Tumblr was unveiled to the internet by David Karp, back in February 2007. Designed as a cross between the two most popular types of user-generated website — microblogs (like LiveJournal) and social media (like MySpace) — it offered a unique UX in the form of ‘reblogging’: resharing content posted by other users by a simple button click, allowing posts to garner thousands of shares whilst keeping the original poster’s credit intact. This meant posters with good original content could amass enormous followings and, as the site exploded, posters who acted as virtual content curators could too. This turned out to be a very popular model — especially to young people, unsurprisingly.
Like everything humans touch, there was a dark side to Tumblr. Many of its users had originally been members of LiveJournal until it was taken over by the Russian government and LGBTQ discussion was banned, causing a mass exodus to the relaxed policies of Tumblr. However, this hallowed freedom of expression came with a price: much of the content on the site was of an adult nature, despite approximately 20% of its user base being under-18, and this unfortunately included illegal CSA material. As the years went by, Tumblr repeatedly came under the spotlight for exposing teenagers to pornography and content that glorified violent sex, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, and suicide — even when they hadn’t looked for it. In February 2012, after Tumblr was mentioned in the suicide of British teenager Tallulah Wilson, search barriers (little pop-ups triggered by searching keywords or phrases, providing relevant helpline numbers to the user) were implemented. But it was the platform’s failure to tackle the rapidly-growing paedophile problem that finally saw Tumblr being unlisted from the Apple Store. So, in November 2018, they enacted a sitewide ban on explicit material. As around a quarter of Tumblr’s user base were there to view this type of content, it represented the death knell for the once-popular site.
Tumblr’s social environment, however, has permanently changed the real world — and I know because I saw it happen. I opened my first Tumblr account sometime in 2009, when I was 16/17 years old. Although it didn’t peak until 2013/2014, there was already a strong community, with all the familiar features of its predecessors: secluded subcultures dedicated to ‘pro-ana/mia’; cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol; self-harm and suicide; violent sex and porn; or some combination of these. All of this interacted with standard mainstream interests like fashion and beauty, academic pursuits like history or English, music, books, and films, creative endeavours like playing an instrument or art, and the ubiquitous daydreams about what adult life would be like. What linked the surface to its murky depths was often tales of alienation, isolation, disenfranchisement, or abuse; many were seeking refuge in the digital world because they felt the real one was harming or hurting them. These individuals — unfortunately and unintentionally — became a gateway for their daily struggles to seep in and poison the well. I, sadly, was one of them.
I started my internet life on Xanga as an unhappy and unstable 11-year-old. I was going through all the usual difficulties of blended families, had already been being bullied at school for a number of years, and was struggling with the beginnings of (what was eventually diagnosed as) bipolar disorder. Finding a community online felt like a welcome balm, and the fact we were united in our quest to “starve ourselves to perfection” didn’t matter one bit. Finally I had found people who felt and acted in the same ways I did, and it made me feel good to be normal in their midst. Of course, the more normal I became in this maladjusted world, the less so I was in real life. By 14 I was completely out-of-control in every way imaginable. I am grateful, in some sense, that the social media boom peaked a year or two later — without it, I may not have given myself the chance to start seeking help. Joining Tumblr felt in some weird way like, on my journey to the light at the end of the tunnel, I had turned to watch everyone behind me still fighting through. By then the images of pretty but skeletal and scar-riddled girls didn’t affect me the way they once had, but the thousands of self-loathing notes suggested others were still deep in that tunnel.
All of this created a new type of social environment — one where the superficial was inextricable from what lay beneath; a post about loving haute couture or going to see a band followed by a post about a self-harm cut that had gone too deep or the inevitable failure of a week-long fast. Suddenly ‘private’ or ‘hidden’ became a toxic concept associated with a world that sought to damage instead of heal, that was more concerned with saving pleasant appearance than addressing unpleasant reality. Harmful behaviours began to congregate around particular aesthetic choices: glimmers of ‘Letters from Ana’ surfacing in their adherence to the ‘purity’ of light colours and soft materials, natural symbolism of lambs and kittens, and alignment with the hallmarks of childhood in soft toys and ankle socks; cues taken from Marilyn Manson and those of his ilk in uniting substance abuse and thoughts of suicide with dark colours and bizarre elements, like his infamous white eye contact, platform boots, nods to fetish culture, and extreme makeup.
Of course, aesthetic subcultures are far from new these days. As ‘teenage’ became recognised as a unique phase of life post-WWII, creative industries sought a symbiotic relationship with this new social group. It was at once intensely influential and strongly influenced, a constant source of inspiration and an endless supply of audience, a representation of the past and a manifestation of the future, simultaneously innovative yet predictable. Their lack of stable identity made them better targets for marketing than adults, as their desire to attain one made them better targets than children. Teenagers were (and are), in essence, a consumer wet dream. Without them and their need for external validation of their ‘identity’ many industries would simply collapse — and this becomes more true with every passing decade, as the market expands based on how infinite this resource seems to be. What made Tumblr’s interpretation of aesthetic subcultures unique is that it sought to undo the mantra of every preceding decade: that appearance in fact did reliably predict personality, and that aesthetics were actually an extension of who people were as individuals. This meant that your outfit was just as important as your career, and both should be weighted accordingly.
