Types of Fandom and Canon Fodder

This week in the Information Supercollider

I have somehow managed to book myself for three different interview-type things today, which means my brain will be cheese dip by dinnertime. So you get something kind of inconsequential this morning, sparked by the interaction of a couple of pieces that probably only end up next to each other in my weird collection of open browser tabs.

One of these is Freddie de Boer writing about the late and lamented-ish Gawker Media and the thriving podcast-network-with-a-side-hustle-website The Ringer as exemplars of their peak eras:

These two sites, Gawker as the avatar of the 2010s, the Ringer for the 2020s, are not perfect parallels and they are not perfect foils. But they are, in their own ways, quintessential media brands of their decades, and comparing them tells us a lot about the culture industries that shaped them. Gawker and the Ringer are both particular kinds of media dreams, cold foreboding New York skyscraper canyons vs sun-blasted traffic-snarled LA boulevards, one built on defiance and contempt, the other on access and enthusiasm. One smoked clove cigarettes while texting “kill yourself” to your favorite columnist; the other brings you a top-five ranking of NBA duos and their analogs in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each posture offers its own kind of seduction. Each tells a story about what media is supposed to do, and what it’s actually allowed to do, in its era. And I wonder if there will be such a thing as a publication that might define its era in the 2030s.

This goes on for quite a while (as FdB tends to do), and is generally pretty entertaining. I was never much of a reader of Gawker— the only site in their orbit that held much interest for me was Deadspin, which was highly variable— and mostly consume the Ringer via podcasts, but I think he’s definitely right about the relative vibes of the two websites. And I absolutely share in his squeamishness about the Ringer’s enthusiastic promotion of the grossest sorts of online gambling.

That said, this happened to hit my feed at a moment when I’ve found myself becoming a bit jaded with the Ringer’s general approach, so I disagree with a couple of points of de Boer’s characterization. He’s a tricky guy to summarize with block quotes, but let’s try this one:

If Gawker was a child of punk rock, the Ringer is the offspring of Comic-Con. It’s obsessed with pop culture and, more to the point, with loving pop culture, with the idea of being the kind of person who is in love with pop culture, with being the kind of person who writes defenses of collecting Funko-Pop. Its writers often try to give even the dumbest streaming show the benefit of the doubt, as though criticism was a form of disloyalty. And this isn’t always a bad thing. The Ringer has real cultural literacy - read Justin Charity or Brian Phillips or Katie Baker - and real taste. The perspective you get there is much more nuanced than the bland pro-everything boosterism it gets accused of. But it does not believe in counterculture. It believes in content.

That’s why so much of the site’s writing is organized around celebration rather than analysis. It’s also why so much of it is genuinely fun, like actual fun, and also why the site itself feels ideologically empty even as it produces thought-provoking essays at a pace that seems entirely unacknowledged by the industry.

I don’t entirely disagree with this— they certainly spend a lot of time and energy on various media products that seem pretty worthless to me. At the same time, though, I don’t know that I’d say my primary association with them was a lack of analysis or criticism. On the contrary, one of the primary sources of my dissatisfaction with their output recently has been an excess of ordinality: they’re endlessly producing power rankings, pyramids, Top 5/10/20/100 lists, drafts and auctions, tournament brackets, Halls of Fame, Mounts Rushmore, and on and on. If there’s a scheme for rank-ordering a set of pop-cultural products, you can bet¹ that the Ringer has run it into the ground.

And, look, I say this as a guy who likes sports and competition to a mildly unhealthy degree². But, you know, there are limits to my interest in rank-ordering things that aren’t really all that comparable to begin with. I just can’t work up any enthusiasm for yet another round of debating whether, say, Jordan Love is the ninth or the eleventh best quarterback in the NFL. I’m fairly certain he’s a more reliable option than anyone the Giants are going to run out there this season, and I don’t know that it makes sense to try for more fine-grained analysis than that in the second week of August. It’s pretty clear, though, that lots of people have a boundless desire to sort lists of things, or at least a vastly higher capacity for list-sorting than I have. It’s even more farcical (in my opinion) when you shift to “All Time” lists, because of the vast changes in context that happen between eras, but better #content for engagement bait you will not find.

Which in a weird way brings us around to the second of the items that collided in my feed. Over on BlueSky, John Scalzi got into a minor dust-up over that most evergreen of topics, listing “essential” works of SF for a hypothetical reader new to the genre. Conveniently for those who don’t like microblogging, he wrote this up in prose, but if you want to, as they say, Read The Whole Thing³, it started here:

Though in a lot of ways, I like James Nicoll’s pithy summary better:

I remember versions of this argument all the way back on 1990’s Usenet, involving some of the same authors and titles. In the intervening years, of course, a bunch of authors have moved from “new and exciting” to “dusty relics of no interest to Kids These Days”— curse you, linear progression of time!

I find this whole thing a little silly, because I think ultimately it comes down to a clash between incompatible sets of assumptions about the nature of fandom. The Scalzi side of the argument might be characterized as descriptivist— “Just read things that seem fun”— while the other side is more prescriptivist— “You need to know these historical influences.” They’ve both got valid points, but that’s because they start from fundamentally different models of why you’re reading in the first place. If you’re just looking for a way to make a long trip in a car or plane more tolerable, you’re not at all obligated to read Old Stuff, but if you want to develop and deploy a big-picture Understanding of the SF genre, yeah, you probably do need to read at least some Asimov/Heinlein/Clarke along the way⁴.

