Ana Valens’s Tumblr Porn is the first book in a new series called “Remember the Internet.” The premise may seem odd given that the internet hasn’t gone anywhere — you’re literally reading this on the internet right now — but three decades after the launch of the World Wide Web, virtual space has become similar to real space in being littered with the memories of shuttered spaces and leveled landmarks.

One such space is the microblogging site Tumblr in its glory years, the early to mid-2010s. The platform is still around, but it’s a shell of its former self, due precisely to the absence of Tumblr porn. Market research firm Statista concludes that the platform’s December 2018 ban on adult content has been its “undoing,” precipitating a “stark decline” in visitors and engagement. The blog’s latest owner bought it at a fire-sale price, but still has no intentions of lifting the ban.

At its peak, Tumblr thrived on fandoms (after a conveniently timed LiveJournal purge and exodus) and purveyors of all manner of adult content; while Valens doesn’t have any false nostalgia about a space that wasn’t immune to the kind of harassment that crops up everywhere, she argues that at its best, Tumblr facilitated connections not just within but among communities, its organic discovery tools allowing users to explore interests and identities that didn’t fall into an easy taxonomy.

The first half of the book traces the contours of the content and communities that sprang up on Tumblr prior to 2019; several apt illustrations (think tentacles) suggest that a coffee-table book may be in order someday. The second half, broadly, explores the issues around the ban and sounds an alarm about the need for sustainable safe spaces for people — including sex workers and their clients — to engage with NSFW content.

Tumblr Porn is the latest in a growing chorus of concern around broader threats to free speech online in the United States. As Valens points out, the internet as we know it rests on Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, absolving platforms of responsibility for user-generated speech. A law that went into effect in early 2018 removes this protection with respect to human trafficking, which may sound uncontroversial, but had platforms running to cover their asses (so to speak) concerning any content that might conceivably be construed to facilitate prostitution.

Not every response was as draconian as Tumblr’s (Valens derides the platform’s infamous language banning “female-presenting nipples”), but the author argues the law’s effect may have been opposite its ostensible intent. Derived of platforms like Tumblr to connect with clients and network with one another, sex workers are often forced to turn back to pimping, “a notoriously exploitative and predatory practice.”

In the end, Valens (a sex worker herself) argues: “If we want a space where we can be our true selves — a space to learn and to grow and where the most marginalized among us are protected — then we have to create and own such a space ourselves.”

She cites some platforms that are rising in response to this need, which is a hopeful development, but not one that diminishes her elegiac celebration of a community that promoted openness and cross-pollination.

Tumblr was a big part of The Tangential’s rise. When we launched this blog just over ten years ago, Tumblr was investing heavily in creative content, hiring curators to build relationships with communities of artists — including writers like us, as well as visual artists like those whose work is represented in the pages of Tumblr Porn.

We were always focused on writing, but even so, the ban on NSFW visual content affected our tumblelog as well. The selection of our posts that were at least temporarily hidden reveals just how wide-ranging the ban, as implemented by skin-seeking bots, was. Most of the affected posts were decidedly PG: a woman in underwear, shirtless men, people naked in bed with the naughty bits well-hidden. A body-painted bicyclist was certainly showing his schlong, but even that post — our post most unambiguously in violation of the new rules — was nowhere near sex, let alone sex work.

President Donald Trump, who signed that 2018 law, openly called for Section 230 to be repealed, in hopes of giving his Justice Department additional leverage over tech platforms. In documenting the history of Tumblr Porn, Valens has performed an important service not just for its former purveyors, but for anyone who doesn’t want to see valuable content and priceless community deleted with the stroke of a pen.

– Jay Gabler