A few months ago, I got back on Tumblr.
Not for nostalgic purposes – but a utilitarian one. Its interface allows one to keep a digital scrapbook, uninhibited by a confinement to photo and video mediums like on Pinterest or Instagram. I also wanted to step away from platforms conducive to doom-scrolling and move toward ones that champion interesting archival material.
Tumblr exhibits a unique multimedia ecosystem – one can “scrapbook” photos, textposts, songs, gifs, stills, and quotes, in a way that is structurally and aesthetically sound. You can forge a pastiche of your own posts, alongside reblogging others.
There is less of an emphasis on a “following,” and other banal metrics on Tumblr. One’s Tumblr blog can be kept rather inconspicuous, but still partly accessible – a scrapbook left part open, which can entrance a wandering eye.
Tumblr in 2014 wore tiresome precociousness and violently ugly crackle nail polish.
Tumblr in 2014 left sickly sweet lipstick marks on cigarette butts.
Tumblr in 2014 dispensed thinly-veiled advertising to its impressionable disciples.
Tumblr in 2014 had no self-awareness although it thought it did.
Tumblr in 2014 would deliver hilarious anecdotes to their friends when, in fact, it was stolen from a textpost written by someone in another hemisphere.
The cultural behemoth wreaked irreversible damage on many of us, but the experience was entirely different logging on in 2024.
Starting a fresh account left my cache wiped & exposed to the vanilla algorithm – a shapeless and impersonal lump of posts. I had to sow the seeds of my affinities and hit like on pictures of Tommy Lee Jones, old Miu Miu campaigns, high definition photos of fruit danishes.
It took a while to sculpt the feed into anything resembling my interests again. I was confronted with fan art and bad poems, with the algorithm not the most pliable thing to fix. But perhaps these were the subcultures holding down the fort for the past decade years, while the rest of us joined the mass exodus to Twitter (now dead) and Instagram (insipid).
I think of the five stoic souls in the canonical alleyway photo. Where are they now? Do they still use Tumblr? Have we let them down?
Countless flaccid and soulless attempts have been made in recent months to revive the 2014 Tumblr grunge, or “indie sleaze” aesthetic – however, it cannot fit neatly on the conveyor belt of trends being voraciously pumped out. When one left the safe waters of 2014 textposts and Hunger Games screencaps, woven into the “Tumblr girl” movement were ideals of whiteness and thinness being peddled – championed by the bowels of the algorithm. Some girls lucky enough to levitate to Tumblr royalty embarked on lucrative endeavours of personal entrepreneurship, or promoting “skinny teas” (laxatives) on instagram.
The Tumblr girl was aspirational – you could do anything with a polaroid camera in one hand and a Marlboro red in the other.
Like clockwork, brands clocked this highly profitable aesthetic – advertisers immediately tapping into the market potential. Who could forget the American Apparel campaigns, which nodded both to the Tumblr girl monocracy and Tumblr’s laissez-faire permissibility of pornography?
Anyone who puts their Don Draper hat on could see that they were not selling clothes. By casting the Tumblr girl they were selling an idea. You, too, can be her – white, thin, and peddling laxatives – if you buy our varsity thigh-high socks.
When Tumblr wasn’t being spiritually ugly, it was fun. It enabled an “I contain multitudes” outlook on the world, in that you could have different blogs for different interests, akin to having marginally different personas for different friend groups. A delicious way of neatly compartmentalising your interests.
Opting into Tumblr 2024 has allowed me to blog in peace – it has a feeling of quasi-obsolescence now. Tumblr in 2024 is infinitely distinct from its 2014 self. The platform has mellowed, and is now a relatively placid user experience, at least in my corner of the algorithm. Perhaps the platform itself is now just used differently. I post my own photos, reblog the occasional photo of Kim Gordon, and journal my ideas. My feed is interesting now – with my corner of Tumblr very much dominated by fashion archivists and architects. It’s a few rungs less depressing than twitter. I wonder if the 2014 victims of teal hair dye grew up, or if they simply logged off.