I owe it all to One Direction

An excerpt from our new book 'Make It Make Sense' about how I crushed so hard it built me a business 𓆩♡𓆪

This is an excerpt from our debut book ‘Make It Make Sense’ which is out in NZ and Australia today, and in the UK next week! It would make my heart so fucking happy if you got yourself a copy, I love you so much x

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I Owe It All to One Direction

By Lucy

The final night of the Oceania leg of One Direction’s ‘Up All Night’ tour, 22 April 2012, a random bar in Wellington, New Zealand.

Harry Styles and Niall Horan are less than a metre away, only a wall of glass keeping us apart. Ruby and I are trying as hard as we can to seem chill and not like the ‘knicker-wetting banshees’ men in the media keep calling One Direction fans, but when security guards force us to part with our life-size cutouts of the boys’ faces, I sense that chill is the last thing we’re coming across as. The boys are both waving, and I hope they notice our meticulously selected concert outfits, hand-picked with the legitimate hope that one of the band might spot us from the stage and invite us back to the hotel that we’d been shrieking outside mere hours earlier. We’re trying to seem 25, but the fact that we’re shivering outside a bar in Wellington at 1am; not old enough to drink anything stronger than a shandy, even if we were invited inside, is an embarrassing reminder that we’re only 15. As is the presence of Ruby’s mum, who’s standing a few feet away, chaperoning the whole encounter.

The rest of the band is up at the bar getting drinks, except Zayn, who’s noticeably missing, but that’s okay because he’s neither of our faves. Harry waves his flashlight over us and, as he turns around to join his friends, I stress about how the videos on my iPod Touch are never going to do justice to this interaction. After an hour or so, we have to leave to make our early-morning ferry back, and we reluctantly depart. On the journey home, I comb through my grainy footage, upload it to my social media accounts, type up the interaction in the way I think will get the most notes on Tumblr, and wonder if this will be one of those moments that go on to change a person’s life. Feels that way.

We didn’t end up outside that bar by chance. The moment had been years in the making, after my simple crush on a British boy band spiralled out of control and onto Twitter. Sixty-thousand followers later, when One Direction was in New Zealand for the first time, someone who followed me and knew I was at the show tipped me off about where the band were heading afterwards. The Wellington incident went on to become ‘famous’ in a niche area of the internet, and thanks to what I learnt during that intense time of crushing, you could say I went on to become ‘famous’ in a niche area of the internet, too.

Young girls aren’t allowed to be interested in things. If you’re into pop music, you’re basic. If you’re into the stuff your dad used to play, you’re a tryhard. If you’re into makeup, you’re wasting your time and money and told that ‘natural girls’ are hotter anyway. And if you like sports, you’re a ‘pick me’ girl. As a way of proving to ourselves or to the hobby police that our interests are worthwhile, we feel like we have to make them productive. If reading is our hobby, we join book clubs and annotate our pages to ‘get more out of it.’ If we play an instrument, we wonder if we should be recording our music and uploading it somewhere in the hopes of getting our ‘big break’, picturing those early clips as the intro to the documentary that someone will inevitably make about us. For me, crushing was no different. A schoolyard crush has always increased my attendance in class. A work crush usually leads to a better (or at least wittier) performance at the office or a brighter smile towards a customer. A crush on a boyband? Well, that’s how SYSCA came to exist.

Everything I learnt about being a person online, I learnt at the University of One Direction. I enrolled in 2010 and graduated in 2014, thanks to the five hot tutors who encouraged me to show up to class. The band were coming up at the same time social media was exploding, and they were encouraged to be everywhere, so I, the student, needed to learn how to be everywhere too. In YouTube 101, I was introduced to ‘vlog’-style content by way of the chaotic video diaries the band uploaded weekly alongside their X Factor performances. My assignment was to log onto YouTube, admire, synthesise, download and then chop up the best bits of these videos to use in my other classes. In Twitter 101, I learnt what it took to make the clips go viral, as well as the function of a hashtag and how to make one trend, and in Tumblr 101, I turned those clips into GIFsets. In Photoshop 101, I learnt how to make a ‘manip’ (a manipulated photo where you’d insert a picture of yourself next to your favourite band member), and in Media Literacy 101, I was tested on how well I could spot the ‘real’ photos from the ‘manips.’ Live Streaming 101 was held on Twitcam, where I’d stay up until some ungodly hour to join 7,000 other fans watching a combination of bandmates sit in their lounge doing mundane teenage boy things. Here, I mastered techniques like transcribing, screengrabbing and annotating, but most importantly, I learnt how to be the first person to upload an ‘update’ or an ‘iconic’ moment to the internet. In a fandom, timing and speed were everything.

Every time the boys were up for an award, I had bonus Community Management classes to figure out what strategy would rally people together and get the votes we needed. Timetabling across time zones, writing and sharing petitions, raising awareness for a cause we believed in – it was all there. My favourite class, Editing 101, was held on Wattpad, where I learnt what self-published work looked like, but, more importantly, that if I wanted to write something, I could just go for it. The exams for this class entailed reading the most terribly written fanfiction known to fankind, and editing the grammar as I went.

I graduated top of my class because although the study was self-directed, it was the most passionate I’d ever been about a subject. I’d earned my degree in cross-platform crushing, but out in the real world, I may as well have majored in embarrassment and minored in shame. I’d been doing all of this in secret, for the same pride-protecting reason you keep your childhood crush close to your chest, and there was no way I was confident enough to put the years of experience I had in editing, community management, photoshopping, social media – any of it – to use in the ‘real’ world. I had treated crushing as a full-time job, and I was quickly realising it would never become one.

