Francesca Coppa

It's kind of an iceberg.

You know, like the internet thing says, if you know, you know.

I mean, we have, you know, more than 10 million registered users and many, many more unregistered users.

So fan fiction as a kind of organized subcultural activity, right, had really been going on very strongly since the 60s.

Fan fiction writers and fans were some of the first people to come onto the internet.

It's really not overstating it to say that we built a lot of the internet.

And this is in the 1990s.

And what happened is in the aughts, venture capitalists came.

And in fact, the venture capitalists saw...

fandom and its potential and fanfic and its global reach.

And a lot of them clearly thought, great, let's commodify and sell this.

And the community that I'm a part of, we believe in a gift economy.

We have a lot of community norms that are not capitalist norms.

And so when the venture capitalists came, there was a real sense of like, wow, they're literally trying to commodify our hobby and our relationship to each other as a community.

And we don't want that to happen.

So we founded a nonprofit specifically to create an archive of our own.

which, if you're a literary person, might echo to you Virginia Woolf's famous essay, A Room of One's Own, in which she says, among other things, that a woman needs 500 pounds a year and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

And so the idea was to create a space, a nonprofit, non-commercial space for the community that would preserve our fiction and our hobby without it turning into some tech bro's commodified dream space.

Who is writing fan fiction for AO3?

The demographic of AO3 is so broad, you would not believe me.