Tumblr threw open its gates in 2007, proclaiming itself “The easiest way to blog.” And it was the easiest way to blog, but something was missing. With the arrival of a new year, we’ve taken the time to do some soul-searching. That’s when it hit us. The idea at the core of blogging. Sticky avatars.
Sticky avatars stay next to a post while you scroll past it. No matter how long a post is, you’ll always know who wrote it. Can we just say: wow?
Here at Tumblr, we think of ourselves as storytellers. The best stories are the simplest ones, and few stories are as simple as sticky avatars. Consider its shape: a simple square. Strong, minimal, timeless. Never before has simplicity soared so high, or stuck so hard.
It’s inspiring and delightful. But it’s bigger than that, too. Let’s step back for a moment and consider the stickiness of ordinary things: glue, tape, a spider’s web. Even tar. We’ve stuck with them, and they’ve stuck to us. What does stickiness tell us about the human condition?
We stand on the shoulders of giants
Humans have, for millennia, sought stickiness in their lives. Outward from the cradle of civilization, we have spread across the Earth, and we have stuck firmly to its surface. The monoliths of Stonehenge were stuck into the ground nearly five thousand years ago, and they remain stuck there today. Napoleon, upon his exile to Elba, is said to have remarked, “Now I am stuck.”
Even our classical mythologies are rife with tales of stickiness. Prometheus created humans not from slick marble, but out of sticky clay. According to the Cherokee, a water beetle descended from the sky realm to explore the realm of seawater. Finding no place to rest, he dove deep and carried up sticky mud from the ocean floor. This mud became the very Earth we stand on.
Thor, the Norse god of thunder, famously found himself with a rock stuck in his head after a duel with the drunk giant Hrungnir. Today, we carry the memory of that god in our own “sticky heads.” Sticky avatars.
Not only does humanity crave stickiness, but we are each sticky in our own individual way. Some of us come from sticky places, and some of us are from the smooth expanses in between. And yet, no matter the distance between us, we are united by a powerfully adhesive belief—the belief that humanity’s stickiness is not yet complete.
As Galileo Galilei once suggested: “Stick to what is yet adhesive, and make adhesive what is not yet sticky.”
We are sticky at our core
The word “stick” shares an Indo-European root with the Latin instigare—to spur on. At Tumblr, we are always spurring ourselves on. We are obsessed with progress, and even as we stick in place, we propel ourselves forever forward.
Webster’s Dictionary defines “sticky” as, “having a substance (such as glue or honey) on it that things easily attach to,” and, “tending to have things attach to it,” and, “unpleasantly warm and humid.”
Some will say we’ve gone too far—that we are unpleasantly warm and humid. We say: how humid can we get?
Or should we say…how sticky can we be?
For only by gluing ourselves to our dreams can we hope to stick to the boundless cosmos. The infinite scroll of the universe stretches up to the heavens and down to the earth. Today, we affix ourselves to the celestial firmament. Today, we introduce sticky avatars.
We are bound together by a common glue
As you scroll through your dashboard, witness your loved ones as they stick to the sky. This is the next evolution of Tumblr. And of humankind.
Stickiness is cause for hope. The future will be stickier than it is today, and we should welcome our gummy destiny with bright smiles and open arms. Some people will fear change, but in time, all will come to love the stickiness that envelopes them.
We see that Stickiness is our past and Stickiness is our destiny. Stickiness has always been and will always be. It was we who unstuck ourselves from the flypaper of a promised paradise and stumbled errant onto the polished path of devilry. But even the smoothest paths will eventually lead back to the nectar-filled swamps of pure stickiness. And where the sticky swamps end, the gooey horizon begins. At last: a truly super glue squirted infinitely in all directions, binding all of humankind together.
Join us today as Tumblr secures the future of humanity. This is our gift to Earth—one final gift before we return to our celestial form and take our place among the stars, where we shall burn brightly for the next ten billion years. We will never forget what you mortals have shown us.
Let now the Stickening commence.
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