Do You Remember EARLY 2010s TUMBLR???

the wild fucking west

hey everyone! as you may know, i recently went through a natural disaster down here in Texas and am still feeling the effects. we still don’t have hot water in our apartment building, for example. also, as a result of a urologist appointment, i recently was told i’m demonstrating symptoms of diabetes so i had to make a doctor’s appointment to follow up on that as well. it’s all really stressful! but i still feel really bad for not being able to write anything all february and so will be doing my best to update regularly through march. even if the entries aren’t super-long, i will definitely try to make them as substantial as possible. if you like my writing, feel free to support me on my Patreon, or if you’d rather make a one-time contribution, hit up my Venmo at xyoudontneedmapsx. thank you in advance, and i hope you enjoy!

When you think of Tumblr, what comes to mind? La Dispute lyrics written in brainflower typeface superimposed over black-and-white pictures of a forest? Fifteen-year-olds ill-advisedly eating their mom’s jewelry because they are dragonkin? Blogs devoted to crushing on the Columbine shooters? Screenshots of Special Agent Dale Cooper smiling and talking about a “damn fine cup of coffee”? Your high school girlfriend posting Frankie Cosmos ripoff songs she recorded in the bathroom? Porn? All of the above? None of the above?

Tumblr still exists, but it really does not anymore, not in the way that it did at the height of its powers— which I would say coincided roughly with the years 2010 to 2015. As I’m sure you know if you’re reading this, Tumblr is a microblogging (whatever the fuck that means) social media platform that served as a logical follow-up to MySpace in that it was a hub of alternative youth culture. It was often best understood at the time as a contrast to Reddit— where Reddit is/was populated mostly by white dudes in their early twenties who leaned libertarian and STEM, Tumblr’s demographics leaned towards teenage girls with artsy sensibilities and radlib politics. There was kind of a culture war narrative between the two that began to reach fever pitch circa 2013 and exploded into semi-popular consciousness with GamerGate (something that, unfortunately, coincided with my freshman year of college and so is deeply burned into my brain), but no one really needs to rehash that and there are many places where you can relive that hot mess if you’re so inclined (including Angela Nagle’s semi-reactionary cash-in book, Kill All Normies, which, while leaning way too hard into class-reductionist narratives, isn’t a bad overview of the actual history).

However, the popular-internet-consciousness perception of Tumblr doesn’t really tell the whole story. What made Tumblr such a bizarrely compelling place during my high school years isn’t that it was the “New MySpace,” it was that it was the new LiveJournal. In other words, it was a place where all sorts of bizarre, feedback-loop-laden niche subcultures flourished and interacted, a place where, even if the amount of other people who were into the same shit as you was vanishingly small, you could find your people (and play a game of gawk-at-the-freaks, if that was your prerogative). True, there were obscure niche communities on Reddit as well, but the subreddit system often closed those off from the rest of the site’s universe at large, whereas Tumblr’s reblog mechanic allowed for far wider proliferation of weird shit (or at least gave the impression that more people were interested in/aware of the weird shit than they actually were).

For our purposes, I would say that there were really three main (and semi-overlapping) areas where Tumblr was extremely important: Music, “Politics”, and Edgelord Shit. There is a fourth area, Aesthetics, but the thing about that is that it went part and parcel with the other three— less of a category unto itself and more of a shifting series of styles that dictated where in the Tumblrverse you were.

MUSIC

I’ll start with the area that I’d assume most people reading this are most familiar with, the music of the early 2010s Tumblr era. Lending credence to the “New MySpace” theory, there was a ton of third-wave scenecore that had a deep foothold in Tumblr culture— Of Mice & Men, The Word Alive, etc etc etc. This also had a tendency to crossover with the “Emo Trinity” side of Tumblr (the basic bitch MCR/Panic!/FOB fandom) and was home to a lot of slashfic about pop-punk-with-breakdowns-but-in-a-bad-way band members. In retrospect, not super interesting!

