“The schooling system we have in the Western world is crazy – you’re taken away from your parents at your most impressionable age and fed a load of bullshit and lies manipulated to make you think that the way we live in the West is stable and moral, when really it’s neither. You come out of school with a one-track mind based on financial success; you’re encouraged to become enslaved to the banking system. In school, I always felt, ‘Something’s not right here’ and I’m starting to find out what it is. Being outside of the norm gives you freedom of thought and that’s something being suppressed in school and the media. If you have freedom of thought you get labeled as a crazy person or someone strange. Matthew James Bellamy”
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“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
—Jim Morrison“The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? And if he does quit him, is it in order to lead a free existence, in which he will have no master but himself? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forced him to sell himself to the first employer. Thus the worker's liberty, so much exalted by the economists, jurists, and bourgeois republicans, is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realization, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. ”
—Mikhail Bakunin, ‘The Capitalist System’
Tumblr is a direct reflection of consumer society.
the majority of blogs on here are essentially curated personal museums. people are given merit for their taste, not for their ability to create original, meaningful work. there’s thousands of images of boring as fuck “high art” which get 50,000 notes just by existing. users consume these images by the buckets every day, taking very little meaning from them.
a person can easily gather a thousand followers in a month or two if they consistently post content from a specific niche. someone who only posts original work will struggle to break a few hundred. again, “good taste” is rewarded more than originality. in fact, good taste is viewed as a type of originality in itself; those who consume the most, and what is trendiest or coolest, get the most attention.
there are even blogs which gain notoreity simply by using the submitted content of their followers. the only thing the administrators of these blogs are good at is networking, and sometimes web design; they don’t have any creativity. and yet, they profit off of it the most. some of these blogs have even sold their own merch or books, with 99% of the content created by someone else.
this is not to say that there are as many creators out there as consumers; by its very nature, a capitalist system sustains wealth for the few by creating a large pool of people who can’t make their own product. a lack of original artists, and a lack of economic, social, and educational infrastructure for them, is not unique to tumblr. tumblr is just a perfect mirror of it.
