Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?

They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.

Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?

So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.

And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.

And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.

If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.

I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.

been watching more tiktoks from this twink and honestly this is one of the most interesting academic discussions i've seen in a while

“the queerest place on the internet” when you make a post with the word “transgender” in it:

Source

i remember seeing a post like a decade ago (... fuck me have i been here that long) that was talking about the way in which cishet cultural understandings of gay men and lesbians have this bizarre paradox where gay men are assumed to be categorically incapable of misogyny and lesbians are assumed to hate men innately.

sometimes I still think about what that implies about the sort of dominant culture understanding of gender. just in terms of like...

the idea that a man not being sexually/romantically interested in women is a man incapable of hating women or harming women or leveraging structural power against women (implication that misogyny is inherently and exclusively enacted through sex and relationships, or perhaps weirder, that attraction to women in and of itself is oppressive).

the idea that a woman not being sexually/romantically interested in men is a woman inherently hateful towards men (implication that a woman's disinterest in or unwillingness to engage with sex/relationships with men is directed at men as a hateful act, that a lack of attraction to men is inherently cruel or mean. or, perhaps weirder, that an "actual" lack of attraction to men is impossible and lesbianism is a deliberate and conscious performance of disinterest as a means to inflict cruelty on men, making "man-hating" a necessary prerequisite to the "performance" of lesbianism).

and then you start to see how those concepts also intersect with other weird ideas about gayness.

if attraction to women is in and of itself oppressive and misogynist, then that would certainly imply that lesbians themselves are oppressive and misogynist towards other women (and certainly many cis straight women and girls claim so). if misogyny is only enacted through sex and relationships then clearly straight women would be incapable of leveraging misogyny to harm other women or holding hateful views about women (and many cis straight women/girls seem to think so!)

if an unwillingness to engage in relationships with men is equivalent to or necessarily linked to unkindness towards men, then being mean and avoiding emotional vulnerability or physical intimacy in any context with men is how one expresses or performs sexual/romantic disinterest in men (and certainly many cis straight men do express and perform meanness and avoid emotional vulnerability and physical intimacy with other men, including even friends and family! certainly many cis straight men and boys are "accused" of being sexually interested in men for simply engaging with other men/boys in their lives with gentle kindness).

because cis straight people primarily encounter gender tension as something in the realm of romantic and sexual relationships with each other, they are often extremely lacking in understanding larger structures of gendered oppression (especially when they are also white and do not perceive contemporary gendered oppression as inextricably linked to structures of colonialism and whiteness and labor division/devaluation under racial capitalism). the surface perception of gender on this very small, interpersonal level without a greater power analysis or historical material analysis then leads them to just extrapolate these oversimplified ideas outwards and all sorts of weird shit gets projected onto LGBTQ+ people more broadly.

and then of course, LGBTQ+ people are not outside of this culture either--we grow up inside of it.

so many cis and trans lesbians and bi women (and straight and bi trans men too, and probably also cis bi men) go through some period of being terrified that their attraction to women makes them inherently predatory or harmful towards women.

sometimes cis (and sometimes also trans) gay men (and sometimes also ace men) inflict harm on women without understanding that harm as misogynist, because they don't realize that--for example--groping a woman is still sexual assault even if you're not attracted to her and doing it as a 'joke.' they might believe that talking over trans women repeatedly isn't straightforwardly misogyny or decide that a (cis or trans) ace woman or lesbian is being "mean" or "misandrist" by not prioritizing them.

idk, every time I see the "mean lesbian" trope (not like lesbians themselves reclaiming it-- though sometimes that can also veer into this if it is internalized rather than consciously a satirical critique to highlight the bizarreness of a simple absence of interest being construed as literal hatred) I think about how pervasive these ideas are and how they harm so many people beyond just those who identify as lesbians. I think the notion of the "mean lesbian" is sometimes considered like a small prejudice with minimal relevance outside of us, but it really is part of a much larger interconnected web of weird oppressive gender ideology.

btw if u like v/a/c/c/u/m/i/n/g all the puppy dogys fucking hate u

Reallt liiking this giant swuid image

PETA claims to care so much about animals but what are they doing to address the 95% suicide rate in fruit flies?

PETA petitioning to remove all cool refreshing drinks with no fly corpses that you're sooo excited to drink.

literally though the aggrieved petit bourgeoisie dispossessed by capitalism and by loss of prestige/colonial resources in the imperial core were and are a major portion of the base of fascist movements

after inputting some complex algorithms into my super computer i’ve determined what tumblr will look like in the year 2020

i love how this comes back after every shitty update staff makes

You are excited for fluffy towels and fresh sheets and comfortable mattresses for a reason, my friend, they are called creature comforts for a reason, my friend, you are a creature, my friend

it's so funny how ppl sometimes forget that some light sexual assault is just part of the airport security process for some of us lol like I'll be like going through security is the worst part of flying and they'll be like yeah it's so annoying having to take your shoes off and I say no I mean the part where a TSA agent gropes your genitalia and makes a face at you

"one must imagine sisyphus happy" i say, dead-eyed, gritting my teeth

I do not respect the grind. Go to bed

Just found out my facebook birding group is public because my cousin (a lawyer who is not into birds) casually said to me “saw you couldn’t identify a willet the other day… pretty embarrassing”

need the studios to cave to the guilds demands very immediately or tom cruise is going to have Free Time on his hands for the first time in 42 years we as a species cannot allow that to happen like this is what he’s like when he’s busy working every single day of his life can you imagine what would happen if he got BORED

oh so we’re just stealing amanda marisatomay bits now