umm ok

3 weeks ago

Tumblr

Tumblr doesn’t feel like home anymore. It feels like TV. All the good people on Tumblr have seemingly been replaced by brands and/or ultra-stylish, impeccably curated ‘style’ blogs. Why even try to be cool when Nevver has a patent on ice-cold nihilistic minimalism?

Basically, Tumblr is no longer about people, it’s about style and ‘culture’. This is not a bad thing per se. In fact, I am quite comfortable using Tumblr simply as an entertainment medium. But I still lament the lost voice of the ordinary dude/dudette; the angry masters in philosophy student; the witty dork.

As more and more of my friends (both real and digital) drop off the Tumblr grid, and as Tumblr continues to court High St brands to promote lucrative content partnerships, I feel my own voice and my own position within Tumblr’s community diminishing each time I log in.

I’ve been on Tumblr for almost five years now, and it has certainly provided a lot without asking for very much in return, but I increasingly have less interest in being an active member of the community, in favour of basically becoming just another passive consumer. Perhaps it’s time to go searching for greener pastures…

8 months ago

I have seen many people spill their guts online, and I did so myself until, at last, I began to see that I had commodified myself. Commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. In the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which Karl Marx called ‘the means of production’. Capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. I created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board I was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. That means that I sold my soul like a tennis shoe and I derived no profit from the sale of my soul. »

Carmen Hermosillo

If this blog was worth as much as a tennis shoe, I’d be over the moon!