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A lot of things went through my mind recently when Tumblr shut down pornography on their website and, as time went on, it all collided into one very sad conclusion. First of all, let’s be clear and give Tumblr actual credit, yes, Child Porn was on tumblr and hosting it there, even accidentally, should not be tolerated. Tumblr had been in the good fight by having a “report” button but the vast amount of posting and re-blogging created a monster of information that, apparently, saw the limits of oversight by either the authorities or Tumblr staff alike. So let’s give Tumblr some props and some benefit of the doubt that this nuclear option was meant for the best.

So then it appears that Tumblr did the right thing shuting down any and all porn on their site? Well here’s where it gets tricky, conflicted and, then down right subversive, because the devil is in the details. A few months ago, Apple took the Tumblr app off it’s official App Store, citing CP as the reason. So right away we know that Tumblr themselves were not the folks who instigated this pornagraphy D-Day. Tumblr knew they were dead in the water without Apple and, wha-lah, “everyone out of the pool”. BUT, here’s my concern; if CP is indeed the big concern for Apple then why won’t they go after, snapchat, 4chan, kik, reddit or even twitter? While formatted differently, those apps are often cited when ICE suddenly kick down doors and the argument that those sites purport to not tolerate such activities, is also a motto that Tumblr has used for years. So what makes Tumblr the big bad monster? It’s easy.

Tumblr became KNOW FOR PORN and as THE outlet for the cornucopia of user generated sexuality on the net.

Originally, Tumblr was a user owned and operated site. A simple site with options to post pics, write and reblog. It was a fantastic site for USER generated material like art, memes, videos, gifs, poetry, blogging and, yes, porn. Like anything on the internet, and because we have genitals, PORN FINDS A WAY! It soon became more and it’s popularity grew to the point that the kid who invented tumblr was bought out by a giant corporation for ridiculous dollars. I remember the purchase by the, desperate to stay relevant, Yahoo and the usual lie that “nothing would change” and users should only “expect it to get better!” …it’s sad to see when people actually believe corp statements and sheer propaganda like that but that’s unpacking another gigantic dismal layer of society that I don’t need to go down today.

As we should know by living on earth, is that all things change, ESPECIALLY when it comes to business. Now interspersed with meme, fashion, gif and bbc reblogging we now get adds for Marriott, Geico and Bluetooth speakers but since we are so conditioned to see, hear and swallow advertising, it’s something we put up with. But again, when business becomes the driving force over user content we soon see the viral videos companies would rather you see. Remember instagram re-ordering your timeline?

Now is probably a good time to talk about tumblr porn itself. First the porn was just your a-typical porn star shit. Your Jenna Jameson, Sasha Grey and gallons of gay porn you’d find in any grubby porn shop from sea to shining sea. Soon, however, things became tailored. Bondage, foot fetish, blonde, black, big, little, cartoon, teen, leather, cake farts, wet, greasy, rubber, pee, daddy, mommy, blah, blah blah, blah… As the saying goes; if it exists there is porn of it! You may find most porn repulsive but judging from uncountable amount of folks re-blogging the now infamous 2 GIRLS, 1 CUP, well, you may actually be in the minority …at least online.

Then the amateur stuff happened. Dare I say it but, prior to tumblr, porn was mainstream. Big busty blondes with John Holmes dicks and the cum shot finales. The usual, Pepsi flavored porn for all. McDonalds style marketing: Hungry? Have a burger. Wanna Salad? Have a burger. Don’t eat meat? Have a burger. Soon amateurs got in the game and provided something that was lacking in porn for decades. Variety! Big, little, skinny, tall, short, curvy, hairy, thin, tough, soft. Any which was a person was made, or wanted to present themselves!, they found a fan. Often more than one fan. …Many fans. …Many, many, many fans! Then we factor in gender. Gay, Bi, Trans. Their porn too found people who appreciated them for who they were. People also bonded over their particular interests too. Leather, cartoon porn, sissy, incest fantasy became more than wack material it became conversations and thus kink communities.

Imagine how a man who wears panties feels knowing he’s not alone. A woman who wants to peg men feels that she’s not alone. Or a person desiring to be another gender, is not alone. These are often difficult conversations to instigate on twitter or reddit. People rather look at the same picture of a common kink and say; “I like that too”. Yes, Tumblr was a swamp of regurgitated spam and porn bots which filled tumblr to the brim with useless crap but, let’s be honest, so is the entire internet! But with some knowledge of getting around a person could uncover an interest and soon find folks who shared their enthusiasm.

Plus isn’t the hunt to uncover something, the very thing that makes that discovery unique and unpolluted from becoming a commodity?

Does everything in life need to marketed and sold to be valid in society?

