Affect's Engine

Affect's Engine is an immersive ethnography of queer people of color on the social media platform Tumblr during its "peak" years, 2010-2015. Alexander Cho tells the story of Tumblr users and the hurricane of content that they circulated-and that circulated around them. Chronicling a formative time in social media history, Cho shows how a multiply minoritized population utilized Tumblr's unique structure to express, emote, and bond together as a survival strategy for resisting white supremacy and heteronormativity. Paying critical attention to user-facing design, he argues that this was not as possible on other platforms. The same features that drew queer people of color to Tumblr-to feel intensely-also explain why the platform did not succeed financially: its design did not instantiate a version of the good liberal subject-linear, singular, discrete, orderly, public, and market legible. While painting a vivid picture of a vital and bygone internet era, Cho asks readers to take seriously how affect is shaped by user-facing design on social media.