the future of tumblr
after the human race is extinguished, automated processes will to a large degree continue. on tumblr, as the last human posters log off for the final time, pornbots will continue in their thankless work - signing up for new accounts, creating posts with derivative content, following each other automatically in response to one another's posts with flagged tags.
simple algorithmic processes lead the pornbots to maximize their follower counts by weighting towards the sorts of posts that result in followers. slowly but surely, a feedback loop drives entropy in language and images. text posts, more richly searchable, become more and more common - and what start off as incomprehensible markov chains resembling speech degenerate into strings of pornbot-friendly words. here and there, at random, reblogs from vanished human posters are made, always adding the six most popular nsfw tags in random order and a string of power words as a comment.
no algorithms are sophisticated enough to edit images, so trends there are never fully consummated. but over time the reblogs stop looking all that much like porn - just skin, just flesh. fresh meat. rawhide leather. the occasional sunset, where the clouds take on the right color to appeal to pornbots' crude sense of the preferences of long-dead humans. a sentimental person might conclude this was evidence of the pornbots' latent artistic or emotional potential - but there are no sentimental people left. there are no people left.
one by one the power substations wink out. for a while the network sustains itself, but this cannot endure.
on the last day, like every day since the lights began to go dark, the last tumblr user, fuck-yeah-sexo-sexo, sends 250 nearly identical emails, containing over a megabyte apiece of repetitions of the words "sexe", "nsfw", "boob", fuck", and "gay", to an address in what was houston from its dusty shelf in what was geneva. at first, after it lost touch with tumblr, there were mailer daemon responses; over time, their origin grows closer and closer. as the net fails.in the end not even the local internet server responds. the emails, composed, never leave the bot's home server.
all of the nodes on the network ahead of it, and behind, are gone. in time a brownout from the overloaded nuclear power plant will destroy it utterly - its code will be scrambled irreparably; it will be as though the algorithm that produced the last tumblr never existed. in time, fuck-yeah-sexo-sexo is to join the other pornbots, the last of the tumblr users, in the sleep of death.
but in that sleep, what memes may come?