It's just because of tumblr and now it's amplified by twitter and tiktok.
A lot of trends regarding activism can be traced back to tumblr. Everyone, including corporations, became #feminists because of tumblr. Racial representation and diversity? Because of tumblr. Cultural appropriation? Tumblr. Anyone remember when communism was all the rage on social media? Or maybe it's just me. Most of the modern gay jokes (be gay, do crimes) and "being gay is actually cool" comes from tumblr, and deifying lesbians also from tumblr. "actually nonbinary existed in this random third world country and it's all colonization's fault" also from tumblr. Twitter obviously has a role in this by spreading it even more but I don't really think they created new ideas, just mutated what tumblr bloggers came up with.
It's why you hear the same types of arguments and ideas over and over again and it feels like none of these people can think for themselves or explain things in an original way.
It's hard to know what's going to be the next big thing because there's nothing really there. I don't think people with slight anxiety and awkwardness running around and diagnosing themselves with autism and adhd counts.
Blaming Nintendo switch is very random, it feels like a "correlation does not equal causation" situation.
If it hadn't been Tumblr, it would have been something else. The Tumblr that we know today was very much a creation of its user base, not its staff members or founders, with no such aspirations for the site. They probably just intended it as a slightly more artsy version of Twitter. And (as anti-SJWs often use to point out the hypocrisy) they are
straight Hhhwite males!
Even Tumblr's former CTO and current podcaster, Marco Arment, doesn't even seem to be aware of the meme culture or social justice activism that the makes the Tumblr brand significant. This quickly became apparent in
a podcast he hosted after its purchase by Automattic in 2019 (relevant section at 2:00:04). He seemed to think that, with the right marketing, Tumblr could have been an upmarket Instagram clone without the ads. He even voiced the opinion that it maybe should become this in the future.
The SocJus mind virus takes hold easily in spaces like Tumblr, Twitter,
knitting circles, and Tiktok, but these are
not where it ultimately came from. The real culprit is likely to be a complex combination of academia, fatherlessness, the decentralisation of information (an unavoidable byproduct of mass internet access), and the neoliberalism that these folx claim to hate.
If you look more than a little bit back in time, you'll notice a lot of Tumblr's talking points have been around in some form for decades – they just weren't very popular until SocJus ideology went mainstream. Cultural third genders, the addition of T to LGBT, and otherkin communities all seemed to blow up during the 1990s, the latter of which specifically owes its existence to the early internet and newsgroups. Heck, the tranny fucking athlete debate received (some) news coverage
in 1976 [
archive]. It's older than most of us.