Limitless animated cat GIFs. Celebrity obsession, celebrity shaming. Star Trek fashion comedy blogging. An ocean of NSFW pornography. TUMBLR has more hypnotic distraction material than any other social media site to date. And the best part is, you don’t have to worry about regressive paid safety-patrollers deleting your profile for uploading a pic of a nipple. Yes, Tumblr is a voyeur’s (or exhibitionist’s) paradise – capable of time-sucking up large swaths of productivity. Procrastinating ’til the last possible second? You know just where to go.
Yet buried within this cornucopia of pop culture, smut, and GIF mind-numbery are untold volumes of radical content covering social rebellions rejecting global injustice. The American corporate MSM ignores topics like these, and for good reason. From Istanbul, to Brazil, to Greece, to San Francisco, to Egypt, revolts against austerity, against corporate theft of the commons, against capitalism itself are taking place. While not nearly so admirable as Twitter where it concerns user privacy, I count Tumblr as likely the best graphically oriented mass blogging site for subversive journalism. Below are some of the finest I’ve run across over the years.
HUMAN SCALED CITIES: Urban economy, adaptive urbanism, impact of tech in urban life, sustainability, transport.
RAGE MOVEMENT: Based from anarchist and socialist schools of thought pertaining to anarcho-syndicalism, autonomism, anarchist communism, individualism as a societal platform.