In the early 2010s, Twitter became the central nexus of my online life. I would wake up in the morning and check Twitter, and the last thing I would do before going to sleep was check Twitter. Within a few years I had multiple accounts, an After Dark/AD account for kinky thoughts and porny art, a normie politics account, a still MORE normie account under my IRL name for business purposes, a half dozen roleplay accounts for Twitterponies and Mad Men, an account for tabletop gaming, and others I’ve forgotten about.
The MUCKs were moribund dead zones by 2011, and I had drifted off of them and onto Twitter. For almost ten years I had been a heavy user of Livejournal, but I closed and deleted my account when the Russians took over LJ in 2009. Twitter stepped into the breach as my new online home. It was exactly the right place for me. Facebook was for my mom. Instagram was for posting pictures of food and ducks. Other social networks like Ello and Path had popped up but never got traction for one reason or another. I never cared about Snapchat or Tiktok. Furries flocked to Twitter, and then Telegram, so thats where I spent most of my time, along with posting to furry sites like Furaffinity.
And then there was Tumblr.
I had a Tumblr for awhile - it wasn’t furry, just a mood board blog for hipster crap of the era: pics of old industrial equipment and the like. It was for cataloging images to inspire the decor of our Brooklyn loft. There was barely any text in it at all and you wouldn’t guess it was by a furry (or a babyfur) in a hundred years. That isn’t the Tumblr I mean.
The real Tumblr, late-millennial and the quickly growing Gen-Z Tumblr, was nurturing a very different culture. A culture of fandoms and political argument and activism. In politics there was great ferment. The optimism of the Obama election had soured and shifted to Occupy Wall Street and conversation everywhere you went was abuzz with Marxism and anarchism and feminism and all manner of -isms. Tumblr was the home of fandoms: Doctor Who, Sherlock, Harry Potter, Steven Universe and so forth. And those fandoms and shows would get evaluated and judged through a Marxist lens or a feminist lens or a queer lens or a race lens and frequently found wanting. This gave rise to a culture of social-justice warriors, SJWs, a derogatory name for anyone who did things like point out racism or sexism in video games or pop culture. Originally “SJW” referred to people who called out minor problems with excessive zeal and inquisition-like fervor, but over time it began to be applied to anyone who gave a shit about anything even slightly on the left. In 1991 it was ‘political correctness’, in 2011 it was ‘SJWs’, and in the 2020s it was ‘woke’. Same concept, different words.
Tumblr DID have a lot of zealous warriors. Callout culture is a real thing. And Tumblr exported this discourse to Twitter, where it became the locus of what began to be called “cancel culture”.
There’s two kinds of cancel culture. One is the big kind you’ve heard of, the kind that Fox News incessantly talks about: a millionaire comedian gets pushback for saying horrible shit, a billionaire transphobic children’s book author gets pushback for being a horrible transphobe, or a serial sexual harasser gets accused of serial sexual harassment or assault. With extremely rare exceptions, like Harvey Weinstein, nothing really bad happens to the targets of those “cancellations”, instead they get lots of press and Netflix specials. They are embraced and lauded by the right wing, that has learned to capitalize on these celebrity “cancellations” and turn them into debutante coming-out balls for new conservative stars.
The other kind of cancel culture happens to everyday unknown people, usually marginalized, queer or neurodivergent in some way, and can ruin lives. I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes.
In 2015 Undertale came out and was a big hit. It was funded on Kickstarter, and one of the funding rewards was to have your custom character in the game as a side-boss fight. A dragon fur had backed at this reward level, and had their character coded into the game: a plump dragon named So Sorry. And when the information about So Sorry’s origins came out, the backer got absolutely raked over the coals for the crime of - get this - fat-fetish art. It was solely because they liked and drew chubby furry art that they got harassed for months by Undertale fans. That was in and of itself grounds for cancellation. Seeing this happen amid the fandom of a game I adored was frankly terrifying.
There’s a macro fur I’ve known for years. He backed another Kickstarter for a kaiju-fighting video game with a custom-character option at a certain backing level. A variant of his fursona, a big green kangaroo, was coded into the game. Only the game failed to come out and was never finished, for a host of reasons, but who got the blame? Him. For no reason whatsoever aside from his being a macro furry. They just made shit up about him being excessively demanding to the game dev staff and harassed him for months for the crime of being a macro.
