The Age of Hyper-fans: What content says about our society and its technologies (Intro & Part 1)
For the newest instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise, writers had many options on the table. Perhaps this new epic could follow the story of someone else, perhaps the legendary Harrison Ford could be replaced, perhaps a new episode of the Indiana Jones franchise was wholly unnecessary.
Writers probably would put Harrison Ford everywhere forever if they could: he sells. But there’s one thing: he ages. In comes AI! Thanks to the latest algorithms, Harrison Ford can be forever young. Like in the Alphaville song. Just better, because he is Harrison Ford.
Similarly, following an attempt to woo audiences with a burning story on election rigging, writers of the latest Harry Potter instalment (Secrets of Dumbledore) had similar choices on the table. Fans would agree they do not want a new instalment of the adventures of the bland Newt Scamander and his comic-relief-inducing sidekick. The problem is: everyone agrees more cash can be wrought from the Harry Potter franchise. There comes HBO, that is reportedly working on a reboot of the original series.
Then, there is Iron Man! Who, last I checked, should have died, but has not. Or comes back. Or is in flashbacks. (It’s a pity. He died with a flair.)
Are you starting to see a pattern?
Content, in the forms of TV series or series of films, just got longer. The appetite for TV series is so strong that the number of TV Series has nearly tripled in ten years, and that is without accounting for the number of films’ sequels, which have also skyrocketed.
Whatever happened to short stories? What is so gripping about the characters of these universes that we want more, more, more? We want so much more; we would rather redo the original Harry Potter than new stories happening in the same universe.
Have we lost our ability to relate to new characters?
We have not — many new successful Series are, well, new. We got video games, then the internet. Technology and society made us into hyper-fans — fans that identify with immersive universes, instead of just reading about them. We always were hyper-fans, to be fair. Technology was not there yet to provide the tools to live in our destined universes and to satisfy our appetite for content.
Now it does. And the result is an “oligopolistic-ation” of content: big moats of stories win. Small, “one-shot” stories lose. And this has profound implications for companies, too, and not just in media. We will address them in a series of eight sections, from our starting point — the Hyper-fan trend.
In Parts 1 to 4, we will attempt to answer the question as to why we enjoy being Hyper-fans.
We start by a few things typical of these blockbuster stories: first, they accommodate a “universe you fit in” approach, where readers/viewers/gamers can find a house/caste/crew they would best fit in. This is part of a wider trend where we see increased demand for personality testing, reflected in corporate culture.
Sections 1–4 are an attempt to explain this obsession with personality and the stability of groups (Part 1). We look at the rise of processes — driven by corporations getting larger and larger, resulting in a sense of “lack of agency” amongst younger generations. This is evident in the “zero to hero” stories of recent blockbusters (Part 2). The internet and the collaborative culture it enabled provided apparent solutions for this, partly addressed by Web3. However, a lack of trust in organisations and the financial system undermined this initiative (Part 3). Corporations, aware of this issue, tried communications and transparency, but this is challenging given their size and the size of their shareholders. In the end, companies’ increased efforts for communications and transparency only reinforce the increased focus on personality and tendency to “put people in boxes” (Part 4).
Parts 5 to 8 look at the consequences of us being Hyper-fans. More precisely, we look at what the volume of content means for consumers and companies — in short, problems. Starting with the size of asset managers discussed in Part 4, we look at media owners and how they became asset managers, too, with consequences on their creativity (Part 5). This trend was inevitable given the way the legal framework of copyrights evolved to protect copyrights significantly more than patents. In addition, Generative AI adds very significant complexity to these matters (Part 6). We then follow the renewed interest for utopias and dystopias that have awakened in the past few months because of the news on Artificial Intelligence and explain how most of our fears are based on literature-inspired fictions, not facts (Part 7). Finally, we look at how software copyright, quite absurdly, is considered like literature for copyright law, and conclude that because of Large Language Models (“LLMs”) this is perhaps not quite so absurd anymore (Part 8).
The conclusion will be: IT’S ALL CONNECTED.
Part 1: The Sorting Hat, Fortune 500 Style: Our Obsession with Personality
Before the printing press, the world communicated through long-winded fictions, and sometimes even fan fictions. One writer would start a series, continued by many others, written or, more often, sung. Scandinavians’ medieval contemporaries has sagas, the Greeks had Homer, who may have been one or several people. In Homer’s work, the same gods and men (or dynasties) roam the earth playing politics and games at great length. Nordic Sagas tell the stories of kings in detail, showing a culture of oral transmission so elaborate that the same anecdotes come up in stories widely far in terms of distance and time.
In perhaps the greatest religious merger of all time, the same gods reappear in Greek, Roman, Egyptian and even Gallic lore. Their stories would have been known by most people living in these regions in classical Antiquity times, which explains why Latin literature is sometimes confusing — we’re missing many prerequisites.
Sagas, as in tales that span through generations of characters, provide comfort to the reader that they can get to know these characters and their world at length. The stage is set, the pre-requisites explained, and the reader can comfortably read through pages and pages of adventures, without re-introduction. This is perfect for settings where tales are sung — as was the case for most of human history — and, depending on how lucky you were, you could only catch the middle of the story.
The printing press — and increased literacy — made it easy to read books. And sagas made it to the nineteenth century, a golden age for novels, from which we retain many great sagas such as Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. Balzac — and his fellow nineteenth century writers — are known for publishing in newspapers, in line with the Netflix-age concept that unpopular works should be discontinued. Most of the resulting books though — despite official or unauthorised sequels here and there — are meant to be read standalone. They are not, in the purest sense, series of books, but more of a collection of stories pertaining to the world that authors knew.
