost think that Freddie deBoer isn’t a fan of pre-chewed, pre-digested “fandoms”:
brat summer was fake. That’s been my stance for a long while, and I’ve been encouraged recently to learn that I’m not alone in this belief — the belief that the whole Charli XCX “brat” phenomenon of 2024 was AstroTurf, a top-down media phenomenon driven fundamentally by marketing and the clicks-based media’s insatiable need for #content. There was clearly a carefully-coordinated rollout, with key pop culture websites and well-placed influencers shilling brat summer in suspiciously similar terms at the same exact time. And once the actual payola element was out there, once the PR apparatus had gotten the idea into the heads of early-middle-aged music and culture writers, those writers ran with it, in pursuit of the feeling of being out in front of a new craze and wanting to appear to be down with the kids. Someone told them brat was the new thing, they were filled with the FOMO anxiety that dictates their lives, and so they set about acting as though brat really was the new thing, faking it to make it.
This dynamic has been building for years now. The same basic Astroturf pattern was all over the “Barbiecore” moment. The movie itself was certainly popular and deserving of that popularity; it was fundamentally, existentially pretty good and frequently treated as much better than that, but it was still a fun and inventive story that was so much better than a movie based on a series of mass-produced plastic dolls had any right to be. But Barbiecore was fake. The Barbie discourse was fake. The idea that tweens were suddenly enraptured with the whole phenomenon, and particularly its confused brand of inoffensive feminism, was fake. There wasn’t some organic groundswell of pink-clad girl power erupting from the grassroots, but rather an omnipresent corporate campaign designed to manufacture the impression of inevitability. The movie itself was fine, sometimes clever, sometimes clumsy, good enough. But between the Mattel-driven branding blitz, the endless pink product tie-ins, and stunts like Ryan Gosling hamming it up at the Oscars, the film’s cultural footprint was artificially inflated. A popular movie was treated as a broader mass fandom movement that was in turn dressed up as a civilizational turning point, its supposed artistic influence dramatically overstated to serve commercial ends. In the end, Barbiecore didn’t demonstrate the power of art to shape culture so much as the ability of corporations to convince us that commerce is culture.
This is in fact the general condition of what’s now constantly sold as spontaneous collective vibes bubbling up out of TikTok comments and stan culture and the zeitgeist: prepackaged campaigns that combine paid marketing savvy with the cynical manipulation of our poptimism-obsessed cultural commentors, who are terrified of feeling left behind and always ready to buy into any new trend that’s sold as the obsession of the youth. There’s a press release behind every new trendspotting piece, a rollout schedule behind every claim of a new Gen Alpha aesthetic. There are people in glass towers in Manhattan and Los Angeles being paid six figures to decide what your summer will be, and then pretending that you, the amorphous online “fan,” actually decided it. It’s not the grassroots, it’s not organic, it’s not fun in the way subcultures used to be fun. It’s advertising.
Now, I’m a sad middle aged child of the 1990s who believes that selling out is real and bad and that authenticity is a fundamental and essential element of artistic creation and consumption; I believe in those widely-mocked old-school values, and I think my relationship to the art I create and consume is deepened because of that belief. But you don’t have to share my anachronistic artistic ethics to see why the death of organic pop culture appreciation matters. You just have to recognize that all of this ersatz fan enthusiasm creates a hollow kind of cultural participation. If every supposed craze is just a PR initiative with better branding, then what looks like bottom-up fandom is really just a slightly more insidious form of top-down messaging. You’re being asked to play along, to cosplay at authenticity, while the machine harvests your clicks and hashtags. Once again, the digital era’s ballyhooed capacity for citizen participation and “the long tail” has been crushed in favor of top-down control by giant corporations. The promise of the internet was that the gatekeepers would be dethroned, that cultural movements would erupt from the crowd. Instead, we’re living in a Potemkin village of virality where the audience is always the mark and the trick is always the same.