In 2018 a fairly well-known (in certain circles) musician I liked was outed as a little and a babyfur, and was immediately accused of the most horrible shit you could imagine, a wave of harassment and vitriol that I had never before seen. It nearly killed her. The same thing happened multiple times mostly to trans fem cartoonists and other content creators that had an existing audience of normies, who see anything relating to ageplay as inherently pedophilic and dangerous. There’s a lot of trans girl littles, because its nice to have the chance to replay the childhood you never had. Thus there’s a lot of targets for this harassment. In some cases it destroyed them, in some cases they powered through it and came back stronger. But it never should have happened. And it still happens with great frequency to this day.
In furry, high profile artists and furry performers stopped getting away with the kind of edgelordy shit they did routinely a few years earlier. 2Gryphon went from headlining Anthrocon to being a GOH at shitty little right wing furcons. Zaush also has a much lower profile than he once did. Cancellation works sometimes, but it’s the very definition of a double-edged sword. The truly guilty are occasionally held accountable, but more often than not its about hitting whoever's easiest to hit.
Sometimes cancellation on this level is warranted, but it seems like the ones that SHOULD get cancelled, rarely do, and the ones who don’t deserve it get the worst of it. Sometimes the Eye of Sauron falls upon you and you’re just persona non grata for while. If you didn’t do anything wrong, stuff will just get made up and attached to you with krazyglue. Evidence will be doctored to prove that you’re not just into Bad Stuff, but you’re a Horrible Person that deserves the worst harassment and death threats and doxxing and swatting that the internet can administer. And then it becomes a self sustaining snowball rolling down the hill when you react to something poorly and it gets worse. Their goal is to drive you to suicide, which they regard as a win. Or at least just to drive you off the internet.
There’s an entire website that exists solely for this purpose, fostering harassment against vulnerable targets. The right wing took careful notes from the SJWs on Tumblr and Twitter and the left-wing cancel culture of the 2010s. They turned it into grooming panic and accusing all trans and queer people of being pedophiles. Accusing someone of pedophilia went from being a rare accusation to a constant drumbeat. At the same time Qanon was concocting wild stories of child trafficking in secret pizza restaurant tunnels, with the Epstein case providing all manner of fuel to the fire. Its moved way beyond young people on Tumblr now. But that’s where it started.
I have some theories about why this happened when it did.
In the early 2010s, the internet had been in public use for close to 20 years, and kids born from 1988-95 were the first generation that had been raised by it and were coming of age. The poorly moderated, wild west 90s-00s Internet of eyebleach and dank memes and horrifying shit was imprinted on them from childhood. I can’t imagine what it was like to see the likes of Tubgirl and goatse when you were 8. It scarred me and I was in my 20s.
On top of that, these kids were also raised in an educational system where “abstinence-only” sex-ed was the order of the day. Both these factors combined to foster a generation that was anti-sex, to be terrified of sexuality and wary of any adults that were so much as existing near them online. That fear can be weaponized and directed like an orbital laser cannon at just about anyone. And boy is that power intoxicating.
When I was a kid we only had to worry about creepos hanging around the playground in candy vans, or the local youth pastor. For a 90s kid, the candy van was inside the house. Predators were and are rampant online. I can’t blame anyone for developing anxieties over it. And when they turned 18 they must have felt like they were being tossed to the ravening wolves, without even the legal protection of being a minor. Sexual assault had once been spoken of in hushed tones, but now every news story was full of warnings about date rape and frat boys and strange drinks and people, primarily women, began to talk more openly about rape and matters of consent as MeToo gained visibility. Consent was no longer assumed even to hug someone. And on top of ALL THAT, queer rights, transgender people, and LGTBQ visibility was at an all time high. Gay marriage was fully legalized in 2013. Something like a third or more of Gen-Z identifies as some flavor of queer. Sexual politics became a flashpoint in conflict between kids and their parents like never before. Trans visibility peaked and the backlash has been severe. I don’t know how it will all shake out.
By the end of the decade Axiom and I had moved from New York back to Canada, partly to be closer to my aging parents, partly because of the hard-right-wing turn of American politics. And we were just settling in here in Halifax when we started to see news reports about a mysterious new deadly virus making the rounds in China.
The Pandemic and What Came AfterAuthor's Note: It might seem like this chapter diverged a lot from strictly focusing on furry fandom, but this was a time when the lines between "furry" and "general internet culture" started to blur. Furries were all over Twitter and Tumblr and participating on all sides of this discourse, as targets and as perpetrators. Non-furries started to see more furries around and they went from "those weirdos over there" to "secret masters of the internet, with lots of money to buy fursuits and pay for commissions". Furries rose in the geek hierarchy as gamers and SF authors fell. Non-furry artists started to joke about doing furry work because furries paid better.