allegra's schmooze zone

After his short-lived stint as Chief Officer of Viral Marketing and Exponential Growth in April, Brick Whartley spent the last nine months banished relaxing on a remote, unnamed desert island 🏝️. 

But one thing about Brick, a career Businessman, is that he found it difficult to relax for long. His brain bubbled over with concepts and pitches and decks and strategies for Maximizing Engagement: he just couldn’t help it! He had ants in his pants and they were saying CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! 

So he gave in to the call of the business plan. 

Welcome to Big Week On Tumblr Season 4!

It's Big Week on Tumblr for the week of January 23, 2022!

In this episode, Cates and Allegra chat about this week's Tumblr trends: The Last of Us, Tumblr Polls, and Panic! At The Disco.

We've done a bit of a revamp on our format: instead of separating out the trends and the chat, every episode is now one big chat about trends! But don't worry, special guests will still pop on every so often.

In the 19th century, taxonomies were a big deal. A hundred years after Linnaeus developed the system of binomial nomenclature, Darwinian natural philosophy emphasized that new and existing taxonomies should reflect the principle of common descent, giving rise to today’s system of evolutionary taxonomy. 

If you’ve read the Aubrey-Maturin series of nautical adventure novels, you might be familiar with Testudo aubreii, the majestic tortoise that Stephen Maturin named after his best friend Jack Aubrey. It is an honor not lightly to be given, a sort of taxonomy as immortality: “This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the Hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There’s glory for you.”  Putting a name to something makes it easier to understand and discuss; it can provide a starting point for study and for further investigation. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about taxonomy lately, thanks to a few conversations I’ve had this month with people looking for expertise on fans and fan studies for final projects. I’m always happy to chat about this stuff, but sometimes I’m unexpectedly run up against the limits of my expertise: to be honest, I don’t know a lot about sports fans, or the practices of fans of massive commercial domains like Disney.

I’m interested in transformative fandom, which is a relatively small (but impactful) slice of the pie, as well as digital platforms and the ways in which youth audiences in particular utilize affordances of those platforms to express enthusiasm. I suppose I’m a fan scholar in the same way that an expert in ants is an entomologist: it’s a useful bit of nomenclature, but don’t ask them about spiders. There’s obviously a lot of benefits to specialization: but for someone who has aspirations towards the public humanities, I’m increasingly aware of my own need to have a more comprehensive overview of the different types of fans. 

Over the 30 years of fan studies’ existence there have been numerous attempts to do just that: create a useful paradigm that neatly sections off fan practices into families and genii. The split between “transformational” and “affirmational” fandoms, first proposed by a pseudonymous fan in 2009 and later taken up by scholars like Henry Jenkins, is broadly handy, but problematic: it can lead to viewing “affirmational” fandom such as cosplaying, merchandise-buying, and information-collecting (such as in wikis) as purely mimetic and of lesser cultural value than “transformational” fan activities (see Hills, 2014). 

That binary also ignores the large swathes of people that perform both types of fandom, or whose fan practices exist somewhere in between, or not on that axis at all; it’s also slightly outdated. In 2009, transformational fans who wrote erotica about non-canonical ships could still be safely said to be “against” canon in some way, non-sanctioned and acting transgressively out of bounds. I would say that in many cases, that is far from the case today. 

Something I’m interested in is how fan practices develop and spread from one “genus” of fandom to another. (Presuming “species” is an individual fandom, and “genus” is a group of species connected by ancestry and shared practice). You see this in the phenomena in sports RPF, for example: slash fanfiction is a genre of practice developed by media fandom (TV/film fandom) in the 1970s and 80s, but it has been “adopted out” so to speak to form the nucleus of a sub-species of sports fans. 

This circulation of practice is especially notable in the field of transcultural fandom (see Morimoto, 2017). Fan practices developed in the context of East Asian pop music fandom, such as chart-boosting, have made their way over to Western fandoms and communities centering on non-music media objects. Digital platforms afford this circulation, which in turn results in a blurring of boundaries between fan species and increasing difficulty in parsing out which “type” of fan someone is. Practices are contagious and amoebic. The type of sparkly fancams intially made by K-pop idol fans were adopted by Succession stans. 

