La capacité d'être

c’ e s t  t o u t

Kate Moss by Eamonn J McCabe, 1992

and i think that part of it is because tumblr managed to really remain as close to outside of “real life” as possible. your parents aren’t on here. the people you see in real life aren’t on here. it was truly a space that was able to exist for you.

the people you followed and who followed you did so not because they felt some personal obligation (in the way facebook and twitter can feel), but because they liked what was being posted. they liked you being you, or at least being your tumblr persona.

and, perhaps more importantly, we all existed as a username. what appears next to your posts was nothing more than an avatar and that. real names were not only not required, but also discouraged, because you wouldn’t see them.

tumblr was (and is, at least for now) very much a part of the Old Internet, the internet of the early 2000s, where you had a space to be weird and experiment and play around however you want. the internet that was really exemplified by geocities, a free-for-all smorgasbord of things that each publisher found interesting and felt like sharing.

i think it’s fair to compare the change of the internet to gentrification. we very much started with this wild west, no-mans-land that was inhabited by outcasts and artists who went by pseudonyms. as time went on that became less and less the case. now almost every site has a real name policy, and literally everyone is on the internet. 

tumblr managed to stay weird until recently. tumblr managed to keep the oddballs hidden, to let people inhabit whatever persona they wanted, and to create and discard them as they pleased. and that’s something very special. something that “normal” society doesn’t have.

if you go on twitter, you’re expected to go as yourself, and while you can create numerous profiles, changing between them is difficult, and twitter will do its damndest to make sure you find people you know in real life. same with instagram. facebook is even more “real life”. and there’s a consequence to that. all the baggage that exists in real life exists with those sites.

on twitter the most popular posts are by celebrities, by names you’ve heard of in passing. on tumblr the most popular post is literally some shitpost by a random user.

facebook, and all the other “real name” people, talk about how that keeps people authentic, how it makes people act better, how it’s a “meritocracy”. they all exist in an ignorant privileged white boy bubble. without a real identity attached to an idea you don’t know what the person behind it looks like, you don’t know the life they live, and because of that your unconscious biases can’t come in to play (okay yes they can because we have biases around word usage, but less so than around skin color). the real “meritocracy” is the one where everyone is at a level playing field. and that was, to an extent, the old web (ignoring access to resources and limited internet access for a second if you will).

kicking off nsfw content and “female presenting nipples” is just another step of that old web disappearing, and the gates of capitalist, oppressive society going up again. and that’s what’s sad.