The limited amount of slack I’m willing to cut the Old Heads here is rooted in the fact that these two categories overlapped significantly within living memory. Which I say because I was alive, and I remember it— back when I was a kid, if you were going to be a reader of genre SF⁵, your options were pretty much limited to a couple of vertical sections toward the back of the B. Waldencrown in your local mall. You’d run out of new stuff pretty quickly, at which point you needed to either explore the classics or switch genres completely. Anyone inclined to self-identify as a fan didn’t need to be pushed to read older work, because there wasn’t enough to read otherwise.

That’s not at all the situation today— for all that people lament the sad state of publishing, there’s more available these days than you could ever hope to get through. Reading Old Stuff isn’t an inescapable necessity these days, like it was in the Late 1900s. Which is how you get the split into two distinct categories of People Who Read Genre SF where there used to be only one.

(There’s a related but distinct issue, which is that there’s a particular type of story that used to be prominent within the genre but has gotten hard to find, to the point where if you’re looking for that specifically, you might have to go to Old Stuff to find it. This is often given a contemptuous political spin, because 2025, but I think there’s some validity to it. That’s probably a topic for another day, though.)

Are there benefits to reading older stuff beyond just filling time? Sure, if you’re the right kind of person. But this isn’t by any means unique to genre fiction— people make related complaints about classic literature, and there’s a whole category of posts that do the social media rounds every few months in the general vein of “bet you didn’t know that Bugs Bunny eating carrots is a Cary Grant reference.” And, you know, some kinds of fans find that kind of thing enlightening/inspiring, while others don’t. Such is life.

This notion of different types of fandom, in a weird way, loops back to the earlier topic of the Ringer and its approach, or the parts of its approach that I’m becoming jaded with. Quoting de Boer again:

Simmons, by contrast, is the ultimate 2020s media bro: personable, prolific, and never far from a sponsored segment. His voice (literally and metaphorically) is everywhere on the Ringer, inflecting even the most highbrow content with the slightly nasal cadence of a guy explaining why “Rocky III” is underrated. If Denton stood for the idea that media should challenge power, Simmons stands for the idea that media should be accessible, self-referential, and above all, likable. His whole project has been about collapsing the space between critic and fan, between professional and audience.

I definitely agree that this was historically the nature of Simmons’s project, and he might very well endorse that description (though probably not some of the less flattering spins de Boer puts on it). I do think, though, that his approach (and by extension that of the Ringer) has shifted toward a very specific kind of fandom. Or possibly I’ve shifted away from that kind of fandom; or maybe some linear combination of the two. At any rate, there’s a bit of a gap between my interests and their content, particularly when it comes to sports.

The specific vibe that’s started to grate on me is a little tricky to nail down, but might in be summarized as a kind of fantasy-ization of sports, a brand of fandom that’s less about what happens between the lines than what happens in the owner’s suite. The wins and losses that matter most aren’t in the games, they’re business transactions: player trades and contract signings. More and more I feel like what I get from the Ringer has less to do with the jersey-wearing fan in the stands and more to do with the suits in the front office.

And more and more, that’s at odds with what I’ve always prized in sports, as I wrote back in March. I’m in this for the “any given Sunday” aspect, where a heavy underdog can triumph against impossible odds⁶. I don’t want undefeated dynasties, I want the Helmet Catch:

This kind of perspective is less and less common in modern sports coverage. Which to some extent is part and parcel of de Boer’s argument about everything at the Ringer being commercial content, and congenial for capital. It’s a fairly pervasive shift among younger fans, too— one of The Pip’s principal non-baseball activities this summer has been playing various sports video games, including one thing in NBA 2K where he’s re-written history to put all of the greatest players of the modern era on one team, so he can smash everybody else. I could hardly be less interested in this (even beyond the fact that I can’t play video games worth a damn), but one of yesterday’s Ringer family of podcasts included a call for exactly that (starting around the 50:00 mark of this).

I don’t think this is a problem unique to the Ringer, by any stretch, but it’s a pretty distinct variety of fandom. And for all that I enjoy the general hangout podcast vibe of their operation, it’s starting to push me away from their offerings, to the point where I’ve actually done a couple of recent dog walks without listening to any podcasts at all…

---

I don’t know that this added up to all that much, but it passed the time. If you want to see more rambling and discursive Yelling At Clouds, here’s a button:

And if you have can’t-miss betting tips or more substantive replies, the comments will be open:

1. On FanDuel, where making your first multi-website parlay will get you a free handful of magic beans!

2. A couple of weeks ago, on a hot and humid day, I had to ask Kate to come get me after pick-up hoops because I was too light-headed from overexertion to drive myself home.

3. Ask your parents.

4. It doesn’t matter that much which ones you read; I’d probably say to go for the oldest one available in a modern printing. There’s no one work that will let you avoid the “No, you didn’t read the right one…” loop, so don’t even try.

5. In the expansive definition that includes fantasy.

6. And you— yes, you!— can double your payout on FanDuel! (Doubled payout exclusively in the form of magic beans.)