Screamo and twinkly emo experienced a relative heyday in popularity around this time, although it was fairly muted in comparison to literally almost every other style of music that was popular on the platform. For example, Tumblr is where I first heard of bands like Dads, the Hotelier (back when they were the Hotel Year), and The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die— in large part because, especially in the case of the latter, the band members had a playfully antagonistic relationship with their audience in a way that fostered camaraderie and intimate communication. As time wore on, pop-punk bands like The Story So Far also leaned into this dynamic (I am 99% positive that it was the bassist, Kelen, who was constantly lobbing witty comebacks at the band’s followers). The Wave— which Brooklyn Vegan recently wrote about in depth— also began to make its mark around this time, as did hardcore bands like Harms Way, Foundation, and (deep breath) Expire.

But it would be a big mistake to only talk about the guitar-centric music that made an impact during Tumblr’s heyday. When I think of my early high school experience with Tumblr, one group stands tall above all others— Odd Future. They were fucking masters of Tumblr marketing. Their hyper-edgy aesthetic was custom made for reblogs, as were gifs of Tyler the Creator throwing up and hanging himself in the “Yonkers” video. Tyler of course would later go on to make a name for himself as an absolute Twitter god (shout out to those who remember the @fucktyler days) but Tumblr and Formspring were where they initially made their bones. There was also a burgeoning Tumblr-centric witch house scene, which was arguably kicked off by Salem, and would then be a fundamental influence on the SoundCloud/early emo rap stuff (the bridge here would be Bones/surrenderdorothy, of course). The modern equivalent of this kind of stuff would be that kid Sematary. (That kid is a genuine nerd but he makes great music— he’s been described as a horrorcore version of Chief Keef with black metal samples, and I don’t know about you, but that description got me all in a tizzy.)

Thinking back on it, the sheer breadth of music that I associate with the Tumblr era is shockingly vast and diverse, and yet so much of the content is predicated on teenage angst. Lest anyone forget that Tumblr is also where bedroom pop really began to be codified as a phenomenon; someone that I will be mentioning in a later section (you’ll know it when you see it) began their career as, basically, the exploitation-film version of the sad-acoustic-song-recorded-in-the-bathroom subset.

But while I discovered a metric fuckton of music that I still hold dear to this day on Tumblr, in retrospect, it almost feels like the least essential part of the Tumblr experience. I realize that that’s actually a fairly incorrect impression to have— in all honesty, all this music was like a constant soundtrack to the act of mindlessly scrolling through pictures of rivers and shitty poems about fake problems, and inexplicably formed a major part of my subconscious associations with the Tumblrsphere— but when I think about the other two facets I’m going to cover, it becomes clear how much music was kind of an accent on the rest of Tumblr culture.

“POLITICS”

I have the scare-quotes there because there were (and, to be honest, are) even less people than you’d expect on Tumblr with anything close to coherent political worldviews. People talk shit about Twitter and TikTok for being hotbeds of upper-class white girls paying lip service to communist ideology while perpetuating mind-numbing liberal fallacies, but all that started with Tumblr, and to be honest, I highly doubt that Twitter and TikTok could ever reach the heights of absurdity that Tumblr subcultures actively encouraged.

If there is one thing you do have to give Tumblr credit for, it’s being ahead of the curve on acceptance of trans people and fervent discussion of trans issues, but only insofar as they made it part of the conversation. The conversation itself? Well… that left so much to be desired that it ultimately might have done more harm than good. The culture of shrieking outrage that so much of Reddit and “rational skeptic” YouTube derided as the ramblings of “SJW Tumblristas” was, admittedly, not inaccurate, for at least a couple years; it managed to turn being open-minded into a sort of reactionary orthodoxy in and of itself. That’s not even to mention the (still-heavily-active) TERF contingent of Tumblr, which was a blight upon pages that were otherwise completely normal-looking. I explicitly identify as a Marxist, but it took me a while to get there simply because of the sheer glut of Tumblr kids who identified as “Marxist-Leninist” in the most inchoate way and slid down dark, dark pipelines into discourse that wasn’t just transphobic, it was outright hateful and terrifying.

