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Of the infinite variety of tumblr

plaidadder

Tumblr just helped me get my daughter’s giant beanbag chair up 3 flights of stairs and I would like to talk about that for a moment because it seems to me to encapsulate something about what makes this platform valuable that isn’t about the pr0n.

So, we bought this giant beanbag thing from an online company that makes them and I think it’s gonna be pretty boss. But it’s huge. It’s nae so much a chair as a kind of giant beanbag oblong which can be shaped into whatever but also just be a kind of substitute couch or bed for flopping on. It’s about 6 feet long but it only weighs about 20 pounds. 

This is not the kind of thing you can have just left on the stoop of your condo building, and we don’t have a doorman, so it was shipped to Mrs. P’s office. I went to pick it up there today. It comes in a huge cardboard box about 4 feet tall and many feet around. Even giving it the most enthusiastic possible embrace, it’s impossible to really wrap your arms around it well enough to pick it up and carry it very far. We managed to shove it into the back of the car and I drove home, very carefully.

Mrs. P told me we’d ahve to wait till she got home to bring it up the stairs together. I got home and said hell with that, with this thing in the car I can’t see out the back and I have errands to do. So I dragged it out of the car and thought, OK, how do I move this thing across the parking lot?

And then I remembered this tumblr post about a theory developed by anthropologists that the Easter Island statues had been “walked” into their places by rocking them from side to side on their bases:

I realized I could do that with this box. I just walked it forward on its two front corners, swaying from side to side behind it in sync with it, and I got it to the door that way; and then I walked it most of the way up the stairs (sometimes I had to resort to other methods to get it round the turns).

I searched for the post because I wanted to link to it; and I found the video embedded in a “did you know” factoid thing put out by a site that generates this stuff and then funnels it into tumblr through its account. But by the time this video got to me, there was a whole discussion on it about this theory, about the relationship between indigenous tradition and this theory, about the phenomenon of Western observers “discovering” knowledge which was not actually “lost” but merely unavailable or incomprehensible to them because of their own thought and belief structures, and so on. You know how these things go. I would not have remembered that post in the original factoid form; but I remembered the conversation around it, because that was interesting to me.

I would never have gone looking for this information. It came across my dashboard because someone I followed reblogged it. They probably didn’t go looking for it either. It got to me through a very long chain of people who had some shit to say about this and wanted to say it, linked for long stretches by people who had nothign to say about it but thought it was interesting. It got to me through a series of human interactions assisted, but not wholly driven, by technology.

With the consolidation of platforms in corporate hands, content is more and more curated for us, by humans or by algorithms, before it gets to us. Algorithms learn to give us more of what we are already looking for. They have a tendency to narrow our social media experience, to send us in a very intense journey down a fairly narrow rabbit hole. On tumblr, weird shit just floats across the transom all the time; and maybe 75% is just pretty or irrelevant/incomprehensible, but the other 25% will include shit you didn’t know you needed, but now find awesome. 

Anyway. Now we have a giant box in our living room, and I have to go clean PJ’s room up so she can actually put the thing in there after she opens it.

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