Understanding ‘Toxic Fandoms’
What is wrong with Star Trek, Star Wars, and Tolkien fans?
Contemporary reality is the beta-version of a science fiction dream. Richard Barbrook quoted from David Graeber’s, Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit in The Utopia of Rules.
More and more, science fiction stories or even fantasy stories are the last bastion of how we envision a future. In his essay on ‘Flying Cars,’ David Graeber describes a society-wide, daresay global-wide, feelings of disappointment, broken promises, and betrayal. We can only look around and find that there are no flying cars, time warp technology, or transport beams. Or even a global federation of humanity. Rather, what we do have is a growth in information technologies, specifically ‘technologies of simulation.’ Reality offers little promise. The world of the ‘hyper-real — the ability to make imitations more realistic than the original’ is the promise.
Like so many cultural traumas, pain has been displaced; we can only talk about it when we think we’re talking about something else.
David Graeber explains this sense of despondency and malaise from several factors — (1) taxation, the high taxation in companies forced them to re-allocate profit to R&D but with low tax rates, funding has been diverted to other assets; (2) containerisation and logistics innovation, led to outsourcing of fungible goods and cheap labour to vulnerable countries rather than R&D in-country; (3) financialisation of public and private sectors, the switch to shareholder value means making money for investors rather than substantial goods; (4) the market competition of ideas versus a ‘convivial, open-source competition’ among scholars has resulted in what he has observed as research funding going towards validation of what we know rather than exploratory ones; and finally, (5) flexible work, that reduced job security and the erosion of the working class.
The result?
the dearth of substantial technological progress
the narrowing of viewpoints
death of the working class
With the end of the traditional working-class by the late seventies and early eighties, David posits that ‘once there was no longer a working-class…it would turn to identity politics.’ And here we are.
…the ultimate aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world where no one believes any other economic system could really work
More and more, as simulation and consumer technology advance (think, streaming services) science fiction and fantasy stories in books and cinematic forms become ever critical repositories of future-think. A Jedi way of being that promotes inner strength and calm to serve others. A group of science knights that follows a militaristic sense of moral order and code to approach alien beings and build a pan-galaxy social order. When corporate conglomerates purchase the intellectual properties of these myths in the service of profit, the audience can tell.
What happens when stories are crafted to promote propaganda or message? Audience dismay.
What happens when stories veer off the canon of the literature, without necessarily aligning to the story principles? Anger.
While I disagree with David’s statement that we need to ‘free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force,’ I believe that it is within these popular mythologies that we can remain free to imagine or to escape. Indeed, these are escapist literature. And that is a necessary balm of everyday drudgery and existence. However, science fiction, in particular, are seeds of promise in what our society could be or hope to be (without corporate profit messaging). Much like what art is.
This story world remains the last refuge for the ‘eccentric, brilliant, and impractical’ ideas and people.
When these become pandering reality tropes, fandoms have a right to be angry, to defend, but also to be understood.
Over and out.
References:
Graeber, David. 2015. Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit in The Utopia of Rules. London: Melville House
Zicree, Marc. 2022. Interview with Will Jordan on Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5