The tragic demise of Tumblr

I’m actually quite happy to be a millennial guy instead of a zoomer and one of the reasons for that is Tumblr. Sadly, Tumblr as a community is now dead, just like Myspace. I don’t miss Myspace because I’m too young for that, but I do miss Tumblr. My own humble little brain’s cognitive capacity peaked during the glory days of Tumblr, it’s been downhill ever since.

Tumblr was an echo box, where all of the Western world’s insane young women gathered. Whenever such a thing happens to society it’s a sight to behold, because it’s fun at first and then it rapidly deteriorates. The idea with Tumblr is that it’s an image blog where you can easily just reblog other people’s images. As a consequence, every Tumblr account ends up generating a particular aesthetic: It allows you a direct look into a young woman’s aesthetic sensibilities. If you’re writing down your grand political vision or philosophical musings on Tumblr, you’re doing it wrong.

As I mentioned before, it’s not the normies who used Tumblr, it’s the misfits. You’ll find the greatest insanity on Tumblr. You would find the casual boring insanity, like young women who inject testosterone because they think they’re not actually women only to figure out it’s retarded a few months later and end up left with a manly voice forever, but you would also find the more charming forms of insanity: Girls who fetishize school shooters, girls who think they’re witches, girls who post selfies at graveyards in the middle of the night, girls who grow hembane and datura and make ointments out of them, girls who practice astrology and geomancy andsoforth.

And few people realize this, but it wasn’t really woke yet. Sure, you had to avoid offending them by pretending that it’s perfectly normal for a girl to amputate her breasts and inject testosterone in response to getting raped rather than seeking therapy, but you could tell there were plenty of self-aware right wing girls out there who simply kept quiet. Most of the time, the pictures said enough. Right wing people are used to being hated in the modern world, so they tend to develop an occult language for all practical purposes, particularly the girls.

The other thing you would notice is that a lot of these girls would just pretend to be politically correct to fit in and they were looking for a guy who will simply state to them in private how the world actually works. I think most guys are familiar with this experience: Your girl will pretend to be woke enough to be ignored to the outside world, but she gets upset when you say anything to her that is suggestive of sympathy towards the modern denial of human nature.

But most of the time, the pictures told the story. Cottagecore? Yeah that was the kind of girl who wanted to retreat to the countryside, have a small farm and raise as many children as providence has ordained for her and her husband. These were not the kind of girls who dreamed of twerking in the background of a 6ix9ine video and she probably hasn’t heard a Beyonce song in years. Or what of these girls who fetishized white trash Americana aesthetic and Southern Gothic? Sorry honey, you can go on and pretend to be woke, but it’s pretty clear that your soul doesn’t want to go along. You’ll be voting Republican before you’re forty.

The only real problem of course, is that these girls were generally spoiled and entitled. The Internet echobox of crazy young women didn’t really help much in this matter. Tumblr attracted borderlines like syrup attracts ants and so the “if you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best” attitude became normalized. If you wanted to date one of them, you were signing up for a lot of pain and suffering and you had to be a bit of a masochist to make it somewhat work.

If you really want to know what I am, the closest I can come to explaining it is that I’m that feeling you have near the end of summer in the late afternoon, when you yearn for fall and Halloween but realize that this is the first cloudy day during which you genuinely feel happy outside and you’re walking in heavy rain in soggy clothing through an old graveyard, all by yourself without encountering anyone. I can write down endless screeds and grand political visions and philosophical contemplations about what I currently imagine I believe, but if you want to know what I am, then this is what it is. And how did I learn that? From a woman with a Tumblr account.

Tumblr is now dead and the genius who launched it was smart enough to cash out at the right time, but the impact it has had on modern alt aesthetics continues to reverberate through society. The best example is probably Grimes, but the de facto queen of Tumblr was either Wylona Hayashi or Nicole Dollanganger. This video deserves a honorable mention:

I’m sorry for young guys, because you’re probably just not going to have the opportunity to directly stare into a girl’s soul, the way Tumblr allowed us to do that. Tumblr is dead and the women who used it miraculously managed to get their shit together and stopped being chronically online, committed suicide or fled elsewhere. You’re going to have to swipe on some App and then three months later you’ll admit to yourself that she doesn’t have “it” and you’ll find out you have an exotic new STD.

How does she genuinely experience the world? Sorry, ten second tiktok video’s where she’s dancing doesn’t tell you jack shit, nor do bikini photos on some tropical island on Instagram or her favorite Facebook meme pages. You grew up with social media, so your attention span is even shorter than ours. When it’s your turn to reproduce, do your own sons a favor, by not giving phones to your girls until they reach puberty.