Screen Time: On Not Leaving The Party, Tumblr 2013-2023
By Adrian Matias Bell
Welcome back to Screen Time, a project exploring what it means to live and make art in the digital age. The 5th and final piece in this series, centered around the theme 10 Year Challenge: 2013-2023, covers the most ‘2013’ subject of all time: Tumblr, and was written by Adrian Matias Bell.
Adrian Matias Bell is a writer and musician working on Ohlone land in Oakland, CA. His work has appeared in Sonora Review, Protean, Dialogist, and elsewhere, with more forthcoming from Girl Dad Press. As of 2025, he is still on Tumblr.
On Not Leaving The Party, Tumblr 2013-2023
Annie Dillard was right: how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. Similarly, I believe we're always practicing for something, even if we don't know what it is yet. As I touch on in this essay, the years I spent on Tumblr as a teenager felt like practice in the way that being a teenager in general felt like practice. I believed that, through consumption and curation, I was practicing to become an aesthetically minded, politically engaged adult. And maybe I was. But I was also just practicing to be online.
That's not totally worthless. Social media provides a valuable window into how other people are living and thinking. That is the source of its magic, as well as what makes it aggravating to spend time on and difficult to quit. Today, in 2025, I finally don’t go on Tumblr that often. It’s part of a larger departure from social media for me. I’m still online, but usually for no more than a few minutes a day. The reason is simple: all websites are bad. So what was my practice for? Was it truly wasted time?
The Internet, having become cool and then uncool, is accumulating a patina of shame. I semi-regularly read critiques of “Internet novels” that can’t seem to decide if their problem is books that reference the Internet; books that reference the way the Internet makes people talk; or the fact that the Internet exists at all and has affected us so profoundly that we’re talking about it in books. In the last decade, I feel a cultural process has been taking place for Internet users: one of self-realization followed by self-hatred. It’s familiar. As a teenager, as soon as I learned who I was, I learned to be embarrassed.
The story of Tumblr from 2013-2023 was one of expansion and decay. Maybe that feels especially relevant now because it’s never not been relevant. Isn’t every story one of decay? As posts pile up silently on dashboards, so is the present pushed down, like something swallowed, to dissolve and become the past.
1. On The Party
I spent a lot of time on Tumblr in 2013. Today, in 2023, I still spend more time on Tumblr than most people probably do. On a loud Internet, Tumblr is quiet. It’s not trying to sell me anything, or at least not successfully. I don’t have to post face pics or my full name; neither my relatives nor my coworkers are on there; and “the algorithm” exerts a minimal pull.
The drawback, of course, is that it’s broken as hell, and has been for most of the last ten years. Being on the Internet for the past decade has been about watching it invade and collapse our concepts of private and public life. Being on Tumblr during that time, I have seen it aid that process while slowly starting to decay. Here’s what that’s been like.
2. On The Lack
In 2012, my friend Carina and I started a blog together so that we could post drawings we did together and separately. It became my blog after some period of time, and I changed the URL to forcibly unsubscribe my dad from the RSS feed. Drawing was fun, and posting pictures I did for my friends to appreciate was fun, but reblogging other people’s pictures was much more enticing.
Most Tumblr blogs were made of many reblogs, with the reblog function serving as an echo on an image. You could add commentary under the post, but that was gauche. It was far more polite to mumble in the tags, a feature that served a dual purpose as a categorization system and a method of commentary that would be erased on the next reblog.
I liked to reblog funny things sometimes, or informational posts about feminism and art history. But my favorite things to reblog were images: illustrations, photos, etchings, paintings. I liked images about nature, fashion, witchcraft, animals, and so on. And yes, I ran a vertical blog, which meant (for a while) all the images conformed to a portrait orientation.
Other people ran black and white blogs, “pale blogs,” fandom blogs, humor blogs. This was, in the US, between wars, in the middle of the Obama presidency. This was the year of Electra Heart and Moonrise Kingdom. Cringe was the deadest it had been in my lifetime. The images I reblogged were often misty or so saturated they appeared bruised, like bad fruit. Or else the color was draining from them like blood from a vampire’s victim.
A private life is formed from things taken in. As a teenager, I sensed it was very important for me to form a sense of aesthetic, a word that was beginning, thanks to Tumblr, to take on usage as an adjective as well as a noun. A “look” was not encompassing enough, and “vibes” were not yet in common parlance. The individual part (an image, a post) would add together with other individual parts to make a supercolony, an aesthetic. At the same time, things could be so aesthetic, which was like pretty, but more sophisticated.
