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i have some thoughts about stan culture that i doubt anyone wants to hear. proceed at your own risk
someone on here recommended this documentary to me recently, which is about "pixação", which is a type of graffiti that's very common in sao paulo. i found it to be really interesting and definitely recommend watching it! https://vimeo.com/29691112
pixação was started by fans of european heavy metal music. it intentionally resembles nordic runes moreso than graffiti we see in america, and is created in the aggressive, rebellious spirit of that music. in the doc, pixadores explicitly characterize it as "protest vandalism"
while i watched, i found myself thinking a lot about stan culture, which i've always perceived as having a really strong connection to brazil. you may have seen the phrase "come to brazil" deployed as an in-joke by stan twitter, for instance. that's one obvious example
a subplot of the 2010s that i watched with great interest was the way fans in latin and south america used social media and streaming to demand attention from western media industries that had always been indifferent to them.
in this article, trent reznor talks about learning via streaming data that NIN was unexpectedly popular in mexico. i've heard a lot of stories like this - streaming alerting the industry to the existence of fans that primarily consumed bootleg media before http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/trent-reznor-nine-inch-nails.html
touring in south america is difficult for western artists outside of a festivals like lollapalooza and rock in rio. the crowds down there are the most passionate fans in the world, but few artists go down there because the logistics are hard and the money's not the highest
ergo, "come to brazil". brazilian fans learned they could overcome western indifference by engaging in what became stan culture - organized efforts to trend hashtags or flood the replies of celebrities, for example. doxxing, hacking, and leaking are also tactics they'd employ
before private communities like discord servers became ground zero for leaks of unreleased music by western artists, my attempts to trace leaks often led back to pandlr, a portuguese-language pop culture message board frequented by brazilian fans of all sorts of things
lately i've found it interesting to consider stan culture as sort of the online equivalent of pixação. a large-scale act of protest vandalism initiated primarily by people outside the US who see western media as a towering, indifferent monolith that actively ignores them
and i mean like, that's not inaccurate? i've had a lot of good experiences with twitter, but that's mostly because i ignore all the most visible and influential accounts on this site. my experiences are incidental to how twitter is intended to be used. i'm not the norm
i've been attacked by flashmobs of stans because i forgot to put asterisks in the name of the celebrity i was shit-talking, and it sucks! i've seen it happen way worse to many people i admire and care about and i don't condone or endorse that type of harassment at all
but at the same time, twitter fundamentally sucks. the people who own it are terrible. lots of folks got on here in the first place hoping that it would help them get noticed and hired by the terrible people who own media companies. i understand the desire to vandalize it
it's said that pixação started in protest of political advertisements in the 70s. covering everything in rude messages and foreboding shapes made it harder for the messaging of establishment politicians to stand out and make an impact. it reclaimed public space from them
it's easy for a lot of us to just ignore the parts of twitter, or the media and culture that we don't like. people elsewhere in the world have been bombarded with marketing for western entertainment products since childhood, and yet we wonder why they take it so seriously
since we can't control stan culture, maybe it's better just to use it as an opportunity to remember that our social media corporations and our media and pop culture industries are evil and bad, and that if we want less toxic places to commiserate, we have to build them ourselves