Like the animal kingdom, there’s just so much going on. To say nothing of what was going on. Which types of fans have gone extinct? Which modes of interacting with media are now archaeological artifacts, thanks to the shifting relationality of the apparatus of cultural production with respect to audiences? 

In the 2000s through the early 2010s, it used to be that it was pretty easy to "classify" a Tolkien fanfiction writer because they often did it themselves along genre (gen, slash, or het) and character group (usually Elves, Men, or Hobbits), so you ended up with authors who would assert things like, "I am a Hobbit genfic writer" or "I am an Elf slash writer." Then there were the Silmarillion people, where the genre and character group seemed to matter far less (and I am myself a Silmarillion person so I think I speak with some authority here!), though this group also cross-pollinated a lot with the other groups, especially those writing about Elves.

Last night, a handful of journalists from outlets like the New York Times, Vox, and CNN, the Twitter account for Mastodon, long-running antifascist news site It’s Going Down, and, also, Keith Olbermann were suspended from Twitter without warning. The reason eventually given is that they had violated Musk’s new vague and worthless anti-doxxing policy that will almost certainly never be enforced on right-wing accounts sharing real-time information about the location of the drag brunches that they want to victimize. According to the Washington Post, the suspensions came from Musk’s new Hand of the King, Ella Irwin, the site’s new “Trust” and “Safety” head.

But if I can attempt to answer both the question of “what is Twitter?” and also “why is Elon Musk acting like a maniac all the time?” I’d like to argue that there has actually always been one core Twitter experience, going all the way back to its very beginnings, that has remained consistent. 

Twitter’s core experience has been, and still is, disruption. And we have spent over a decade trying to determine if it’s good disruption or bad, left-wing or right, progressive or conservative, but the truth is, it’s just disruption. It’s a random social chaos machine. Over the summer, as Elon Musk finalized the purchase of the site, that chaos machine was turned in on itself. The company was overrun with leaks and drama, which all became trending topics. And after Musk bought it, the company literally began livetweeting its own dismantling. Now that it has toppled itself, and all that’s left is Musk’s various whims, the manic energy of the app appears to be localized entirely inside of Musk’s brain. The man is jacked directly into the feed and it turns out the feed is screaming back at him, “you fucking suck.”

And so we all have to sit around and watch the richest man in the world process in real-time how cringe, how embarrassing, how hated he is. The joke has always been that Twitter causes “psychic damage,” but that joke is real now. Twitter is currently doing to one man’s psyche what it has done to countless societies around the world. He paid $44 billion for a website he believed was a “biological neural net,” a digital collective unconscious that he could use to take us to Mars, and it turns out that frothing Id hates him. Can you imagine how painful the cognitive dissonance must be? If people boo you and think you’re a shameless loser then what’s all the money for? Why are you sleeping in your office? If money can’t make people like you then what was any of it for?

chuck has been trotting around the internet for a long time and i will say there are some buds who did not understand my way at first. they were kind enough, but they did not accept me with sincerity and in early days it id not feel great

on other hand, neil gaiman has ALWAYS treated chuck so well and with such immediate and unwavering sincerity. i can confidently say buckaroo neil is one of the few buds who actually GOT my way from day one. chuck and neil have had plenty of quiet talks in the comments or other interactions over the years and i can say with confidence he is a TRUE BUCKAROO who lives and breathes art and expression and kindness.

Dashboard Diving

It is as true as ever that when you stare into the dashboard, the dashboard stares back. And Tumblr’s love of introspection is well documented, mainly, it must be said, by Tumblr itself. Welcome. This is your 2022 dashboard dive.

One genre of Tumblr post that is always a hit is the type of post that makes you think, “man, I’ve been on this website a while.” At the beginning of 2022, @andthentheywilleatthestars wanted to set the record straight regarding what being on Tumblr was like in 2014: 

overanalyzing Captain America: The Winter Soldier and that one website that let you play Cards Against Humanity online. And it slapped.

