DARCY DUBELL discusses Ester Freider’s study of girlblogging as a radical discursive practice.
When I hear the word “piracy”, my mind drifts back to that now-hideously outdated 2004 anti-piracy ad warning viewers against the perils of digital crime. While Ester Freider’s debut work, I’m like a pdf but a girl, has little concern for illicitly burned DVDs, it does take up the question of what it means to be a “pirate” in the digital age—specifically through the lens of girlblogger culture. By reclaiming and advocating for piracy on Tumblr, Freider reconstructs what it really means to be a girlblogger—framing the practice of curating, archiving and disseminating information as a subversion of traditional structures of authorship and ownership.
Central to Freider’s argument is an expansive definition of the girlblogger, a demographic anchored in an intersectional framework and broadly defined as “long-time Tumblr user”. As a researcher attuned to the platform’s pedagogical potential, Freider highlights how Tumblr’s underdeveloped software renders it resistant to the influencer culture of X and Instagram. She suggests that the “hands off mentality” of Tumblr’s founder has “caused a disproportionate amount of leeway between user content and user surveillance”. In turn, this has fostered a counter-hegemonic space where leftist and feminist accounts, often censored elsewhere, emerge as a mutiny against the Zuckerberg-Musk empire.
Freider’s meticulous (and at times dense) analysis offers a convincing insight into the subversive nature of habitual Tumblr scrolling, where the repost function becomes what she labels “hypertext”—a form of “pleasure not from the inevitability of an ending, but from the multiplicity of openings” (Keep, McLaughlin, Parmar). For Freider, the girlblogger is more than just a collector of niche aesthetics and fragmented thought, but an agent of subversive intellectual exchange. Within the hypertext that the girlblogger constructs, knowledge becomes fluid—a state which Freider labels wetness: an informational connectivity that manifests as “a smooth space, virality, plasma, sublimity, or simply, dreaming”. To “tag into wetness” is to embrace hypertext chaos, freeing knowledge from the rigid intellectual hierarchies of academia.
The first section of the book reimagines piracy not as theft but as a radical, anti-capitalist redistribution of intellectual capital. Freider argues that the girlblogger is so much more than an aggregator of ideas; but an active curator weaving an intricate webs of intextual connections, and she considers this act of digital unshackling as “civil disobedience”. However, while Freider supports the proposal that “digital practices of piracy are inherently nonviolent due to the removal of the physical sphere”, this assertion feels somewhat tenuous in an era of increasing data breach and non-consensual corporate ownership of online identities. Still, Freider is less concerned with the literal consequences of piracy than with its symbolic power, writing: “In small piratic acts on Tumblr, we see a hand reaching out that does not deny but rather plunders its privilege—for the sake of the commons, the stories untold, the ever-teeming wetness”.
In the second section, Freider shifts focus, exploring the girlblogger’s identity through three key metaphors: librarian, spider, and lover. Here, she moves beyond pedagogy to examine girlblogging as a practice of identity formation. She draws from Legacy Russell’s use of micha cárdenas’ concept of stitching together “a curriculum for the play, joy, and exploration of young, marginalized subjectivity”. Girlblogging, she argues, is not just an intellectual act of civil disobedience but an emotional one—a means of self-construction, connection, and devotion to the generative chaos of online spaces.
Freider closes on a note of deep, almost romantic reverence: “For what is love but the encounter, and what you make of it?”It is a fitting conclusion to a work that refuses to relegate Tumblr to the past. Instead, I’m like a pdf but a girl presents the platform as a radical space—one of intellectual and emotional engagement, and one you might just want to log back into.
