Shared Experiences Are the Engine of Fandom

There’s a version of the future that keeps getting floated in AI circles — the idea that eventually AI will be so advanced that you’ll type a prompt and it generates an entire game, movie, or comic tailored specifically to you. Your perfect story. Your experience. An audience of one. And maybe on a purely technical level that happens someday. The economics of AI are still shaking out and I’ve been clear about that. But even if the technology gets there, I’m not convinced this becomes the norm. The reason is something the tech-first crowd consistently undervalues.
People want shared experiences. Think about what actually makes nerd culture work. It’s not just the content — it’s the conversation around the content. When you watch Dragon Ball Z, half the joy is arguing with your friends about whether Goku could beat Vegeta. When a new comic drops, you want to talk about that twist with someone who read the same book. You can take it all the way back to the arcade era of gaming — the shared element has always been part of it. The content is the foundation, but the community built around it is what gives it lasting value.
A shared experience provides a common reference point. It’s a language. It’s that inside joke that only works because someone else was there too. And I think people massively underestimate how much of the enjoyment of entertainment comes from that layer. It’s the reason people go to conventions. It’s the reason spoiler culture exists. If nobody cared about shared experience, spoilers wouldn’t matter — you’d just consume your own thing in your own bubble and it wouldn’t affect you. But it does affect you, because you want to experience that moment alongside other people, even if they’re strangers.
This is also why the classic nerd arguments — DC vs. Marvel, sub vs. dub, who’s the strongest — aren’t just noise. They’re proof that the shared experience is the engine of fandom. You can’t argue about something nobody else has seen. You can’t bond over a moment nobody else had. That’s the fundamental limitation of hyper-personalized content. It might be perfectly crafted for you, but it’s meaningless to everyone else. And entertainment that’s meaningless to everyone else has a ceiling on how much it can matter to you.
Could AI-generated experiences be fun as a novelty? Sure. But replacing the shared stories that bring people together? I don’t see it. The best moments in nerd culture have always been shared, and no algorithm is going to replicate what it feels like to be in a room full of people who love the same thing you do.