Receipts, radicalisation, reactionaries, and repentance: the digital dissensus, fandom, and the COVID-19 pandemic

This essay aims to illustrate how the concept of "digital dissensus" (Penny Andrews in An Xiao Mina 2018) applies to the current state of politics and the public sphere, exacerbated by international "lockdowns" as a result of COVID-19.The digital dissensus describes the current period in politics, where the liberal consensus of the 1980s onwards has collapsed and the internet and social media have become forums for noisy debate and extremist voices.The essay argues that lockdowns have created the conditions for an intensification of already polarising fandoms in politics and activism online, as well as an intensification of the inequalities and exclusions within offline political activism.Coronavirus has made it difficult to escape the calls of the powerful to bring an end to "cancel culture" (Elliot Ackerman et al. 2020) returning to an imagined version of liberal hegemony and denying accountability to the marginalised.It is not only difficult to live through a pandemic that requires us to work, socialise and engage in political organising predominantly online.We are also doing this during a period of profound and loud fragmentation and disagreement on many issues that do not neatly split into left and right, Leaver and Remainer, disabled and able-bodied, straight versus queer or any other easy divisions.At the same time, we are witnessing the radicalisation of previously innocuous celebrities, secondary trauma from attacks on minority communities to which we and the people we care about belong, fallout from racism, abuse within popular culture and politics fandom, and the digital revelation of problematic faves.Meanwhile we also have to struggle with our caring responsibilities to our families, our communities and ourselves.To belong to minority groups and be clinically vulnerable during COVID-19 is a trip, and to retreat to the comforts of fandom and physical spaces is no longer untroubled.