Those are some questions, I really believe you need to ask yourself …everyday. They are also questions that tumblr founder, David Karp, turned his back on when he took money and allowed his site to become a vessel for advertising. Tumblr, like the internet, became prolific not because humans longed to see the next Expedia ad, but because it was human generated stuff. I like anal, you like anal, WE like anal!!! Just like anything else in life, sports, music, food, movies, booze, clothes, personalities, humor, passion …whatever. It’s these things that help us relate, connect, fuck, have families and make up society.

I often say, we don’t live in a democracy or even a republic, we live in Capitalism. Every day, we are thrust into a world that demands you participate in the buying and selling of goods and services in order to stay alive. Dropping out means, you’re either joining a religious cult or becoming homeless but even there you’re relying on something in the world to feed and provide you with a place to shit. A smidgen of society are employed to help the homeless as opposed to the wide swaths of the population employed to make money and sell stuff. Everything is a commodity in our world, including cyberspace. The internet, the use of zeros and ones invented to share information was soon transformed into start-ups and the Tech market. But how do you sell Disney movies on the same platform as Watersports? And therein lies the downfall of any and all sexuality online.

Last year, SESTA was passed. What was sold to the public as stopping sex trafficking, in reality is a tool and excuse by companies to shut down their horny users in the name of “the children” Soon, Craigslist shut down there personal ads and now Tumblr removes porn. There will be more. Sites will try to continue to formulate the way users generate content. Instagram reorders posts, Youtube creators no longer receive a fraction of add money, Vine is gone and more will follow. If the economy doesn’t find user generated material valuable you are disenfranchised into oblivion no matter how popular your naked selfies are. And here, is the most disturbing element, Tumblr is a drop in the bucket. Regardless of the good, bad and ugly it perpetuated, at the end of the day, it is indicative of what Capitalism wants the internet to be, not user generated self expression leading to communities and healthy societies, but just one gigantic mall.

282. Thoughts about censorship on Tumblr

A lot has been said about the recent decision of TUMBLR to ban “adult content”. However what has been said was not always very intelligent. I have mostly seen people crying or manifesting angriness without any reflection… I think that the issue has to be considered in a calm and pragmatic way.

First of all let’s say that there was REALLY a porn issue with TUMBLR, as a huge and steadily increasing amount of horrible crap was published on this platform — but that’s because there was no control AT ALL on “adult content” for a very long period of time.

One of the reason of the drastic measure of censorship taken on December 17th, 2018 would have been the presence of ONE post with genuinely illegal perverse content, that caused TUMBLR to be banned from some interplatform networks. Reviewing posts one by one would have been very expensive. So, apparently, TUMBLR opted for the easiest (cheapest) solution: to remove ALL nude content in using robotic image filtering.

The first consequence was the removal of MOST “adult content”. However a non-negligeable amount of extreme stuffs were NOT filtered off because robots are only robots (non-conscious algorithms) and there is no such a thing as artificial intelligence. So they did not solve “their problem”. The second consequence was the removal of most soft erotic pictures, artistic nude, classical paintings and Hellenistic sculptures. I have one post banned because it showed an ancient Greek sculpture as model. In that case I wanted to use a classical sculpture as model, precisely because I did not want to use a nude photograph!!! I have asked TUMBLR to deflag it. Maybe they will do so as they did once in the past when they used “mild censorship” and mistakenly (robotically) flagged a post of mine as graphically sensitive. However this can take time as they probably received thousands of complaints all at once. We’ll see…

Whatever… Never in history, we have seen so strict censorship concerning nude representation. Censoring Michelangelo or Praxiteles to seek forgiveness for previous laxism is laughable, ridiculous and pathetic.

On the other hand, TUMBLR applies double standards because it is only the GRAPHICAL representation of “adult nature”, that is banned — some quite ambiguous stuffs are explicitely allowed if they have no explicit iconographic support. So what?

It has to be noted that other mega-blog-platforms use a much more common sense approach for “adult content”. For example, Deviantart allows artistic nude and soft eroticism as long as they are flagged as such. They put a simple adult filter on it, allowing access to such posts to people external to Deviantart, if the general adult filter of the computer is off. This is not perfect (a bit too restrictive), but at least this is reasonable. TUMBLR could have used such a system. It did not.

I have another concern — of a completely different nature. This wave of censorship might be a first step in a gradual process of censorship of everything (not only adult content), Everything that is not following the “globalist neoliberal-democratic humanist philosophy” would gradually be banned. The extremists first, then the non-violent but firm “wrong thinkers”, and finally almost every non-conformists, except people with a ‘care bear’ attitude making lacrymal protests — i.e. useful idiots. And even if it does not go that far, platforms like Tumblr are more and more ruling by fear, compelling bloggers to autocensorship.

There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:

1. Social media platform becomes popular

2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base

3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.

4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users

5. This does not, in fact, occur

6. Social media platform crashes and burns

The oligarchs not only know of the disasters that like ahead, they were orchaestrated from the start to uphold a status quo that has started to lose momentum, and needs new blood to be spilled in order to re-envigor their profits.