victims of communismkills memorial foundation

an ode to tumblr

Before there was tweeting, there was posting. And indeed, before I had ever clicked on my first retweet, I had reblogged. This is an important anthropological marker of my position in the World of Chronic Onlinehood—I was not birthed into Twitter with an instinctive knowledge of its nuances and idiosyncrasies. Rather, I was a fugitive from the ancient civilisations of Tumblr, and I was using my expertise in the secrets of identity politics and ragebaiting to navigate this new frontier.

I would wager that many Twitter users are the same, at least those who offer something of substance and entertainment. The measly 280-character limit and fascistic decline of the algorithm are no match for veterans like us, for we have grappled with the Leviathan of the Written Post: we have survived yourfaveisproblematic and the water torture of that The Colour of the Sky post; we engaged in morality policing and virtue-signalling before it was en vogue; we trained in the practice of aesthetic curation and taste-mogging; and, most importantly, we all perfected the art of dunking on strangers. For those who experienced the brainrot of the early-mid 2010s Tumblr and lived to tell the tale, we reflect on that time with a curious sense of pride and disgust. Eras were defined, characters built, adolescents deeply traumatised. It was the best of times and the worst, most unsalvageable, infernal hellscape of times. 

In its wake, we are left with the Jaded Poster who can never truly be perturbed by the chaos of Internet discourse. Tumblr shattered the veil between reality and the delusions of the chronically online, and cyberspace became a dreamscape where the rational and irrational bled together into a sort of eternal limbo. Over time, we find a familiar comfort in the Abyss, where everything you own can be taken away from you through some reckless doxxing over a ‘Benedict Cumberbatch is kinda mid’ reblog, and where 30-year olds are threatening to kill themselves while you are in homeroom. The post-Tumblrian is a sort of ascetic, one who has given up all material attachments because they see online identity as ephemeral and illusory. You come into this world with nothing but jokes, and that is all you will leave with. We are apathetic and amused by the new developments in the online sphere, because we have seen it all before. There is nothing social media could do to me that Tumblr hadn’t already done infinitely worse. We have faced down the Void. There is no more use for fear. 

For all of Tumblr’s sins—namely, opening up this Pandora’s box where all individuals are now uninformed liberal activists and where moral virtue is both currency and weapon—I can’t help but look back on my experiences with a strange nostalgia. Of course, maybe that’s just Stockholm syndrome. But I do think there is a distinct perspective that comes with a Tumblr lived experience, and part of that is the curatorial spirit that it necessitated. Tumblr did not present itself to you plainly. You had to look for it, and you had to find your true self in its darkest niches and crevices. You had to compile the right sort of grunge aesthetic accounts and homosexual comedians, and you could only be clued in on phenomena like ‘John Green’s love for cock killed editable reblogs’ if you really sought to be in the know. It was like learning a secret code that only a handful of other Internet addicts could communicate in. That language still persists today; I can very immediately recognise when somebody I meet was in the same trenches. It is quite astounding that such a specific and isolating experience can also be something so universal for me and the people I surround myself with, and I would even go so far as to say that shared Tumblrhood is a building block for many of our current relationships. We were all engaged in the same politics, the same music, the same television shows and the same comedy. Whether we admit it or not, this education has been a formative part of our social identities. With that comes this curious feeling of pride, in knowing that we had to discover these things ourselves and build our identities through some kind of personal endeavour.

I think about TikTok a lot these days. I would say TikTok is probably era-defining in the same way as Tumblr was for us, but I feel almost sorrowful about that. The thing about Tumblr is that not everybody I knew had it, and its distinct quirks were available only to the select few who dared take the road less traveled; TikTok, on the other hand, is ubiquitous. The most boring straight people I have ever met are making the same references as the quirked-up queer kids I see. It is a jarring reality; the result seems to be this bland, homogenised cultural identity built from the same references and understanding, where all content feels uninspired and moments of true insanity are rarer than before. Our youth are being delivered their identities on their doorsteps, and the entire world is pre-packaged in bite-sized morsels for guiltless consumption. Of course, such is the way of the technological singularity, and it was to be expected. But I can’t help mourning the insanity of Tumblr warfare, you know? As damaging and harmful and completely batshit as it all was, I have to be honest—it was also really funny. 

I am writing this piece quite spontaneously, because I was forced into sentimentality and introspection by a stray photo of communismkills on my timeline. I haven’t thought about her in years, but the idea that one selfie could unite so many Tumblr fugitives in recognition is kind of beautiful. For the uninitiated, communismkills was a notorious Tumblr user from the heyday—a right-wing political blogger who was an enemy of ‘SJW thought’, and obsessed with bad-faith commentary in much the same way as conservative bloggers of today. I was not a particularly clouted Tumblr user at the time, but even I was aware of her notoriety and general ‘problematicness’. There is a blog you can still find on Tumblr today that would collate receipts of all of communismkills’ transgressions, stylised in a ‘yourfaveisproblematic’ manner. To her credit, it is incredibly impressive to have an entire Tumblr dedicated to supervising your posting. 

Communismkills so perfectly encapsulates some of Tumblr’s finer features. She was an evil idiot, no doubt about it, but the idea that an entire community of people had devoted themselves to keeping tabs on some right-wing girl is such a testament to the charming cult of virtue-signaling that constituted Tumblr politics at the time. She was universally despised and mocked and I find it hard to believe anybody had ever taken her seriously, but she was also an easy target. For the more self-serious activists like that receipts Tumblr, this meant methodically documenting her each and every action for people who did not give a fuck. But for the more comically-inclined, communismkills was the perfect fatality for a good old-fashioned dunk. This was where the beauty of Tumblr was most evident: users across the board came together to compete and collaborate in trolling her in the funniest way possible, and dealt with her self-serious idiocy with the exact sort of ridicule it probably deserved. She had weird eyebrows; she did not seem to understand how to use Tumblr, and so she would fall for any trap that was set up; she was always offended and indignant in that charmingly hypocritical and self-righteous style of her ilk. One of the most infamous products of her legacy is this post, which I will let speak for itself. 

I think this tradition of Onlinehood is what creates some of the Internet’s best work. In the raging tempest of discourse and cancellations and dysfunction, there is a true artistic gift in the insight to look past all of the noise and word-salads to understand how surreally funny our interactions are. This is the sort of legacy I want to remember Tumblr for, and an art that I believe was perfected in Tumblr’s hellfire first before it was exported to the likes of Twitter or Instagram meme accounts. It warms my heart to know we are bonded by the commonality of that specifically traumatic experience. It truly is something you just had to be there to get, and I’m honestly glad I was there. Now we continue to spread that gospel of Being Funny AF Online and Just Turn Your Phone Off Quote Tweets Aren’t Real wherever we go.