There were only so many conversations people could have about privilege and identity before the entire purpose of identity politics— which was always meant to function part and parcel with class critique, shout-out Kimberlé Crenshaw— was pushed to the wayside so that otherwise well-off kids could make themselves out to be a victim. Combined with Tumblr’s well-documented history of romanticization of mental illness (romanticization might actually be an understatement— mental illness and poor coping mechanisms were flat-out encouraged, and seeking professional help was actively discouraged and even mocked) this led to a shit-stew of infighting, power-grabbing (what the kids today would refer to as “clout-chasing”), and complete mean-spiritedness. In other words, a good chunk— maybe even the majority— of Tumblr “political discourse” seemed like a CIA psyop, which should sound familiar to anyone who’s ever spent a few hours reading through a Twitter thread about how telling people to read theory is problematic.

Which reminds me, oh, man, the word “problematic.” That fucking word, nowadays, will get you laughed out of any academic discussion or systemic critique of oppression, for good reason. There’s a reason that CHUDs and right-wing losers could so effectively use that word to mock shitlib Tumblr kids during GamerGate (remember the word “shitlord,” too?), and it’s because it was used in the most hollow, pejorative, and flaccid variety of ways. I’ve had to make promises to myself to never, ever use that word again, because it is so goddamn terrible.

This isn’t even getting into all the ways that people would completely mishandle “progressive” attitudes on Tumblr: how slashfic would become an excuse for rich straight white girls to fetishize gay men and gay culture; how people of color were used as tokens and gotcha cards (and how widespread racefaking became as a result); the use of the word “ableism” as a get-out-of-jail-free card for pretty much any horrible behavior; how fat acceptance became an excuse to hurl invective at anyone trying to improve their health and body image; how asexuality was co-opted during the great Ace Discourse Wars in order to (quite ironically) sexualize literal children and groom them to participate in greatly power-imbalanced and deeply codependent and disgusting relationships with adults; and, just to put a finer point on it, the complete erasure of class to the point where I don’t think “solidarity” was even a blip on Tumblr users’ radars.

But while all of this was messy and counterproductive, it paled in comparison to the third big aspect of Tumblr culture, which, in a way, was a dark reflection of radlib “SJW” politics, even while many of the people who would have been called SJWs also participated in it.

EDGELORD SHIT

CONTENT WARNING FOR LITERALLY EVERYTHING. LIKE, EVERYTHING.

Tumblr was full of porn, right? That’s why, when porn got banned, users began to leave in droves? Well, yes, but it’s slightly more complicated than that. For one thing, there was a quiet-but-thriving community of pedophiles on Tumblr, who groomed underage kids in DMs and spread not just loli art but straight-up child pornography with little-to-no backlash or attention from the authorities (contrast this with the way that the Something Awful forums— which, it should be noted, were fairly “problematic” in and of themselves— almost singlehandedly forced action to be taken against Reddit, /r/jailbait, and /u/violentacrez). But, while that was absolutely the worst and seediest element of Tumblr, it was far from being the sum of Tumblr’s most disgusting impulses.

One could easily scroll past a multitude of the less-objectionable subcultures of Tumblr— harmless fetish stuff, adult babies, insectkin, and even hyper-explicit furry art was pretty easy to bypass if you knew what tags to avoid. But when I say Tumblr has a dark side, I’m referring to some of the most uncomfortable subcultures I’ve come across in my personal history as an Internet user. Obviously, there was the Nazis. I’m pretty sure a lot of them are still there. Just like Reddit, 4chan, and Twitter, there was always going to be a community of racists on any social media outlet— they varied in size based on community moderation, but they were always active. However, like the aforementioned fetishists, Nazi stuff was easy to ignore, and to the credit of the young SJWs, while they may have been misguided in many respects, they were always eager to hammer down on Nazi scum.

