layer 1: there's a quote that goes "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." It is commonly attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but is a paraphrased translation into English (by Slavoj Žižek) of a translation into French by Gustave Massiah; a more direct translation of Gramsci's writing from Italian to English would be "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." (In Italian it reads "La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati." And it was written around 100 years ago!)
This quote has gained a lot of attention in the last ~decade (rough estimate), likely as a result of people relating it to current events. Lots of those events that look like the old world dying, after all, and the new world struggling to be born (or you might seek to actively make implications about such events via this comparison). And there truly is no dearth of monsters to be found.
layer 1.1: In Revolutionary Girl Utena, student council president Touga Kiryuu quotes Hermann Hesse’s 1919 novel Demian in a poem that opens with the line "If the egg's shell does not break, the chick will die without being born." This poem is repeated several times during the Student Council arc of the 1997 anime, and ties in heavily to the show's themes, especially the first arc thereof.
layer 1.2: The poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (written in 1919, in the aftermath of the Great War and on the tail end of a global pandemic) ends with the lines:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(Neither layer 1.1 nor 1.2 were intentional references on the part of the post's original author, but they are undeniably present within the metatext of the post.)
layer 2: in 2016, QZ.com (Quartz) posted an article about Yahoo's 2013 acquisition of tumblr, in which an anonymous tumblr employee reported Yahoo's Simon Khalaf saying that the site was “going to be the new PDF.” This became a sort of user shorthand/injoke for the idea that executives who are trying to direct tumblr's growth or change are out of touch with user desires or even the practical functions of the site.
layer 2.1: the anonymous tumblr staff member who reported Khalaf's words added: “It didn’t make any sense. We’d walk away scratching our heads.”
layer 3: so the way tumblr works is you can either make posts of various types, or reblog other users' posts. the chronological sequence of posts you make and reblog (based on the time you posted or reblogged them, rather than when they were originally made, in the case of reblogs), functions as the "output" or "content" of your blog. the output of however many blogs a given user "follows" is organized, again chronologically, into that user's "dashboard", wherein they can scroll through the accumulation of posts and reblogs from people they follow.
posts have "notes", which are the sum of every comment, reblog, or like that a user has added to the post.
layer 3.1: when you post on tumblr, you can add tags to that post that are a sort of metatext that is not maintained when someone else reblogs a given post. you can also do this when you reblog someone else's post.
layer 3.2: alternatively, when you reblog someone else's post, you can add a comment directly to that post in such a fashion that it becomes "part of the post" for anyone who reblogs it from you, or from someone who reblogged it from you, ad infinitum. this, combined with layer 3.1, combines to create a sort of post ecosystem where individual posts mutate into different versions and are spread around when they have qualities that tumblr users who see them want to perpetuate for some reason.
layer 3.3: the transmission of posts from OP to dashboard to reblog to dashboard can result in a post that is particularly striking, timely, influential, or controversial accumulating thousands or tens of thousands of notes in the course of a day or less. this may even happen to a post that was made months or years ago, under the right circumstances!
layer 3.4: tumblr users fucking love reblogging references they understand, references they think they understand, references they vaguely recognize, and juxtapositions of multiple references
layer 3.5: there's also the for you page. its got an algorithm. if anyone tells you tumblr doesnt have an algorithm they're wrong.
layer 4: recently staff announced that they were updating the site so that each uniquely commented branch of any given post accumulated its own set of comments, likes, and reblogs. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.
layer 4.1: this change, much like "tumblr will be the next pdf", can be interpreted as the result of upper management being deeply out of touch with the needs and culture of the site, as well not understanding the site's core function.
layer 5: a lot of those unhappy people explained why they thought it was a bad move, at length, in reblogs of the announcement post, comment on the announcement post, and freestanding original posts regarding the change.
layer 5.1: the change was rolled back the next day. there's an announcement about it but i've just about run out of steam on this bit. also they banned a bunch of trans women the same day, which sucks.
layer 6: then the next day, someone made this post... i heard she's hot... i heard she has a really nice rack...
vaporwave
pixelskylines
blakekathryn
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