Each July, while he was in high school, my brother Nick would host his friends for sleepovers in the lounge so they could stay up all night and watch the Tour de France. They bought magazines with different riders posing on the covers and their favourite team’s lycra (literally merch), and for that whole month, cycling was all we talked about. I sat through TV highlights and replays, learnt the names of all their favourite and least favourite riders, and I thought this tradition of theirs was the coolest thing ever. When Ruby and I would have our own sleepovers to watch the premiere of a new One Direction music video or when I’d order copies of a magazine from the UK so that I could have the one with Louis Tomlinson’s face on it, that was juvenile, embarrassing and a waste of money. Nick started working in a bike shop as a mechanic, and I often thought about how cool it was that he could turn his hobby into a job. He’d roll into work after school and talk openly about upcoming races, dreamt of going to France to follow the Tour around one day (groupie behaviour), and it wasn’t outlandish for him to imagine that he’d be able to have some sort of career in this field. When I realised that the same wouldn’t be possible for me and my hobby, I deleted everything I’d built online. I left the communities I was a part of to go and do the complete opposite: I went to university and studied politics.

I went through the motions. I passed my exams, memorised facts instead of understanding them, and I was bored. All. The. Time. I felt unengaged with what was happening in the world and disconnected from the spaces where I had once felt so inspired. There was nothing that made me feel crazy or obsessive or psycho or cringe – all the things that I was supposed to be embarrassed by, but that made me thrive. I needed something new to crush on.

During my hiatus from online crushing, the mood online was shifting. From being cringe to crush, it was now cool to crush, and being a fan became an important tool for social change. Back when I was obsessed with One Direction, my activism didn’t stretch far beyond getting justice for Louis’ solo in ‘Over Again’, but now online communities were sabotaging the rallies of unfavourable politicians, raising millions of dollars for causes they believed in and taking over prejudiced hashtags with homemade edits. The world, which may have always been aware of the purchasing power and cultural impact of fandoms, seemed to be starting to respect the hustle it took to create that impact. I wanted to be part of it again.

Starting SYSCA was like meeting up with my old friend, the internet. As soon as I started searching, synthesizing, and posting, I felt old muscles begin to re-engage, and realized they were from my years of hard crushing. There were tangible things I could do for SYSCA, like building a website or writing for the internet, but more important were my intangible skills.

Like being able to tell which clip from a video would go viral, which quote would work best as a tweet, where the people we wanted to engage with were hanging out online, or how to get a group of people to care about a common idea. SYSCA was new, but my love for building community online wasn’t. From the beginning, our new platform paid homage to our fandom roots by blending the news with our latest crushes (notably, Harry Styles).

This was strategic: we wanted our audience (largely young women) to feel comfortable being interested both in serious things like the news and frivolous things like boybands. It was also fueled a little bit by spite: I wanted to reclaim the interests that I’d once felt so ashamed of and make a business out of them.

People had opinions about this. Of course they did; everyone has an opinion on the internet. The key is to know whose you should listen to. For example, you should not listen to the ex-manager of a ‘famous’ influencer who decides to DM you something like this:

Hi girls,

Have loved seeing your platform grow and I am loving the Harry content. We all do.

I wanted to give a piece of advice – I’ve been at this for a while now and I wish someone had been so honest with me when I started out.

The news cycle is really heavy at the moment and you’re doing a great job at reporting it, but the Harry stuff seems a little light and fluffy in amongst it all.

Maybe you could isolate the Harry content to a ‘Harry hour’ of sorts and we’ll know when to expect it . . . just so the messaging doesn’t feel so disjointed? Then we can still get involved with the ‘shit we should care about’!

Something to think about as you continue to grow and influence.

This was a nice gesture from a man who didn’t realize that he could simply scroll on or had never known the feeling of being a fangirl. Luckily, one thing I’ve never doubted is my gut instinct, so I replied:

Thanks so much! This is something we’ve thought about and as much as we agree on some parts, we never want to lose our human aspect or have any of our content controlled by other people! Thanks so much for checking in and if people think that because we post Harry Styles then all our other news is irrelevant, then I think that’s on them. We don’t wanna put ourselves into any boxes! <3 <3

When our strategy worked, the years I’d felt like I’d wasted suddenly felt valuable. The skills I’d assumed only pertained to the singular experience of being a fan were suddenly being transferred over to work that people respected. The validation came through the people who started following us, including leaders in the media industry who wanted to replicate what we were doing, but mostly from the fellow fans who could see themselves and their skills in what we were building.

Ten years after we stood shivering outside that bar in Wellington, Harry Styles’ sister Gemma DM’d me and asked me to come on her podcast. I spent an appropriate amount of time freaking out over what 15-year-old Lucy would have thought (probably something cringe and of its time, like “Jesus take the wheel!”) before considering what she would have liked to hear. She would’ve wanted to know that spending her teenage years crushing on a boyband wouldn’t turn out to be a waste of time and that she learned more practical skills during those years online than she did at university.

She’d want to know that she became so un-embarrassed of her time as a fan that she made it an integral part of her business. She’d want to hear that she still loves One Direction, though these days she would never track them down at a bar in the middle of the night because she’s learned what boundaries are.

As Gemma and I were chatting, I felt a type of catharsis wash over me. None of this has ever been about having to make your crushes productive by building a business out of them or hoping that one day you’d get on a podcast with the sister of your decade-long fixation. It’s about letting ourselves love and obsess deeply and seeing where we get to when we don’t care what people think.

Plan and organize your way to the front row of a concert and be loud about it. Relish the hours you spend at the coffee shop working on a project that no one has forced you to create. Walk through the doors of the White House because they need someone with the skills to edit a thirst trap of the president. You’ll make it to these places because you were obsessed with the journey. Just make sure you put it all on your résumé.

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