underrated lotr moment is gandalf’s “let me risk a little more light” so the fellowship can see the ruins of dwarrowdelf.
idk what it is idk how to put it into words but like. such a quick and quiet little moment of, recognizing we’re all in constant mortal peril but while we’re here you should still witness the wonders of the world. while we are here, though it may be on a life-threatening quest, you deserve a little tourist moment. soak it in, the great city that remains long-abandoned and nearly forgotten, the grand pillars that outlived the memories of those who built them. so much of love and life is fleeting in this dark age. but the scraps of it can still be found. the remnants are still here, and even with significant risk they deseve to be beheld.
And Howard Shore went “Do it, Mithrandir, I’ve got your back.”
#and when you consider that this comes after gimli talked at length about the glory of khazad-dum and the place it holds in their history #and then got there to find it abandoned and shattered and filled with goblins and the bodies of his kin #it’s this moment of almost like… affirmation? #no you were not wrong to speak of it this way; yes it is as glorious as you have heard and more #countless dwarves fought and died for this place; it is worth the risk to see what they died for; why they believed it *worth* dying for #gimli is the only dwarf on the quest and in that moment the rest of the fellowship get to see that the creations of his people #are EVERY BIT as spectacular and awe-inspiring as those of elves and men #the movies did gimli wrong in a lot of ways but they NAILED this bit @arafinwes
Honestly the age of even fake-free technology services is ending. Sites and apps have sold all your data, tracked your every move for a literal decade and a half, and they still don’t make enough money to stay afloat. Think about that: Almost every site (tumblr and a few others as notable exceptions here) has spent the past decade scraping every part of your identity to sell it to the highest bidder. Emails. Purchases. Search history. Clicks, website visits, who you have seen, what wi-fi networks you walked by, that you stayed out late last Thursday and what bookstore you stopped by. All to slice you into convenient advertising segments.
And it’s still not enough. Your data, those supposedly-secret pieces of your supposedly-private life - that time you bought flowers for your mom, the time you looked up that health thing, hell, even the fucking phone number you used for multi-factor authentication - went up to sale for pennies.
Sent to dubious ad-companies to scrape whatever profit they could.
And it didn’t even matter.
There is no online space that doesn’t require money. Actual money, not fake ad views-money. Independent forums and Mastodon/Fediverse instances and reddit lookalikes are all put up by people’s own money and volunteer time. AO3 and Wikipedia use volunteers and donation drives.
Because it isn’t free. It never has been.
If you want something to exist, to continue to exist online, the only way to ensure it will stay is to give it money. Actual money. Exposure and ads just do not work, and have never worked. They sold every bit of your information to try to make it work, spent billions of dollars to bleed the internet dry, and it still hasn’t.
Yes, this is a post about tumblr woes. This is also a post about Web 2.0 dying. And also a plea to literally anyone who can afford it:
Pay for sites you use. If you do not, they will not exist. You are on a sinking ship.
I hope people take the above with a state of understanding, but:
People don’t like hearing the above. And yes, it fucking SUCKS. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t had a time in their life when they couldn’t scrape a dollar together, much less $2, $3, $5, for some online-thing when you need that money for groceries and medicines and bills. I know. I know. For some people that time is now. For some people, it was recently. I know.
I don’t have a good answer, save for, if people don’t pay for the sites they like, these sites will die. The communities you have will die, you will lose decade-long followers, fics, beloved art and artists. Fandoms will be scattered into the burgeoning mix of fractured, private, more affordable online spaces, then split further. Maybe you’re fine with that outcome. People tend to feel guilty when someone says the only way to keep something around is to pay, then angry, and then swing for “But what about people who can’t afford it!” I know.
This isn’t about, precisely, you. It is about the singular choice of the entire internet to have decided on an unsustainable model, that have thusly formed beloved online spaces, spaces that are going to no longer be here, probably very soon. And the literal, only means by which to save them, is to give them money.
Tumblr does not have a path forward outside of actual money, given to them by the people who use their service - we know this because frankly, wildly more successful sites than Tumblr also aren’t doing well. I think their only choice is for people to willingly give them money for services-rendered, money to save their little corner of the internet. This might be in buying ad-free, this might be in donation-drives. But that’s it! That’s it.
Web 2.0 is dying. Save your shit. Backup things you like. Preserve it or watch it perish.
