Woke was invented by angry schoolgirls

For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior Spad. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements, and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following her, reading and engaging. These were the days of Tumblr, a youth blogging website that functioned like a dysfunctional think tank.

I first found out about Tumblr in 2012, when I was in Year 7; a girl in my year group started a blog about her depression and anxiety and linked it from her public Facebook. I wanted in on her mental anguish – the posts she shared would ring safeguarding alarm bells today, but they seemed impossibly grown-up at the time. At my all-girls state school, having a Tumblr blog was a smug in-group identifier, signifying taste, depth and intelligence: if you already struggled making friends it gave you a leg-up over your happy, popular classmates, who mostly just logged onto the internet to post on each other’s Facebook walls. ‘You’re on Tumblr,’ as one anonymous blogger put it in a viral post in 2013. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, you are the intellectually elite. You don’t learn anything new in school.’ I remember scrawling my blog’s web address on the inside of a toilet cubicle at school; the girl who had written hers above mine mostly posted optimistically about the possibilities of a homosexual relationship between the male leads of BBC’s Sherlock.

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The politics were a major draw on Tumblr, but they were mostly recycled and garbled. If it was on a women’s studies or race relations syllabus at an American liberal arts college, it was on someone’s blog – and then on a thousand others. The average user had no structured philosophical background; she learnt about the world from bite-sized folk retellings of work by Judith Butler, Foucault, bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw, the architect of intersectional theory. There was always some form of Maoist synthesis involved: one of the most influential blogs was called ‘Your Fave is Problematic’. It was created in 2013 with the sole purpose of listing the political wrongs of celebrities. (Stranger cases: Harry Styles got done for making ‘a sarcastic comment on the attractiveness of women in Tamworth’, Katy Perry for ‘trivialising bisexuality’ after singing a song called ‘I Kissed a Girl’.) The blog did a lot to bring cancel culture into the mainstream, even though its anonymous owner was a teenager at the time. An apologetic piece by the blog’s owner for the New York Times, written eight years later, revealed a subconscious agenda. ‘I was interested in knocking people off their pedestals…’ she said, ‘[I thought] I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude.’

This was typical. As we kept telling ourselves, we were not just ordinary teenagers: we were the most depressed and downtrodden of our kind in the First World. The website’s anonymity was a draw to young people who didn’t have social skills – and any we did have were soon worsened by isolation. Our common political denominator seemed to be leftism, but it was actually envy and resentment; you could become a new person on Tumblr, but you could never quite drop the attitude of the school outcast, furious about your exclusion from the ranks of the popular. It was considered good taste to visibly list one’s own signs of privilege, to defer to those more disadvantaged on matters of gender or race, and to chide others who did not.

Tumblr jumped the shark at the start of Trump’s first term and became a ghost town by the end of it; when I made another blog during the lockdowns to promote my writing, it felt like wandering onto the site of Woodstock to find Joplin and Hendrix dead. Some of the original userbase had left and exported the politics to TikTok. But the damage was done: by the start of Biden’s presidency, institutions all over the western world had found themselves embracing a worldview originally engineered by resentful children.

At my London alma mater, decade-old Tumblr politics are now considered good pedagogical practice: an exemplar philosophy syllabus issued in 2024 tells ‘less privileged’ students that ‘it is not your responsibility… to carry the burden of educating others.’ ‘We must be alert to the labour and exhaustion involved when a member of a less privileged category has to repeatedly call attention to problematic and unthinking statements…’ it warns. ‘Be mindful of the space you are taking up.’ I was shocked to find the same hierarchies of privilege in EDI materials recently handed to employees of Westminster council. Similar doctrines in publishing, stand-up comedy and social work seemed to come out of nowhere – but had actually been festering on Tumblr for years. Comedian Hannah Gadsby’s mockery of Picasso in a 2023 gallery show seemed to have been lifted straight off the website; I had seen more bloggers attempting to unseat him for sex crimes than posts about his actual art. Every institutional political correctness scandal has its Tumblr ancestor.

But Trump’s success among the young is a new sign: leftists are no longer in charge of the political internet. In 2025, the streaming-and-podcasting landscape is so overwhelmed by the right that there’s a doomed effort to incubate left-wing influencers. The White House has promoted its tighter immigration policy on X with AI memes, including one of a sobbing Dominican fentanyl dealer rendered in whimsical anime style. In Britain, issues now flow to the papers and Commons by way of anonymous right-wing X users: a recent furore over the Motability scheme was led by Max Tempers, a pseudonymous account who jokingly declared all beneficiaries should have to drive bright green Fiat Multiplas. The very-online right has consciously adopted a strategy called ‘from posting to policy’.

The censoriousness of the left-wing internet no longer looks like a serious threat. This will be a boon for the Democrats if they ever want to get elected again – but both sides ought to watch out. My time in Tumblr’s orbit taught me that the memetic spread of ideology can only ever be bad. There might be no more language policing, but political ideas still get mangled as they pass from one person to the next thousand; there are fewer cancellations, but there is still a pervading sense of resentment. Tumblr was the first expression of that resentment. There will be many more to come.