Bluesky is what Tumblr was

Over the past several months I have watched carefully as leftists have migrated over to Bluesky from X/twitter. As I briefly perused Bluesky so I could see for myself what that sort of leftist bubble looks like form the inside, I could not help but feel like it all felt very familiar in a way I could not quite place. The language, the mannerisms, the humor, the tone policing and intra-leftist squabbling it all felt very familiar. It was the sort of leftist community that I had seen online before, but I could not, at first, place it. And as much as Bluesky is a twitter clone, it didn’t feel like leftist Twitter circa 2020.

It felt older, more feminine, less official, less organized; more vibrant and feral. It felt alive in a way leftist twitter never was.

It felt like Tumblr.

By now the story of how woke ideology was formed in Universities and Colleges by leftists academics using their positions as a way to seek social change is well known, what is less known and less talked about is the role that social media played in synthesizing the woke academic theories in the genuine cultural products for popular consumption. Wokeness needed a vector to get out of the academy, and that vector was Tumblr.

The form, layout, and mechanics of Tumblr made it very easy to “layer bits and pieces of content together. This mean that it was easy for activists to take little bits and pieces of fandom culture and remix those pieces of culture with activist messaging, so photos, clips, quotes, scenes, music, and dialogue from various cultural products (Marvel movies, Harry Potter, Harry Styles, Twilight, etc) can be quickly used in the service of activist commentary. The ease with which one could mix, re-mixing, and comment on various posts on Tumblr made it the perfect place for woke ideas to be metabolized into the culture. The result is that a massive industry of cultural commentary, remixing, fan-art, and so fourth was created, with much of it carrying (implicitly or explicitly) the framing, assumptions, ad ideas that we now associate with wokeness. If you are wondering where the “your favorite thing is problematic” cultural discourse came from, it came from Tumblr.¹

What made Tumblr so potent was that ENERGY that was latent in that platform. Tumblr was vibrant, wild, spirited leftist cultural politics at its most feral. Tumblr was the platform of choice for young creatives, artists, and progressives, and as such all the energy of teens and 20’s leftist creatives, particularly young women, was melded to the hivemind of leftist identity politics. To but it bluntly, Tumblr is the id, the hindbrain, the lizardbrain, the collective unconscious of wokeness in social media from unencumbered by social norms and expectations.

Bluesky is like that.

Bluesky is feral, vibrant, primal, alive. Bluesky has the energy that 2014 Tumblr had.

2020’s blue-check twitter, with its’ BLM hashtags, black squares, and pride flags, was entirely lacking when it comes to the sort of potent energy that Tumblr had circa 2012. Leftist blue check twitter was comprised mostly of journalists, academics, and young professionals who were trying to present a professional public face as they attempted to break news, spread their pieces around, shop ideas, network, and so on. It was lifeless paint by numbers activism and fill in the blanks wokeness mixed with progressive group think and cynical virtue signaling. If Linkedin had a baby with woke humanities departments the result would be 2020 blue-check Twitter. These people may have had the same politics as 2014 Tumblr, but they did not have the energy. They were essentially running on the creative fumes of 2014 Tumblr while trying to use woke ideas to monetize their social commentary and journalism. In contrast, 2014 Tumblr was a wild west of anonymous accounts, teenagers, college kids with nothing to lose. It was unemployed artists people with time to kill just trying to make content, spread memes, and have a good time. Nobody was getting paid, there was few (if any) sponsorships, there was no censorship (Tumblr was famously nsfw); these people could not have cared less about careers, or their real world social standing in prestige institutions. In short 2014 Tumblr had heat in it’s blood and sting in it’s piss and it was ready for a fight.

Bluesky is like that.

Bluesky has all the vibrant creative, feral energy of 2014 Tumblr. 2020 twitter was leftist who though t that had won the culture war and all that there was left to do was mop up after the battle. 2024 Bluesky is embattled and pissed of leftists who are feeding off each other creatively and spoiling for a fight. And that means that we are very likely in for another round of woke activism in the not to distant future.

When I look at Bluesky I see all of the same energy that I saw in 2014 Tumblr. There is all of the community, the us against the world mentality, the creativity, the cancellations, the feminine energy: all of the good and the bad from 2014 Tumblr resides on Bluesky in a more mature form. It isn’t Tumblr, but Bluesky is very quickly becoming the spiritual successor to 2014 Tumblr, and as such Bluesky is going to be a generative space for wokeness for the foreseeable future.

As the Trump administration comes into power there is going to be a large number of professional class elites who find themselves out of work. These are very likely going to be the people who do work in progressive policy making, sensitivity training, workplace HR, DEI programs, and social activism. In other words, people whose entire job and training revolves around activism, social policy, and progressive identity politics are going to find themselves out of government, out of a job, and having a whole lot of time on their hands. Further, there people are going to be entering a job market in which their main skill set (particularly for the DEI focused elites) is not in demand. All of this adds up to a large number of elites who are trained in activism, social policy, progressive politics, and community organizing, who all of the sudden have a lot of time on their hands and a social media network on which to organize.

Once these people get organized there are going to be protests, social media campaigns, boycotts, activism, and all the same protest activists we saw in 2020. Remember, people who hold woke ideas still run most universities, most sense-making institutions, most journalism companies, most cultural institutions, and most art institutions. They tend to dominate the culture industry in terms of the production of movies, music, television, books, comics, art, and so fourth, and they still have tremendous cultural cache owing to the fact that huge numbers of artists are woke. Further, there are a large number of journalists and academics who are migrating to Bluesky. There are tremendous resources available to woke activists if they want to make use of them, and with Bluesky functioning as an organizing platform with real energy the woke will be back in the not to distant future.

I do not deny that wokeness is in decline, or that there has not been significant progress made against wokeness. I am not claiming wokeness is inevitably going to win. All I am claiming is that wokeness is not going to go away quietly, and the ascendance of Bluesky is, to quote a DM I got last night, the canary in the coal mine that lets us know that another round of woke activism is coming.

-Wokal Distance

1. I owe much of this analysis the Katherine Dee