For all of those who remember those good old days, @voidandradiance kicked off a 100k+ notes reblog chain with an anecdote about how they were recognized as a Tumblr user by their vocabulary alone: getting asked, “were you on tumblr in 2014?“ is surely enough to strike a simultaneous mix of pride and fear into one’s heart, as you experience the mortifying ordeal of being known. And in October, the dashboard celebrated a decade of blogging on the tenth anniversary @apjvff’s iconic post: “In 10 years this will all be a memory.” And yet, we’re still here!

Another iconic post that draws attention to the many magical powers and phenomena of the dashboard is @ponyoisms’s observation that “one hyperfixated tumblr mutual has the power of six hundred thousand ad campaigns.” On Tumblr, earnestness and irony live in sometimes not-so-peaceful coexistence, and nothing is more demonstrative of that than a screenshot to two posts by @baphonnicula​ that came up one after the other on their dashboard: one a heartfelt love letter to Tumblr, the other simply reading “suckingham phallus.” Beautiful, beautiful [sheds a single proud tear].

Fandoms of Yore 

If there’s one thing you can always find on Tumblr, it’s a love of old things. This year, the outrageous success of Dracula Daily drew Tumblr’s attention again to the archaic: classic literature, archaeology, mythology, Medieval poetry, Renaissance art, and more. Basically, it’s the most concentrated collection of history nerds this side of dark academia, and we’re obsessed—so let’s take a look at some Fandoms of Yore. 

Tumblr’s most ancient fave is probably Ötzi the Iceman, who lived nearly five thousand years ago in the Swiss Alps. @dyatlovpassingprivilege​ brought Ötzi’s era to life with some highly evocative ‘Ötzi posting:’ “more venison and wheat? good morning followers” is definitely the sort of thing Ötzi would have said. 

Tumblr’s next oldest obsession after Ötzi is Ea-Nasir, the Sumerian copper merchant from the 1700s BCE, whom Tumblr absolutely loves to hate. So much so that @oylmpians​ warned their followers to check their Halloween candy in case they find some of Ea-Nasir’s inferior quality copper inside their KitKats.

It would be an understatement to say that Tumblr loves its classic lit. @cishetgreg came in hot with the following scenario: 

(trying to get notes on tumblr in 2022) Franz Kafka isn’t even a writer to me he’s like um a girl mutual who brushes my hair.

And, true to form, got nearly 30,000 notes out of it. Because, of course, Tumblr loves the inventive, depressive, highly relatable Kafka: This year, like every year on July 1, the dashboard celebrated that day when he was simply “too tired.” 

Not just authors but classic books and characters are beloved on Tumblr, too. With regards to Tumblr’s favorite pastime, @brownsugarteathoughts pointed out that shipping characters from classic literature just hits different. 

You can find many excellent posts in the #frankenstein tag, such as these custom booty shorts for you and your creature from none other than @victorfrankensteinsuggestions. In the #dracula tag meanwhile (the 2nd most popular book tag in 2022, second only to Percy Jackson), you will encounter the genius of Dracula Daily readers like @citizen-zero, who pointed out that:

the funniest possible modern textual adaptation of Dracula would be Jonathan as a part time recipe blogger and you have to scroll through 10 paragraphs of the most harrowing thing you’ve ever read in your life just to get the recipe for paprika hendl.

And, of course, Tumblr has been home to the Shakespeare fandom for as long as anyone can remember: @benvoolioo even wrote Horatio’s assignment extension request. 

saying words about a media and deeply analyzing a text in a way that often finds more meaning than its creators intended (this time with the benefit of no one being able to fucking contradict you, because you can literally say whatever you want and there’s nothing to undermine you)

communally going wild about the most random and obscure things that the entire rest of the internet could not care less about (e.g. dashboard crabs, a classic novel from 120+ years ago, the fucking annual celebration of the ides of march, etc)

But fandom thrives on community. That connection may be centered around The Story, but the connection happens through discussion and art and new stories.

Amazon has lost its bet that we will all volunteer to install hidden microphones in every room of our house so that the company can mine our every thought for actionable market intelligence. Alexa has lost billions and Amazon is reducing its team to a skeleton crew.

Softbank, the investment fund that funneled tens of billions in Saudi royal oil money into bets on monopolies like Uber and WeWork is now broke, and its founder, Masayoshi Son, is in disgrace and billions of dollars in debt.