Nineteenth century novels also happen in worlds that don’t need explanations — mostly, the reader’s. Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Austen are called realists writers — in that readers perfectly understand the rules of their world and require no introduction. A lot of classical twentieth century writers, like Hemingway or Steinbeck, also write about realistic worlds. Even early science-fiction books such as those written by Jules Verne do not require heavy world-building as most of their novelty comes from exotic machinery rather than different world rules. The mysterious — or rather, the uncanny — is sometimes present (such as in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Maupassant or Robert Louis Stevenson), but it mostly interrupts normal life, rather than rule an entire world. That is in fact the primary sense of mysterious — related to mystic, referring to what is hidden.
The dynamics of a story change, however, when a writer needs to spend a hundred pages explaining why the rules of their world are different. Many readers were put off by The Lord of The Rings’ famously interminable description of the Middle-Earth. Tolkien’s world is in many aspects the continuity of traditional sagas, with their supranatural myths and lore. But elves, dwarves and wizards are revamped from their early mythology equivalent and get a whole new set of characteristics. These needs explaining, and new places need describing.
And so do many works of fiction from the mid twentieth century to today, from Merwyn Peake’s nefarious Gormenghast, a novel altogether unexplainable, to George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (where worldbuilding is so elaborate that all readers would recognize the made-up words Valar Morghulis — in the book, a saying meaning “All men must die”). Granted, a few worlds are not meant to require explanation (“We’re all mad here”, says the Cheshire cat in Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland), and some are elaborate metaphors to get a message across (such as C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle from the Narnia series which depicts the Apocalypse). But most do. And thus, mid to late twentieth century science fiction introduced long-winded worlds, the most famous of which is perhaps Dune, an elaborate collection of books that gave way to one of the first universes of hyper-fans, the Duniverse.
On TV, the advent of special effects introduced the first televised fictional worlds, from BBC’s Doctor Who to George Lucas’ generation-defining Star Wars. This new genre of worldbuilding perhaps explains the huge growth in books addressing themes related to Exploration.
Then came the Harry Potter Series.
What the Harry Potter series and video games have in common is they spearheaded the extraordinary transformation of these encompassing universes into places where you — yes, you — can fit.
JK Rowling’s genius move to create houses where students are sorted by personality fit perfectly into a growing trend of “get to know yourself” that is very characteristic of the 1990s. A testament to this: the MBTI personality test taken by two million people a year, though created in 1945, started being administered by trained practitioners in 1989. The first industrialised version of the “Big Five” personality test (ominously called the NEO PI-R) dates to a Costa & McCrae paper published in 1992. A spin-off version was developed in 2001.
A new branch of psychology that emerged in the 1990s, Positive psychology, gave importance to personality and strengths (the initial version of the MBTI, developed by Dr. Carl Jung in his 1921 book Psychological Types is rather mean). A lot of these tests have now been described as bogus by psychiatrists — but a lot of people think of them as fun and did many of those as teenagers. Are you an INTP, or a Slytherin, or both?
Companies have been quick to jump the bandwagon and use personality tests to hide the de-personalisation of many hiring processes. It doesn’t feel as unfair if you’ve been rejected after a personality test — you feel that at least you went through some kind of assessment. The danger is to start believing that twenty minutes computer administered tests can measure “grit” or “rigour” or “curiosity” or “impact” (true claims taken from the websites of personality tests’ start-ups). Personality tests can be gamed easily, and many providers offer tips and training to do so.
There is an advanced sociological literature on how much more situations predict people’s behaviour rather than their personalities. For example, people who are late stop much less to help others out — regardless of how selfless these people might be in other situations. Ask any finance professional with experience and they will mention how Lehman Brothers’ culture ultimately caused their demise. Of course, individuals shape the culture of their firm — but the culture of their firm shapes them, too.
Personality tests are a highly efficient marketing tool. Results are always meaningless — the point is to create engagement. Which Disney princess are you compared to your friends? Recently, the consumer version of personality evolved to something that would be familiar to our friends from Antiquity: astrology. Astrology has known an incredible revival as it became mainstream in online and social media culture. In 2017, the magazine The Cut reported a 150% increase in traffic in the astrology section compared to the year before. Other media outlets have reported the same.
The secret of astrology is identical to the secret of personality descriptions: it talks about things that sound specific but really are not. It makes sense of events, which provides a sense of control. Stressful events are not random and undeserved, but ENTPs reacting to a bad Mars situation. At the time of writing this article, my horoscope instructed me to: “ditch the dated script and liberate yourself from the expectations that are keeping you stuck”. This sounds like a very universal problem to have. Who would argue against ditching dated scripts? This kind of personal encouragement resonates in a world where, increasingly, younger generations suffer from a perceived lack of control (2016 survey figures found 48% of millennials felt they ‘lacked control” over their working lives).
Somewhat paradoxically, this lack of control that consumer-side personality tests are trying to alleviate is arguably the production of corporation-side attempts to control and measure people’s behaviours — often based on personality assessments. Banks are a great example. Post 2007, regulators blamed excessive risk taking to poor culture and lack of governance. Reading one of the FCA’s (the British financial regulator) whitepaper on Transforming Culture in Financial Services one can find dystopian statements such as “traditional personality measures [in this case, the Big 5 personality test] may be a rough proxy for moral identity”. But more importantly for our purpose, the paper advocates measuring “moral identity” with — you guessed it — a scale, or a “psychometric instrument”. In other words, a standardised test.
The way management — as a political system — has learnt to deal with the very real potential cultural issues of a firm is through standardisation and processing (a phenomenon not dissimilar to the growth of public administration in States). Something that is very much outside of employees’ control. Try arguing with a scale, see if it works!
Want to keep reading? Stay tuned for Part 2: Katniss Everdeen vs. The Machine: Considerations on Employee Benefits
