While simultaneously “resisting" norms of capitalist society and its rapid turnover of novel commodities, fans are also implicated in these very economic and cultural processes. Fans are, in one sense, “ideal consumers"since their consumption habits can be very highly predicted by the culture industry, and are likely to remain stable. But fans also express anti-commercial beliefs (or “ideologies", we might say, since these beliefs are not entirely in alignment with the cultural situation in which fans find themselves).11
Hills thus views the fan experience as having (at least) two competing aspects the “anti-commercial ideology” side and the “commodity-completist" side.
Hills's proposal of these two halves of fandom allows him to articulate, more clearly than the subculture and fanstudies scholars who preceded him, how fan labor adds value to commodities and why fans disavow or simply refuse to acknowledge that their value-adding activities constitute labor. Looking at the way that fans who have collected old, no-longer-manufactured items are able to sell them for sometimes quite high prices on eBay, Hills says,
Many commodities offered for sale on eBay should, according to the conventional logic of use and exchange-value, be almost worthless. However due to many of them having been intensely subjectively valued by fans such commodities take on a redefined “exchange-value".... [F]an-based “use-values" interact with systems which belong to the economy “proper” meaning that the existence of a marketplace for media-related collectibles is underpinned by the lived experiences of fandom.12
What gives these commodities value beyond their initial sales price is what fans add to them—the new uses to which fans put old things and the emotional landscapes that fans construct around them. Hills states that “fan ‘appropriations of texts or resistances' to consumption can always be reclaimed as new instances of exchange-value,"’13 and, conversely, we can say that without fan appropriations many commodities would have much lower exchange-value, a much shorter shelf life of value, and a much smaller base of potential consumers. Withoutfans working on them, many items would be, in Hills's words, “almost worthless" a short while after coming to market.
But fans and fan studies scholars have historically been reluctant to regard fans value-adding actions as labor since “fan identities are typically viewed against consumeridentities."14 Particularly relevant to this essay is Hills's observation, citing a study by Taylor and Willis,15 that fans criticize members of their own communities who do regard their activities as work worthy of compensation: “[F]ans whose practices are clearly linked with' dominant capitalist society (e.g. they may be trying to sell videos recorded off-air) are likely to be censured within the fan culture concerned."16 As I have written about elsewhere, using the example of the case of a Star Wars fan fiction author who briefly listed her fan novel on Amazon,17 fan communities frequently severely criticize members who attempt to sell theirfan works. Because fans generally conceive of their activities as “resistive" to consumerism, they refuse to consider that their works might constitute either promotional materials or ancillary products that increase the value of the objects of fandom and therefore might be deserving of compensation, either from official producers or from other consumers.
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Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor