I’m a Gen-Xer. I remember life before the web, when social interactions had weight and physicality. I also remember watching the Berlin Wall fall on TV, hearing about the end of the Cold War and apartheid in 1991, and believing—like so many of us who grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek—that the future was going to be brighter.That era didn’t just give us hope. It gave us the building blocks of today’s digital revolution. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, as Klaus Schwab calls it, is moving at an exponential pace—digital, biological, and physical innovations all feeding into each other. That’s the world my fandom grew up in.
Here’s the thing: the entertainment industry didn’t just reflect the politics of the 80s—it exported them. American soft power flooded the globe with a simple, dualistic story: capitalism good, communism bad. That black-and-white worldview, sold to us through blockbusters and TV news, still shapes how many in the West see the world today. Having spent the last 20 years in China, I can tell you firsthand: it didn’t have to be this way.
Then came the internet, Napster, Netflix, the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter. Suddenly we had access to everything, anytime, anywhere. But as sociologist David McGowan points out, streaming didn’t make us collectors—it made us dependent on platforms that can pull content at any moment. And the news? What started as reporting facts slowly became opinion-based entertainment, feeding our confirmation bias.
The pandemic poured fuel on this fire. Digital platforms amplified every binary: woke/anti-woke, left/right, us/them. Nuance got lost. Fandoms—including mine—became battlegrounds for polarisation.
This post is adapted from my doctorate research on the intersection of religiosity and fandom.