The Dashboard, Back When It Was Feral

Over the course of a year, this notebook posted more than 3,400 images to its Tumblr feed—not all of them polite. Some followers wrote to say they loved it. Others wrote to say I should burn in hell. These felt like proportionate responses to the content in question.

Tumblr in 2010 was not what it became. The dashboard was a democratic slipstream of art photography, hardcore pornography, animal GIFs, and stolen band shots, flowing past each other with perfect indifference. You’d scroll through a gorgeous black-and-white portrait and two reblogs later hit something that would end careers. Nobody seemed to mind. That was the point.

What made it worth doing was the ecosystem. The blogs I curated from were genuinely unhinged in the best way: Sperm Dump running daily operations with the cheerful professionalism of a small business, Dirty Little Style Whore collapsing the distance between fashion photography and actual filth, Dethjunkie building a coherent goth-porn aesthetic from things that shouldn’t have cohered at all. These people had found a format that let them publish exactly what they wanted, at exactly their frequency, with zero apology—and the result was a kind of authenticity the respectable internet has never managed to fake convincingly.

Tumblr before the content bans, before the algorithmic sorting, before it got sold and resold into irrelevance, felt like a particular kind of freedom. Not the performative freedom platforms sell now—express yourself, they say, while quietly killing your reach. Actual freedom, sustained by obscurity. Horny and violent and funny and beautiful in no particular order, sometimes all at once in the same post.

That version of the internet is gone. The dashboard still exists in some degraded form, but the specific energy of that era—the beautiful garbage, the uncurated honesty, the genuine sense that anything could come next—that’s not coming back. You know it won’t, but you go looking anyway.