The silence of the image is captivating in a way that words can’t be. Images provide origin points for meditations, daydreams, fantasies. And all fantasies are fantasies of possession. Beauty, I realized over the course of my adolescence, is linked to our desire for possession: we keep looking because we know we can’t really have what we’re looking at. Even if it can be bought or witnessed in real life, the moment will always feel hollow. What you really want is to consume it and have its properties somehow absorbed into your body. By reblogging, we were collecting things we wished we could absorb into our burgeoning identities. The blogs were visual representations of what we were missing–what, once we had it, would make us into the people we actually were.
Lacan: “This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil.”
3. On GIFs
GIFs are still one of Tumblr’s longest-lasting legacies. Even now, if you open up the GIF keyboard on any messaging service, the vast majority of what you see can be traced back to Tumblr and probably to a random teenager’s blog. GIFs had a few technical advantages over video posts: the files were smaller, which meant they could load faster, and they required no outlinking to other sites.
GIFs expressed the promise of expanding time infinitely, and nowhere was this more evident than in the beloved format of the GIFset. Through a wall of moving images, a duration of time could be expressed in an instant, and an entire scene–or highlights of different scenes, thematically linked–could be inhaled in a glance. A line of dialogue delivered in a few seconds in a TV show became an endless loop of an image, often moving a little slower than real life. An exchange that might take about a minute expanded outward into infinity, with multiple moments constantly starting and ending simultaneously. GIFsets were the absurdist visual logic of the comic strip updated for the information superhighway:
GIFs could be silly reaction images, especially on their own, and they often were; the condensed-yet-infinite nature made them stronger emotional punctuation marks, heightening the emotion they expressed. GIF sets could also be expansions outward of small moments of sensuality: the ephemeral, looped, could last forever. Mostly, I think GIFs were about luxuriating in a moment. You could move on easily if you wanted, but if you stayed, you could let it last forever.
4. On UI
It’s much harder to find documentation of old Tumblr UI than old Tumblr content. What examples I can find are not dated. Tumblr requires a login, so a person’s dashboard is unscrapable by the Internet Archive, although individual public blogs can be saved to the Wayback Machine. It sort of makes sense that people aren’t posting screenshots of their old dashes–who the hell takes a photo of their email inbox on a normal day? Many people don’t document mundane things about their Internet experience, even though we need that information just as much as we need information on things of obvious historical significance. The loss of documentation for ol UI is frustrating and interesting in the broader context of digital media studies as an emerging field. It situates essays like this one closer to archaeology than art history: I have to write around the vast gaps of visual evidence of Tumblr’s evolving design.
My quest to form a sense of identity by archiving instances of unmeetable desire on the Internet was exactly the use case Tumblr was created for. Tumblr’s UI was geared toward the images in a way that no other platform was at the time. The images were nice and big, not squished together on a grid like on Instagram; and, unlike Instagram, Twitter didn’t bound images in a square aspect ratio, meaning they could feel more like postcards or catalog pages rather than Polaroids. At the same time, Tumblr was, at one point, extremely functional as social media, especially for nerds and introverts. Unlike something like Twitter or Facebook, there were many options for “quiet” speaking, like in the tags of a post or under a “Read More” cut, which would hide all or part of a post unless clicked on. It was like a party where hanging out with the cat was not just a viable but an honorable option.
We were also getting to know, as many people were around that time, the “like” as a universal gesture. On Tumblr, a like could mean “I like this,” “I don’t like this (i.e., that your parents are getting divorced) but I’m here for you,” “I like this and we should kiss on the mouth,” “I’m going to look at this later,” “I know this post is about me, asshole,” and so on. Most of the time, though, it just meant, “I’m here too.” That was why my high school friends and I formed a little webring and lovingly maintained it despite seeing each other for ten hours a day. Our parents didn’t understand, but of course they didn’t. This was the balance that defined my adolescence online: luxuriating in the anxiety of unmet desire in the house I grew up in, punctuated by notifications that the people I loved were, in some sense, here too.
5. On Public Life
Our parents grew up running around cul-de-sacs fully unsupervised; my friends and I grew up on cul-de-sacs under tight supervision. As a teenager in Orange County without a driver’s license, when I wasn’t at school, I was mostly confined to the house. Even if I could have gone out, my options for third spaces would have been limited. Because I was an unemployed teen, I had no money, and in Orange County, public space was both endangered and associated with danger: I came to know public libraries and parks as things to be enjoyed with caution, since something accessible to everyone was also accessible to criminals and perverts and so on.
The Internet, and Tumblr more specifically, gave me the ability to participate in society before I was able to vote or drive. Perhaps this is an overly sympathetic way of looking at the Talmudic volume of social justice commentary that Tumblr somehow produced, but Tumblr was the first forum in which I could read analysis of forces that I could tell were shaping the world around me, and to see those forces named.
