One Direction, and the Direction of Internet Discourse

The Week in Review: October 14, 2024

Earlier this week, I had the eerie experience of scrolling upon the news that former One Direction member Liam Payne had died—while I was taking a break from reading Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book, Everything I Need I Get from You, about the band’s fandom.

While I can’t claim to be a “Directioner,” I’ll admit to having listened to and enjoyed some of their more popular songs when they first came out back in 2011 (when I used to listen to Top 40).

Tiffany’s takes on celebrity fandoms are not the most insightful—especially when it comes to the deeper political and metaphysical implications of the phenomenon. She routinely mentions identitarian talking points about fandoms as a form of women’s empowerment under patriarchal oppression, and briefly touches on its religious dimension. But I must say her extensive documentation of how the One Direction fandom (alongside those of other singers and bands) developed is impressive. Above all, she brings attention to the deceptiveness of claims about the “democratizing” effect of the internet, which while giving a voice to everyday people, opens the door to the chaos and irrationality of mob rule. 

Further, this form of internet usage exacerbates its users’ experience of atomization and of being uprooted from family, local community, meaningful labor, and culture. It also demonstrates the cognitive dissonance of how “woke” discourse is largely in denial about the extent to which it is wrapped up in—and thus, poses no threat whatsoever to—the structures of corporate power…a point Geoff Shullenberger highlighted in his review of Musa al-Gharbi’s latest book.

This week in Compact

Despite former president Obama’s contention that men are failing to back VP Harris’s presidential bid because of their cover misogyny, Batya Ungar-Sargon argues that the “reason men of all races are reluctant to support Harris is because her campaign isn’t for them.” Rather, “it’s for women—specifically, college-educated women. And this includes the messaging that’s ostensibly about or focused on men.”

Though today, “even progressive commentators admit that ‘contemporary American men are mired in malaise,’” Sen. Marco Rubio writes that “far from working to help men, many elites are exacerbating the crisis—by overlooking, allowing, or outright encouraging mass migration, both legal and illegal.” He insists that it is time to “abandon the post-Cold War consensus, break multinational corporations’ tariff taboo, reinvest in domestic production, and—crucially—regain control of our borders.”

Branko Marcetic warns that “there is serious political danger to giving tech billionaires free reign to censor speech on social media platforms,” and instead suggests that “a public ownership model could at least allow some level of democratic input into tech platform policies.” Yet “to even start having that conversation,” he insists that “we have to first break out of the tribal frame of thinking that partisan politics has trained us in.”

Benjamin R. Young observes that “the combination of North Korea’s opening of its borders after the pandemic, increased interaction with Russian authorities, and, most of all, the growing popularity of South Korean pop culture has loosened the party leadership’s total grip on ideological control.” As a result, the North Korean media has “strategically shifted” toward reviving references to the  country’s “communist traits” and  “communist future.”  

Jose Gabriel Reyes Soto writes that for a while, Puerto Rico seemed to be “poised to move beyond a jaded political culture dominated by two political parties with no substantial ideology.” Yet “the new forces that have arisen on the right and left seem more likely to make our political culture more like that of the United States.”

Be sure to check out Sohrab Ahmari’s newsletter on Europe’s creeping deindustrialization, and this week’s podcast episode on Harris’s media blitz and new Hollywood flops.

The deceptions of stardom

I must admit that among my favorite guilty pleasures is watching singer biopics. This week, it was Elvis and Bob Marley: One Love. Most of these behind-the-scenes-of-the-industry movies follow a predictable arc: Singer falls in love with the magic of making music, greedy label exec discovers her talent and promises her the chance to share her passion with the world, artist is crushed by her newfound fame and extorted by the dehumanizing expectations of the label, and ends up on drugs, suffering mental breakdowns, or dead. 

The Irish journalist John Waters once wrote about the commodification of music—which he describes as being among the most “transcendent” of art forms—by corporate execs, describing how “outwardly reduced to ‘showbusiness’ and ‘entertainment’, the holiness of [music] is forced inwards into a closed circuit,” which leads to the star’s “sacred calling” to “combust” under the pressure of the industry.

I pray for the soul of Liam Payne, and all the musicians who find their creative vocation blocked by the demands of corporate elites.