Reading

It's been a hell of a month for me. I really haven't had the energy to do much, and I've been coming out of a period in which I realized I was stuck in a kind of bad mental health haze since around 2020. I went to a renfaire yesterday and chilled out, and then tried to work this morning and remembered that everything is fucked up and broken, on every level. Enshittification is becoming more of a fact of life in a way that is making me want to check all the way out in a way that I told myself that I can't and I shouldn't anymore, because I've spent way too much of the last two decades checked all the way out.

But today, I want to talk about a phenomenon that I noticed during the year of 2005, which seemed to start right after the re-election of George W. Bush and the 2004 Tsunami which happened a month or so later.

Around the turn of the century, we collectively observed several of what one youtuber called "mass unaliving events." This caused a lot of people to turn inward, or to turn to escapism to cope. Way more than ever before. People like me, who had always just kind of existed that way, and who had been heckled and harangued and hassled for it over the course of our entire lives, suddenly found ourselves joined by a bunch of people who were trying to do the same thing. Using fandom as an escape went from something that only hardcore weirdos and people with extremely niche interests did, to something that became way more mainstream - say around September 2001, for some reason.

But hell, there was so much great stuff to hyperfocus on! Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pirates Of The Caribbean, The Matrix Sequels, Lord Of The Rings, Firefly (remember "Browncoats?") and more. And those were just the big ones. The "SuperWhoLock" of early 2000s LiveJournal. There was a surplus of media to consume,no one was thinking about it in terms of "media consumption" in the early 2000s. But there was so many really great books and films and shows to get excited about and hyperfocus on, right as things in the real world were getting really grim.

The shit kept happening. And happening. Our dumb president at the time, George W. Bush, went and got us into a couple of dumb forever wars - attacking two wrong countries (Afghanistan and Iraq) for an act of terrorism committed by 15 Saudis and Jordanians. Somehow, Palpatine returned he was re-elected. And the shit just kept happening.

It seemed to hit critical mass around the beginning of 2005. The same time that a lot of fandom cults were forming on LJ and elsewhere. Bit Of Earth, The Matrix Cult, and too many more to name.EDIT: Thinking back, BoE was 2002-2003, and some of the other "Livejournal Cults" I can think of got going in 2004. But 2005 was the year that a lot of them got noticed, and their activities started to "bring heat" so to speak; often in the form of posts over on Fandom Wank.

I think this was happening because the escapism wasn't helping so much anymore. It stopped working. The crazy shit and mass unaliving events wouldn't stop happening, and it was harder to escape than ever before.

Like, I think about how big LJ was, and how many of us were basically corralled in together because of that, and how things just blew up between different people and different groups around that time. The strife from online communities spilled over into people's irl personal lives, and it spilled over into online communities *from* people's irl personal lives.

The internet has metastasized into something dramatically different since then, and now a lot of the strife is algorithmically-driven.


I know this is apropos of nothing, and irrelevant in context to what is going on now, 20 years later. But it was weird to witness at the time.