Professional, commercial, and even the sexual interactions that literally determine life itself are mediated through these privately controlled communications networks. Why is this so broadly dangerous? Because it’s not easy to opt out of using digital platforms, which are becoming as important as physical roads for human interaction. And you’d get no money and have no legal recourse. Now consider that these companies could swiftly and legitimately shut their platform down, and sell all of your images and words for a trillion dollars.
#No longer home gif tumblr professional
Consider how much of your personal and professional life experiences may be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tinder. The commons are, after all, privately owned-never really commons to begin with.Īnd here comes a second fact that the Tumblr fiasco exposes: how interwoven our intimate encounters, desires, and relationships (including, but not limited to, sexual matters) are with digital platforms. Yet the people who generate that wealth have no influence over the digital commons where it resides and no recourse if they’re evicted from it. This is the end point of user-generated content on any social-media platform: When people create content that has social benefit for them, it makes massive capital benefit for Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Come December 17, when adult content is made private and un-shareable, these communities will effectively be shut down, their collectiveness made digitally homeless. The first is that Tumblr’s adult communities-like the platform writ large-are driven not just by amateur, user-generated uploads, but by the curation efforts of committed volunteers. Whatever your body type or fetish, there was probably a Tumblr community for you.Īnd this brings us to two problems that go well beyond Tumblr and the legal but still widely condemned sexual activities featured on it. There were Tumblrs for those who identify as bears, furries, HIV-positive, bisexual, disabled, and fat for people into S&M, pegging, and group masturbation. Just as black Twitter gave voice and audience to black writers, Tumblr created the space for sexually nonnormative people to see and be seen in ways they weren’t elsewhere. As a reader who might be described as a member of the “cub” gay subculture wrote to me, “Porn and related content on tumblr was the primary place I first saw more natural body types for guys.” Besides Tumblr, he said, there hasn’t always been “any place guys who are average to larger without growing six packs could admire themselves and other guys.” The site is-was-a haven for people who might not be able to connect sexually in other ways. But its adult content wasn’t strictly limited to porn. You can see why rather than pay for the expensive work of patrolling the age of people in porn, the company would simply want to overcorrect. Tumblr’s decision was partly motivated by a large child-porn problem. A friend of mine texted me that Tumblr ending porn is like “McDonalds ending hamburgers.” Tumblr may be home to personal blogs, community forums, and foodie photo collections, but pornography makes up a huge part of its reputation. The “adult content” Tumblr will be banning, the company wrote, “primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content-including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations-that depicts sex acts.” But what the company is really going after is a four-letter word strangely missing from its 538-word announcement: porn.
Earlier this week, the blogging platform Tumblr announced that it would be scrubbing itself of “adult content.” The move doesn’t just affect how people look at and exchange nude photos on a downtrodden platform-it portends a broad shift in how we experience intimacy and connection online, in how user-generated content is managed, and in how tech maintains its stranglehold on the digital commons.
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