If it’s something that was done and there was no mainstream blowback then it wasn’t an unambiguous norm violation. Also, norms aren’t content-neutral.
For anyone who’s nervously wondering how to avoid being aggressively sanctioned in public for their views/writings: Don’t…. be confrontationally nonconformist…. unless you have a sufficiently powerful outside institution backing you up. This is sheerest common sense, and the whole reason that dramatic public censure is public and dramatic is that it’s for things that are virtually impossible to do on accident.
Ah, yes, things that are virtually impossible to do by accident, such as the dongle thing and the shirt thing.
And it is worth remembering that “confrontationally nonconformist” includes things like “you donate money to a campaign for a state ballot proposition that wins the popular vote” and “someone finds out that you do BDSM”.
Tumblr kinda relies on being esoteric and cumbersome enough a platform (e.g. indexing, basic usability, permalinking, etc. are all complete garbage here) to keep the normies away. A large amount of seminal discourse is happening here (ironically, @argumate will probably unironically deny this (or make a joke about the word “seminal” as a dodge)) and subsequently failing to remain easily traceable as the source by the time it becomes a wikipedia citation or a news article (e.g. donglegate-type discourse and the Scott A.s, and @kontextmaschine posting Pepe in 2014, before Pepe was supposed to be a right wing thing).
Classic blogs were kinda like that in the ‘00s, and the same is perhaps true of USENET in the ‘90s.
I think it’s important for obnoxious thinkerpeople to stick their necks out a bit, and that includes reputational risk. If you don’t harvest risky future potential while people are still being civil, things will eventually turn uncivil (e.g. Rotherham and the rest of the UK and the rest of Europe). The actual measurable risks to the openly opinionated contrarian in a genuinely violent society are a lot greater that the ones in a less violent society (duh). It’s not a paradox but a pigeonhole to say that people who would care to avoid a particularly violent future have to take risks now, while things are still generally nonviolent.
Hmn… fair enough.
Though I benefit a lot from the Tumblr format in terms of average length, time-to-feedback, etc. Most blog entries out there have no comments, and nothing like “likes” to indicate perceived value and uptake, nor reblogs to spread them.
