His only mistake, I think, is following people who use Tumblr like LiveJournal—i.e., as a site for long-form and call-and-response fine-grained social bitching and drama—but in every other respect, he’s absolutely correct; he has diagnosed the ailment without even being asked and for that he will be at best ignored and at worst refuted by the very idiots that have made his online experience such a facile, inherently commercial experience.

I use “This Is My Jam” as an occasional and convenient transmitter of whatever earworm I’ve got crawling around in me; a bunch of people I knew were doing it and I was invited and I thought OK, fine, there is a sort of sick and intimate pleasure in potentially transmitting one’s earworm to another human being that is otherwise, for all intents and purposes, a complete and utter stranger. I do, however, understand how the author I quote below would not feel the same.

pudensis:

I am continually impressed by the internet’s ability to find new ways to tell me no one cares.  When I was your age I had to log into a site and maybe not get any special notice of new correspondence, but now they come and find me for the specific purpose of pointing out that nothing has happened.  It wouldn’t have been more perfect if somebody built a robot to come to my house and throw a triaminic-filled water balloon at me.

Hey person, just a reminder that you’re irrelevant.  Better keep investing time into it!

And how presumptuous to assume I have a new favorite song!  That wasn’t even my new favorite song.  I haven’t listened to a new song willingly since November.  Neither has anybody else I know but we all listen to different exact same songs.  That’s what brings us together.

You know what I like about tumblr?  Nothing.  I always used to get these stupid reblogged arguments and I could never tell which alternation of text indenting I was supposed to agree with because everybody involved was just as closeminded and smug and it would keep coming back and getting longer, and I would always want to ask why are you paying attention to these idiots who make you miserable in the first place?  And so I stopped.  That’s not why I brought it up but I have made the decision to leave a record of it.

Right tumblr, it’s totally useless.  It makes no sense and it’s impossible to find anything that was posted more than a day ago.  All of these “networking” hideousities I’ve been killing myself inside with since 2006 are garbage.  But they never took deliberate action to make me hate them or myself before.  I like nothing about tumblr but I don’t quite hate it.  It has all the same arbitrary value-assigning as every other site but it’s so shoddily programmed that there’s no actual correlation between the real numbers and the ones it shows, so it’s slightly harder for me to tell what copy-puking plaidmonger I’m “losing” to and I appreciate that.  We live in a very boring exciting age.

No one thing pushed me “over” any “edge.”  I’ve been tumbling down a staircase for the last few years.  Fitting that there is finally an appropriately named system to document that on, and then never be able to locate again.