Harder to ignore, though, was the gore. At the time, unless you were a major 4chan junkie (I was not), you had to go actively looking for gore on places like Reddit— even larger subs like /r/WTF and later on, /r/WatchPeopleDie (which was recently banned and has been supplanted by subs like /r/EyeBlech) were fairly separated from the default subs and the site at large. There was also Liveleak, a descendant of shock sites like Ogrish and Rotten, which was a one-stop shop for upsetting videos. But gore was shockingly commonplace on Tumblr; there were often blogs that uploaded stills from horror movies that would occasionally (sometimes accidentally) post real gore, but it wasn’t uncommon for it to randomly pop up on the feeds of otherwise completely innocuous blogs. Even if you were just browsing tags, gore wouldn’t be properly tagged (and people would request trigger warnings for the most random shit, but, somehow, rarely request such for gore) and would show up at completely random intervals.

Semi-related to gore was pictures and videos of people self-harming, which, again, was shockingly commonplace (and, as a corollary to the way that many communities on Tumblr actively fetishized mental illness, was almost a given on several corners of the site). Self-harm pics often came from accounts that were dedicated to things like eating disorders (Tumblr had and might still have an enormous pro-ana community) and drug blogs (there was, for a period of time, an unnervingly large community of blogs dedicated entirely to the blogger’s heroin addiction). If you managed to fall down this hole, Tumblr could end up feeling way, way scarier than a casual poke around the dark web ever could.

Remember that musician I didn’t name, back in the first section? That was Nicole Dollanganger, the stage name of a young singer-songwriter who has toured with Code Orange and collaborated with 100 Gecs. Though she was at one point semi-active in the Canadian hardcore scene, she first became notable on Tumblr due to blogging about her eating disorder and being a participant in the Columbiner scene (kids who were obsessed with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who would often write loving fanfic of them, gloss over their open relationship with white nationalism, post graphic and gory pictures of their suicide scene, and, in Dollanganger’s case, write songs about them). I say none of this to condemn Dollanganger, by the way, only to demonstrate how commonplace all of this stuff was— to the point where a kid who was hyper-invested in these weird Tumblr subcultures could rise to fame by writing semi-catchy songs about them.

CONCLUSIONS

I realize this probably says a lot more about me than it does about Tumblr as a platform that these three categories are the stuff I most remember from it (you’ll notice I didn’t even talk about Superwholock or fandom in general, because it’s something I loathe deep in my being and genuinely refuse to understand out of principle), but I really do think that, even if this wasn’t a universal Tumblr experience, it was a pretty widespread one. Point of fact: I actually had the thought to do this while I was brainstorming a piece on that Disturbing Movie Iceberg (which will probably come out next week, maybe followed by a piece on horror/horror-themed video games).

More than anything, I want to dispel any notions that I’m saying Tumblr was a terrible place. Tumblr was, ultimately, what you made of it— while much of this stuff was easily accessible and often came across my feed without me actually searching it out, I still had to scratch the surface and poke around a bit before it started to become a presence. Part of it is that I was a confused, mentally ill teenager with weird interests, and a site so specifically geared to curating microscopic niche interests would of course feed right back into that. I think what this says more than anything is that Internet culture in the early 2010s feels simultaneously so close and so far away— in a lot of ways, this stuff is repeating itself now, and yet there seems to be a cynicism inherent to it now that misses a lot of the naivete and innocence— or loss thereof— of how it felt to me back in the day. In any case, I hope you enjoyed this nostalgic little trip down memory lane. And if you liked it and would like to support me, please don’t forget to hit that subscribe button on my Patreon, or hit up my Venmo at xyoudontneedmapsx if you’d prefer to show your support with a one-time donation.

#sorry for the e-begging but i’ll never miss an opportunity to get my worth for my writing #also remember how people would put like half their actual thoughts into the tags of posts #it was really weird and annoying but sometimes i find myself getting nostalgic for it #also the style of extremely deadpan all-lowercase and completely non-punctuated internet writing definitely sprouted at least partially from this era #screamo #hardcore #emo #pop-punk

-xoxo, Ellie

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