Again, Tumblr’s UI facilitated the site’s eventual notoriety for being a hub of “social justice warriors.” The reblog structure allowed writing to reach far beyond the OP’s immediate circle, and there was no character limit like there was on Twitter. The anonymity of Tumblr also, in a way, made public discourse easier. It was easy to check on someone’s blog and guess what quadrant of the political spectrum they might slot into, but you would probably not come away from this with the person’s full first and last name, which was for the good of everyone involved.
In the summer of 2014, a Black 18-year-old named Michael Brown was murdered by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. I was on Tumblr when it happened–literally, by coincidence, as it happened. I was sitting on a velvet couch in my childhood home, near my parent’s bookshelves, surrounded by the reading that had shaped their knowledge. I caught wind of something having gone wrong in the world. I would scroll, reading, then refresh the dashboard to catch the slow drip of more. My dad kissed his fingertips and tapped me on the head as he passed. “Are you going to bed?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m going to stay up a little longer.”
This was the first time I remembered a news story of such gravity unfolding in front of me in real time. And this was on the Internet, not on TV; what I was receiving was not only the information, but people’s reactions to it, which the structure of the platform treated as just as important as the original information. This created a sense of intimacy: we were in this together, watching together, having, sometimes, the same feelings, and then feelings about those feelings. It would also, as the years wore on, prove to be, at least for me, the most existentially upsetting aspect of being online during a tragedy.
I was starting from a place of understanding that cops were bad, and that racism was bad, and that cops were usually pretty racist, but the murder of Michael Brown was the first time I had seen all the pieces of anti-Black police brutality laid out before me and connected. When I became aware of the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” it was, and I hope you’ll forgive me, Tumblr that gently explained to sixteen-year-old me why this phrase was important and why it didn’t mean all lives didn’t matter.
It wasn’t just the ability to be exposed to new perspectives or my peers’ opinions that made Tumblr significant: it was the fact that I could navigate branching trees of discourse, following arguments as people worked together to build them up and tear them down. Beliefs I already had were coalescing with beliefs I was coming into; I was beginning to develop an awareness of issues that didn’t directly affect me but that weren’t far away, either. Tumblr was the first opportunity I had to express my nascent political beliefs to a small audience of my peers and to hear what they thought. This was, for better or worse, the first time I ever felt like a citizen.
You have to understand that my peers and I were not talking about this in real life. To understand the generation I grew up in is to understand the importance of digital gestures. The calling cards and meaningful glances of a period drama also existed online for us, forming a new layer of social and political subtext. The first protest I ever participated in was a die-in at lunch in solidarity with BLM. There was a Facebook event, and everyone saw which kids replied Not Going. I remember who they were, but not who sat back in real life instead of joining the die-in when it happened. If anyone changed their mind, I don’t remember who they were.
6. On The Money
From a user perspective, the years of 2015-2017 were the beginning of Tumblr’s end. The site was still thriving, but its reputation for discourse was driving the site’s tone to an increasingly acerbic and dire place. I remember these years on Tumblr as ones of endless, pointless arguments, even as Trump got elected and the US devolved further into real fascism. On Tumblr, though, we were asking the real questions: Could bisexual women call themselves butch, and if not, which animal should they name themselves after instead?
Yahoo had purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, but by 2016, it was becoming clear this had been a mistake. Yahoo wrote down $712 million of Tumblr’s value. And no wonder: it was, and still is, unclear to me how the hell the site makes money, if at all. The ads were nonsensical, and the fact that they were often roundly mocked by the users probably made them an unappetizing idea to potential advertisers. There was no premium Tumblr membership, and it was clear that the user base would riot against David Karp himself if the site stopped being free. There was a strange sense of power that came from being a young person on Tumblr at this time, even though it was probably not grounded in reality. Despite our differences (mostly re: what bisexual women should be calling themselves), we could all agree on one shared fantasy: we had those suits at Yahoo under our thumb. If they took something we liked away, we would just leave. And then they’d all be sorry.
7. On Pornography
There used to be porn on Tumblr. Tumblr’s pornography had the potential to be softer, gentler, more feminist (though not without endless debate) than the mainstream. And a lot of it was GIF-based, which meant, in addition to the above, the content was both unpausable and unplayable. On the journey toward infinite sensuality, you have to give up some amount of control. Time itself collapses at the altar of the image.
