It’s loud and bright and productive and glamorous. It’s fast-paced and things cycle through the environment in hours. Everyone is trying to fight for their position in the food chain and stay Relevant. There are lots of pretty things to look at. If something gets Popular it has an impact on everything around it, for a brief time until the next big thing arrives. To an outside observer it’s chaos but to those involved it has order, reason, a Purpose.
Tumblr is like a deep-sea ecosystem.
Things are slow and weird. Memes bounce around for years and even decades. People exist in their little isolated hydrothermal vent communities of mutuals. Sometimes something big happens (suez canal, November 5th, Queen Lizzie kickin’ it) and we all gather around like a whale fall but for the most part we’re just snootling around in the sand doing whatever the fuck. Occasionally someone comes down and shines their flashlight around and immediately leaves and tells their friends about what freaky shit we have going on in the depths. We don’t care. We’re very busy talking about Our Friend Jonathan from a book published in the 1800s like worms slowly digesting the bones of a long-dead organism.
Sometimes you’ll be drifting around minding your own business, and something massive and horrible will drift past just out of sight range and you’ll know it feom the way the current changes. And you’ll be glad it didn’t see you.
