Have you ever wondered why people online are so fervently passionate about minor, trivial things? Like an influencer quitting a content creation group, fans doing investigative work and documenting an inconsequential online controversy, debating on whose side they should be in an online breakup, or even fighting between two fandoms. The answer could be as simple and as reductive as terminally online people needing to touch grass, yet this is not satisfactory.

In the earlier days of the internet—not so early that it was still a niche technology limited to the northern hemisphere, and rather late enough for corporate social media platforms to gain increasing traction—the internet used to be treated aand crucial means of communication, which helped in many respects, especially in political activism. Many protests and campaigns of the early 21st century were effectively launched (or at least boosted) on blohs and social media. One must only mention a few examples to get the point across: the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Arab Spring uprisings, the Kony 2012 campaign, and so on.

However, reality was progressively changing as the internet, and specifically social media, was morphing, due to corporate interests, from a simple means of communication into a public space in its own right. You do not communicate on the internet anymore, you exist there. This transformation has been happening since the last decade, but it was accelerated in the COVID years, and has found its conclusion with the identity-verification policies that many countries have started to adopt, thus declaring the continuity between one’s real-life public identity and its digital counterpart.

The older verision of political activism for the most part ended in 2019-2020 with the BLM movement in the United States and the various civil uprisings in Iraq, Lebanon, Haiti and other nations. After COVID, the internet cemented itself as not only a space for political debate, but the main theatre thereof. Many political parties and personalities nowadays rely on the internet for political presence and to build a popular base—or in this case, building a “fanbase.” Political activism ought no be done in real life anymore, but rather in the digital space away from the actual centers of political power.

That the lack of effective democracy or progressive change in the political system engenders a sort of alienation and desensitization in people, is not a new phenomenon. When political activism and defying class oppressionbecomes an impossibility, there is a need to compensate such dearth in other domains, especially benign, cultural matters. This point is moreso exacerbated with the internet where there is an unquenched thirst for activism which has naturally bled into the entertainment industry. The whole idea of being a “fan” transforms into something quite similar to being a partisan who’s always ready to defend the party (in this case, the fandom) and its leader (the online personality) from the criticism of other groups. Content creation is not dealing with parasocials, but rather an entire wave of pseudo-activists that have either lost all hope for political change in the real world or didn’t even get the chance to experience any of it because of their young age. With that context in mind, it becomes more comprehensible why online users, especially the younger ones who’ve only experienced their cognitive awakening in recent years and have no social outlet besides the internet, feel entitled to have opinions on the most personal aspects of influencer’s lives: this is virtually their whole conceived world, and they need to feel as though they exist in it.

Politics fell victim to consumerism. (Always has been). I remember when the recent protests in Nepal broke out seeing many flags from the anime series One Piece. It reminded of the trend back in 2019 when protesters across the world were painting their faces like the joker. I am not hating per se, because it could potentially be a first step for someone’s social consciousness. However, it always feels so absurd to see viral trends online spill into the real world, and especially into political activism. Though this is the natural consequence of having a politically illiterate generation that owes most of its intellectual formation to pop-culture media consumption.

P.S. I wrote this rant for selfish reasons. I am fueled writing this by my long-term frustration with inconsequential “dramas” online which have deprived me from some creative content creators whose personal lives I do not care about and should not have ended up being shared or sniffed out publicly.