who are you a stan of?

I like posting.

https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/03/taylor-swift-folklore-hardcore-pop-fans-abusing-critics-stan?

"This is horrible, anti-artistic behaviour from people wanting total consensus. That would be a strange and damaging thing to want even in politics, where some degree of consensus is necessary to make a democracy run. In art though, this impulse is downright fascistic."

Lol @ anti-artistic behaviour. Also berating (mainly) young people for fascism when the parents vote Trump and Tory.

i give folklore zero stars. take that, stans!!

I did a vote last week, we decided narrowly that everything is bad.

Who are the real villains?

* Publications which insist on grading music to decimal places
* Obsessive stans who launch petitions to have any non-fawning reviews taken down
* Music writers who are still somehow employed in 2020, so must have done kind of faustian pact.

— Centuries of Sound (@Centuries_Sound) July 28, 2020

I read some people on Facebook commenting that Swift's silence re: the harassment Mapes and Empire was "disgusting". I thought about responding there but decided to type it here.

People decrying Swift's silence, people targeting Mapes for her review, people piling on JK Rowling for being an TERFy idiot, the fact that Swift likely has to deal with a weekly attempt at a break-in, B-list musicians getting stalked, C-list musicians getting stalked-- this is all symptomatic of the same issue. The issue: individuals who have obtained even a modicum of visibility by dint of their occupation become subject to immense demonstrations of onlooker entitlement. Onlookers demonstrate entitlement over the visible individual's attention, their opinions, their bodies, and responding with immense resentment when their entitlement is met with resistance. (I don't want to focus on "stans" because I don't think it's just "stans" who do this-- even certain professional music writers themselves absolutely veer outside the realm of objectivity and demonstrate immense levels of entitlement upon their subject, even to the point of obvious narcissistic abuse.)

"Twitter" is a catalyst, not the problem itself. I don't know what the problem is, but I think it's a metaproblem that is woven into the very fabric of concepts of "visibility" and "culture industry".

tbf Rowling would probably not be getting abuse for being a terf is she didn't persistently keep posting terf shit on Twitter

I'm not saying that Rowling doesn't deserve the abuse, or defending her in any way shape or form. I'm just saying: it's abuse, it's not actually criticism. (You know, forget that I ever mentioned Rowling, to me she's literally not important and I've found over the past month that when I even mention her in passing, people will frothingly defend their inalienable right to frame the transparent online abuse she's received as "criticism", and I feel ridiculous even talking about it any more considering that I, too, agree that Rowling's comments were fucking foul, and I have no personal use for her presence or work in my life henceforth.)

I agree that there's a lot of abuse which is beyond the pale, and I agree that people are not fair game because they happen to have some level of celebrity

Don't use Twitter would seem to be one way out of this.

Yes. Several A-list musicians I am acquainted with do not engage with social media in any capacity-- two particularly famous clients don't own phones at all and communicate solely via e-mail. But: Twitter is just a pressure cooker for a broader cultural problem.

In what ways does it happen outside of Twitter? Feels like Twitter fuels it behind the scenes either way.

harassment of people in the public sphere/their relatives happened long before twitter!! harassment can take many forms, it's just easier now

Also, writers/journalists have good reason to feel they must be on twitter for professional reasons

I suppose I assumed fgti was talking more about when people gang up to do it but I misread.