Excellent article, concise and to-the-point. I agree that capitalist systems systematically trivialize and devalue things that people aren't making a profit on, presenting it as a foregone conclusion that these things have inferior worth. But I think it's also very important to consider the implications from a consumer side. In just about any fandom, our population of readers is much larger than our population of writers, and fanfiction is entertainment that no one pays for the privilege of consuming. I think most of the devaluation aimed by the culture at large at fanfic is meant to reach and shame the people who are reading it. What would happen if it became widely known that this is a source of stories that are comparable to published work, often do a better job offerering stories people want to read, are uncensored, and despite all the turmoil surrounding "write more minorities," already represent them more than the mainstream does? I don't think mainstream culture wants to find out. I think it's presenting fanfic as necessarily inferior out of ignorance, prejudice, and most of all, self-interest.

It's a complex equation, because while the variety of paid entertainment a fan consumes is presumably less than a person who comes out of a theater and doesn't give that movie a second thought, there's plenty of research attesting that fan involvement increases the value and longevity of commercial entertainment. And there's an even closer symbiosis where fans are involved with canons that aren't imported via standard distribution channels - companies lag behind in the importation of foreign media and let fandom be an indicator of what would be lucrative to buy the rights to. But a capitalist economy will always prefer interactions that put money in its pockets *right now* to ones that don't. Even when you're creating other kinds of value, "a hundred people who otherwise would have never read X or watched Y, if they hadn't read this fanfic" don't map neatly onto economists' graphs.