Ten years ago today saw the commencement of DashCon, the convention for Tumblr users and its sprawling yet unique subculture. Badly mismanaged and threadbare in programming and participation, the event was a disaster and most famous for the photo of a liminal ballpit in which one could "win" time.
Coverage at the time (including here) was extensive and scathing; recently there have been retrospectives that situate DashCon in an unsustainable era of social media culture, a prelude to the worse failures yet to come.
The ways in which DashCon fell apart are well documented by internet historians, and were fodder for pop culture blogs for weeks after the fact. Reported attendance was only in the hundreds, a mere fraction of the estimated crowd. Special guests and vendors either canceled or were not properly secured in the first place. At one point, O'Neil said she and others were locked out of her hotel room, along with other DashCon guests, because the hotel bills hadn't been paid by the event's organizers.
"It was terrifying. I was hungry and scared," O'Neil recalled. At one point on the second day of the event, organizers gave O'Neil a paper bag and asked her to approach the con's remaining guests to ask for donations to make up the roughly $17,000 they said they needed to keep the con afloat.
FanLore has deeper coverage.
Today, DashCon is still vividly remembered as one of the most spectacular disasters in recent fandom history. For many on tumblr, it deflated the myopic fantasy of the site as an idyllic haven for fandoms, and acted as a lurid deconstruction of popular posts speculating what tumblr would have been like as a school/island/etc. Some saw the event as a testament to the cringe-worthy nature of fandom culture on tumblr and even cited it as the cause of SuperWhoLock's downfall on the site; others saw it as an unfortunate scam leveled towards some kids who just wanted to have a fun time.
The Ball Pit has its own article!
As compensation to attendees who had paid extra for reserved seating to the canceled reading, the convention organizers promised, among other things, "an extra hour in the ball pit." The ludicrousness of offering 500+ fans more time in the overly small ball pit immediately took off and fans began flooding tumblr and twitter with photo-manips of the ball pit in various scenarios, often combining them with other Internet memes. Several ball-pit cosplays at other conventions have also photographed and posted to Tumblr."
Some date the death and rebirth of the internet to Trump; I date it to the ball pit.
Previously:
• 'Tumblr convention' a total disaster
