"Toxic fandom" is one of the strangest new permutations of totalitarianism - the notion that enthusiastically approving of politically certified entertainment is mandatory and dissent is, in essence, a sign of sinister intent or mental illness.
Yes, it's a totalitarian idea. People mix up concepts like totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism all the time, and they do often come as a set, but they are distinct evils. Totalitarianism is the aggressive politicization of every facet of life.
Totalitarianism is very big on mind-reading and treating all dissent from the "consensus" as either mental illness or the work of organized subversive forces. This has a pedigree much older than the Internet era, but the Internet has exacerbated the tendency.
The Internet produces a lot of hive-mind responses, mobs, swarms, cascades, and pile-ons. It all happens very quickly - fast enough to track with the marketing and release of a movie or the airing of a television show. Hive-mind reflexes can be triggered by very small groups.
And now that lazy journalists are basing much of their "news" content off what they see on Twitter and Facebook, it's easy for a small group to trigger an Internet mob action that becomes "real world news" in a matter of hours. Entertainment journalists are the laziest of all.
This brings us the bizarre spectacle of the entertainment industry and its media insulting viewers for daring to dislike its product, often hurling those insults before the product is released or while it's still in theaters.
It might be counterproductive in terms of selling tickets, but it's a deeply totalitarian impulse: treat dissent as illegitimate or deranged, read the minds of dissenters to pick out the dark thoughts they are supposedly harboring, bully and intimidate people into agreement.
And while screaming insults at people because they dared to dislike a superhero movie might seem like an amusingly trivial problem in isolation, it signals a disturbing mindset that stretches into other areas of life. That's how totalitarianism works. It grows like cancer.
It doesn't help that so much of the lazy media is constantly doodling out articles describing patterns and linking things together into "trends," as in current ruminations that criticism of a Star Wars movie might have been driven by Russian bots.
This is also a totalitarian impulse, a subset of its predilection for mind-reading and announcing what dissenters are "really thinking." Totalitarians constantly try to break people into groups and keep them fenced in.
The Internet combines with lazy media's hunger for easy content to create "social trends" that often boil down to shouting matches between tiny handfuls of people. 3 guys with 140 Twitter followers hated a female character in a movie? AMERICA HAS A TOXIC MASCULINITY PROBLEM!
And somewhere along the way, the creators of pop culture shifted from being PROVOCATIVE to seeing their mission as deliberately ANTAGONIZING large segments of the audience. They went from asking impertinent questions to delivering sermons and casting out heretics.
Everyone involved in every stage of this "toxic fandom"process thinks totalitarianism is not a problem because they're Good People who believe the Right Things, while their critics are all Intolerant Haters. Every totalitarian society throughout history has believed this. /end
