Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

"Everything I Need I Get From You will fascinate aficionados, but even for someone who’s never so much as logged on, it makes a rich and heartfelt explainer on the feelings and phenomena that thrive on the internet." —Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing

A thrilling and riotous dive into the world of superfandom and the fangirls who shaped the social internet.

In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternative universe: stan culture.

In Everything I Need I Get from You, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band members' allergies, internet typos, and hairstyles. In the process, Tiffany makes a convincing, and often moving, argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today, effectively making One Direction the first internet boyband. “Before most people were using the internet for anything,” Tiffany writes, “fans were using it for everything.”

With humor, empathy, and an expert's eye, Everything I Need I Get from You reclaims internet history for young women, establishing fandom not as the territory of hysterical girls but as an incubator for digital innovation, art, and community. From alarming, fandom-splitting conspiracy theories about secret love and fake children, to the interplays between high and low culture and capitalism, Tiffany’s book is a riotous chronicle of the movement that changed the internet forever.

About the Author

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology and culture. She was previously on the same beat at Vox’s consumer vertical The Goods, after starting her career writing about pop culture, fandom, and online community at The Verge. Formerly the host of the popular podcast Why’d You Push That Button, which considered the tiny technology decisions that have an outsized effect on our modern social lives, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.