The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

SJW Tumblrinas: The Root of All Evil

Posted on | April 30, 2022 | Comments Off on SJW Tumblrinas: The Root of All Evil

Back in 2014, when I started researching radical feminism, one of the first things I discovered was the phenomenon of Tumblr, a toxic cesspool that began as a blogging platform with an interface that allowed it to also function as a social-networking site. Tumblr users could “follow” each other, exchange DMs and, most importantly, “reblog” each other’s content. Feminist Tumblr was a notorious bedlam of craziness, where The Discourse™ spiraled into long threads of young women practicing “call-out culture,” i.e., accusing each other of transgressions against intersectional social justice. Whoever your favorite celebrity, whatever your favorite movie or TV show, it was sure to be denounced as “problematic” at some level by the social justice totalitarians of feminist Tumblr — all of whom proclaimed their mental illnesses in their profiles, and none of whom were heterosexual. Tumblrinas were always somewhere in the LGBTQ spectrum, and all of them were suffering from depression, anxiety, ADD, OCD, autism, bipolar disorder and/or PTSD.

What made Tumblr such a natural habitat for this insanity? Wombat explained to me that Tumblr was blogging for stupid people — no skill was required to participate in the discussion, because the “reblog” function made it possible to create a blog composed entirely of other people’s content, so Tumblr naturally attracted a core audience of low-functioning people. A fat bisexual teenage girl with purple hair and a cluster of mental illnesses, too unstable to hold down a part-time job at Burger King, could nevertheless be a fairly popular blogger on Tumblr, and these were the types of people who came to define the platform.

The World’s Worst Web Site™ “was considered a ‘hot’ online property in 2013, when Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for it”:

Three years later, however, Yahoo was forced to declare that Tumblr was “effectively worthless” — a net drain on revenue, with no prospect of future profitability — and in 2017, Yahoo was sold to Verizon for less than 1/10th of what Microsoft had offered for Yahoo in 2008.

In 2019, Verizon offloaded Tumblr for a nominal price, and everybody forgot about the site that once had seemed a potential rival to Twitter and Facebook. Except that what happened on Tumblr during the years when it was a “hot” site turns out to have played perhaps a pivotal role in contemporary culture. Bill Hurrell at American Greatness has a brilliant analysis of how Tumblr fans of the TV show “Glee” were the online laboratory from which “cancel culture” emerged.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)




 

Category: Culture

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