Some of the outcomes of this are, by now, familiar. Anyone active on Instagram or Twitter will have seen memes circling phrases like ‘if you dress like this you’re now bi’ or ‘if you sit like this you’re now gay’ or ‘if you enjoyed this character you’re now trans’ or ‘growing up black/Asian’ or ‘growing up poor’ — but many don’t know where this practice of extensive and rigid characterisation originated from, or why. Tumblr hosted a lot of people of a ‘marginalised identity’ purely because they didn’t feel welcome in their real lives, and the outcome was that these people created virtual communities of their own; ones with all the same idiosyncracies as any other, but that included them by excluding those who had excluded them. I personally never felt excluded due to my ethnicity growing up and, despite being the victim of persistant homophobic bullying, never felt necessarily alienated by it either (thanks, accepting parents). My ‘marginalised identity’ was being mentally ill and all the ways I expressed that, and so that’s the community I found on Tumblr. It has taken me a very long time to shake the mindset that I am irrevocably different from everyone else, but it’s a totally necessary process in allowing yourself to grow up. I don’t need to protect my ‘identity’ anymore, because — like most adults — I now have more important things to consider.
This knowledge of the dark corners of internet history is why the current practice of enshrining this way of thinking into every institution is making me feel frightened for the future. It was on Tumblr, amongst the disenfranchised teens, where an ideological consensus on straight/white/abled/male people was reached: they were the locus of the oppressor cross-section, and so they must be vanquished. In order to facilitate this multi-group movement, certain groups had to acquiesce to others: white people must accept the racism black and Asian groups told them they performed; straight people the homophobia, etc. Any perceived rejection was characterised as further oppression of a ‘marginalised identity’ and the individual in question would be bombarded with hate and/or corrective inbox messages — now known as ‘being cancelled’. Memes imparting negative associations of straight white abled men began to circulate, ingraining the demonisation of this ‘identity’ into the mainstream culture of the site. You were only part of the community if you adhered to this belief system, and many willingly did so.
Eventually these negative associations and successful implementation of struggle sessions became regarded as ‘our truth’; the community had crowd-sourced bad experiences and desired consequences, written it as fact, circulated the propaganda, and now it was part of the lore. Enshrined as Tumblr conflict theory, all of this was just as real as the racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist attitudes the users had experienced in the real world. In this way it was a blueprint manifestation of every civil rights movement that had come before it — the difference was that Tumblr’s user base of people who grew up ‘outside the box’ no longer desired its destruction, but to create a new one, excluding completely innocent people that never did anything to them based on nothing but ‘identity’. The abused becomes the abuser in action, and society seems to think this is a positive development; suddenly the mystery of how so many societies have done this in the past is solved. If those who to allege to be persecuted are loud enough, the persecutors will be punished, whether the evidence is justified or not.
To place this meandering explanation into context, I’ll share my first experience of Tumblr happening to me outside of Tumblr. It was 2015, and a mixed-black girl I somewhat knew had shared a post on Facebook about Miley Cyrus wearing dreadlocks to the VMAs. ‘Cultural appropriation’ is a theory that was widely circulated on Tumblr, due to its rigid assignment of phenotypal features, cultural traditions, and aesthetic choices by ethnicity (race + heritage). She had stated her position that Miley, a white American woman, wearing dreadlocks and receiving praise for it was racist because she, as a mixed-black British woman, had experienced racist abuse regarding her Afro hair. I commented that I had worn (a poor imitation of) dreadlocks at school and had been badly bullied for it — and was called racist for ‘trying to obscure a black woman talking about racism’. The core reason that the accusation of racism could originally be made against Miley was that racism itself had assigned dreadlocks as not being a ‘white’ hairstyle. The fact that white groups had historically worn dreadlocks, or that white people received negative feedback for wearing them from other white people, didn’t matter — it only mattered because White criticised Black for X, and that meant that X was now only for Black. Any attempt of White to partake in X was, consequently, appropriation of Black. Does this sound familiar?
I deleted my Tumblr account in 2012. On occasion nostalgia has drawn me back, but all too soon the tides bring toxic discourse and damaged teens to the shore. It’s a raw subject for me as an adult — I don’t think you ever fully forget the pain of a troubled childhood — and it’s certainly not something I enjoy remembering while casually browsing social media. Eventually all that will be left on the site is what was there at the start: the damaged, the disenfranchised, the alienated and alone. The ‘marginalised identities’ this time round, I imagine, will be very different.
