asher

25! (he/they)

[normalmammal]

I’m so pro abortion I feel insane hearing any other take on it

[normalmammal]

Even lefties I know will eventually concede to some situation where they think it’s right to force someone to carry a child against their will as if that’s not one of the most inhumane and cruel situations to put someone in regardless of any other factors

[inacatastrophicmind]

[mortalityplays]

remember like 15 years ago when black bloggers were talking about this exact shit, 'digital blackface', white internet users appropriating images and clips of black people and using them as cartoonish exaggerated expressions of absurdity or high emotion. straight line from minstrelsy to your reaction gifs and nobody fucking cares any more. white people just decided not to acknowledge it and it went away, just like every other time black users have ever tried to criticise any aspect of online culture.

[phenomenologically]

On the contemporary internet, things have been turned inside out. Exchanges that have historically taken place in the underground of black social spaces are now vulnerable to exposure, if not already exposed. The call-and-response creativity of Black Twitter is overheard and echoed by White Twitter, and viral dance phenomena like the whip are seized on by the likes of Hillary and Ellen. Together these objects — and the countless others in circulation, literally countless — create widespread visibility for blackness online. Blackness once again takes up its longstanding role as the engine of American popular culture, so that we find ourselves where we were in the 1920s with jazz, in the 1950s with rock ‘n’ roll, in the ’80s with both house and hip-hop — in a time loop wherein black people innovate only to see their forms snaked away, value siphoned off by white hands.

All the creative labor of the black collective being aside, there is a palpable blackness to much of this viral content — especially memes — that circulates independently from actual black people. This depersonalized blackness is shifty and hard to pin down — as is the blackness of any object or subject, really. It makes itself known through language, through an aggressive use of maneuvers associated with black vernacular speech, explicated in Manuel Arturo Abreu’s “Online Imagined Black English.” One finds captions littered with “bruh,” “fam,” “lit,” and, of course, “nigga.” This blackness is also signaled vaguely through the presence of black subjects. Athletes like Michael Jordan, rappers like Lil Mama and Birdman, and actresses like Skai Jackson have become vessels for affects extending beyond their own individual capabilities.

[...]

Memes move like blackness itself, and the meme’s tactical similarity to historical black cultural forms makes them — predictably — vulnerable to appropriation and capture. The meme is a form that allows for a sense of collective ownership among those who come into contact with it — black or nonblack. The meme seems open to appropriation and interpretation by whoever possesses it for a moment, echoing Fred Moten’s description of blackness as being only what we hold in our outstretched hands.

When we say that the internet extends and exacerbates the same old offline relations, we mean it. In keeping with historical precedent, the cultural and affective labor of black individuals online largely goes unrecognized and un(der)compensated. Compare the nonexistent returns seen by black teens for introducing the whip to the lifetime supply of Vans shoes gifted to the Damn Daniel kid or the nearly half–million dollars worth of swag that Chewbacca Mom received for her most abject display of consumerist bliss.

[...]

“Rather than capital ‘incorporating’ from the outside the authentic fruits of the collective imagination,” Tiziana Terranova argues in “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” “it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a field that is always and already capitalism.” Likewise, memes — even when produced by black users — cannot be viewed as objects that once authentically circulated in black circles for the enjoyment of the black collective but instead are always already compromised by the looming presence of the corporate, the capitalist. As such, the meme will probably never manifest blackness in a traceable form such that it might be fully claimed by the black cultural body. The internet, which was advertised as a way to free us from our bodies, has merely confused our limits and identifications, providing just enough flexibility to, in artist Keith Townsend Obadike’s words, “make the same old burnt cork blackface routine easier.”

Aria Dean, "Poor Meme, Rich Meme"

[hollanovulation]

my sondaughter and their cheesecake factory waiter bf about to be naked on live television tmrw because of my government’s tax funded yaoi show

[forestgreenlesbian]

Water For The People, Paul D’Amato

[persianmom-deactivated20260602]

obsessed w this nail art by @manicures.nyc

[boghermit]

Happy May the Fourth to this tweet specifically

[dnp-as-posts]

[gagagagagugagaga]

[thisfeebleheart]

Ilya slinging his left arm around Shane during kisses ↪ requested by anonymous

[sickroomcookery-deactivated2015]

Antler lock

[orteil42]

i always love when a horror movie is like ohh we are a group of people from various backgrounds stuck together in this motel/gas station/roadside diner/grocery store/shopping mall/warehouse/underground bunker/fallout shelter/research facility/military compound/prison/police station/office building/apartment building/school/hospital/church/bar/music club/amusement park/resort/boat of some kind. the baddies are coming. quick! let us organize into some sort of social commentary

[ordeals]

Julia Soboleva, Sacrificed Beings to the workshop of becoming somebody

[anasabdin]

Conditions Apply [ 10 colors ]

[catullus101]

Avel De Knight, Two Young Men, charcoal on cream wove paper, 1940s

[ganymedesrocks]

Avel De Knight (1923–1995)

[ganymedesrocks]

Susanne Hay (1962 - 2004), born and raised in Stuttgart, Germany. After studying at the Kunst Akademie, Stuttgart, she studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she lived and worked as a painter since 1983. Inspired by @anglofranco, via @edmdantes

[liv-empyrea-deactivated20260324]

You can make the world a better place by becoming a trans man.

Each trans man and trans masc in the world is a step closer to a more beautiful world.