rm | On the Internet everyone is a dog

With LJ/6A's seemingly endless silence (the meaningless quote to CNET doesn't count for my purposes) it's hard to fathom what they were actually thinking, and I'm trying not to go there.

But I will say this: they underestimated fandom. And the reason they underestimated fandom is that we underestimated fandom.

When it started it seemed like a fandom issue.
Even as it began to snowball lots of people were still on the "don't read [that type of] fanfic, don't care" mantra.

But now?

Guess what, kids -- we're all fandom. And I don't mean that in some happy hippy dippy love way. I mean that in the sense of this is what JK Rowling and Peter Jackson and Joss Whedon have wrought. A few years ago it was triumph of the nerds and then dominion of the nerds, but now we're all nerds. Being fannish, no matter how you choose to engage fandom or how often you engage fandom or how thoroughly you engage fandom, is, quite simply fun, ubiqutous and not terribly shameful anymore.

And when what once would have been niche geek movies are consistently and reliably the summer blockbusters? It means fandom isn't a little group of fringe wackos without connections. Rather, it's doenz and hundreds of iterations of two people who met online talking on the phone for hours about which of the celebs and talking heads and heroes of our community we could get to help with this LJ disaster and which ones we know to various degrees personally.

Because that's the other thing about the Internet. It's not just that it's made everyone a star and everyone a nerd.

It's that it's made it so no one is.

Which is, in part, why LJ/6A has the wrath of pretty much all of its userbase on its hands.