A lot of the porn I saw on Tumblr, potentially related to all of us being teenagers, was not especially hardcore; posting full hog would ruin the aesthetic, and aesthetic and sexual concerns had to be reconciled at all times. The only way to solve issues of dissonance was, of course, to start a sideblog that implied its own sense of internal consistency–and that would, like all compartmentalized aspects of the self, inevitably leak onto main.
That said, it’s remarkable how much genuinely good information I got on sex while scrolling through the pretty pictures website. My high school health class told us about chlamydia, sure, but they would never have given us infographics for basic shibari knots, much less resources on what it might be like to have safe, enjoyable sex as a queer or trans person. Tumblr was my introduction to the idea that sexuality could be a positive thing, even for someone who was (hypothetically, of course) not cis or straight.
Tumblr’s porn ban, enacted in December 2018, was in many ways the death knell of the site. Although it came from an Apple App Store ban on adult content, the rollout could not possibly have been more of a disaster. The policies were confusing, and their implementation was worse; Tumblr started cracking down on “female-presenting nipples,” and even patent diagrams and paintings of Jesus started to get blurred or taken down. Once Tumblr was no longer safe for sex workers, most other people left too: some out of solidarity, but most because there was nowhere else to go. And, as in other cases, a site unsafe for sex workers became unusable for everyone else. The life started to drain from Tumblr. The party was going somewhere else.
8. On Collapse
Tumblr collapsed public and private lives together in a way that was not, at the time, happening on any other social media platform. 10 years ago, other platforms were focused on documenting public or private life. By centering fantasy and desire in the form of the reblog and the GIF, and by encouraging discourse with the branching-tree commentary structure, all without making users reveal their “true” identities, Tumblr encouraged the formation of its users’ private and public lives, conflating them in the process.
Now there’s no escape. All platforms are for both formation and documentation of a person’s life, with privacy becoming less normal. Twitter Circles are broken, or not, depending on the day; who cares, it’s all going to the NSA or Russia or whatever. Instagram grid posts are for photodumps, but stories are for infographics, which are usually reposts of grid posts, because the grid is also for infographics. Israel is enacting a genocide on the people of Gaza, and I have seen multiple people I know entreat their friends and oomfs and besties and moots, and probably also old coworkers and their moms and people they met in a linguistics class in junior year of college, to stay logged on in order to fulfill their obligation, as Westerners online, to bear witness.
On the Internet, bearing witness is a great and noble deed, on par with attending a protest or donating money. But, much like those other options, it only counts if you tell everyone–not necessarily what you’re witnessing, simply that you are witnessing it. In the absence of an actual community with whom to metabolize feelings about watching horrific things happen, or even an online community that can build a communal discussion of said feelings, the design of social media platforms now encourages individuals to simply announce these feelings in the same way they might announce their engagement or document their outfit for the day.
At the same time, I see the obsession with bearing witness in the first place as a direct tonal descendant of the hyperbolic discourse that originated on Tumblr. Not contributing makes you look disengaged, even if it’s just because you have nothing to say. But if a platform primarily functions off of posting and not reposting, as Instagram does, you have to say something. The result is a speech act that is arguably just clogging avenues that could be used for first-hand news. But the real problem, the thing that (to me) makes witnessing truly unbearable, is the fact that the horror of what is being witnessed cannot be functionally distinguished from the midden of desire all around it. Footage of hospital bombings is nested in among park photos and tweets about gnomes and ads for the water fountains you see in airports. The most horrific acts humanity is capable of have to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with beauty. It was on Tumblr that I first encountered this nightmarish dissonance, but it has popped up on every social media experience I’ve had since.
It’s hard to say if Tumblr felt more like a new kind of Internet or the carry-over of the old kind. It existed–still exists, I guess–as a kind of bridge between an Internet that encouraged anonymity and one that tried to obliterate it, between the Internet of collection/consumption and the Internet of Posting with a capital P. That might be why it had to die, and also why it somehow still isn’t dead.
I don’t know why I’m at this party. Everyone else has gone home. But it’s too loud outside, so I’ll stay. No one’s going to kick me out; they’ll just pack up the building. One day, suddenly, the roof and the windows and the doors and the walls will vanish around me. Then, although I haven’t moved, I won’t be here anymore.
More of Adrian’s writing can be found on his substack, The Home Encyclopedia Hour. Adrian’s website is ajmb.info, and more information about his music project, Nightjars, can be found on bandcamp!!
If you made it this far, thank you for tuning into Screen Time!! This was a long time in the making (most pieces were started in 2023), and I’m really glad it’s finally out. Publishing these has given me inspiration for a future Screen Time issues, which I’ll announce the first theme of in a few weeks. In the meantime there’ll be a few pieces on art, so stay tuned!
~ Sam
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