MySpace Is Dead. Time to Move Back?In.

A love letter to digital decay and other bad decisions

I’m going back to MySpace. It’s not any better than anything else, but it’s just worse enough not to be completely harmful. It’s Brooklyn from years back, a shithole with charms and just itching for some gentrification for the savvy settler. That broken down palace where this whole shit show all started. I mean not actually started because there was a lot in the before times. Remember Justin.TV or Habbo? Yeah, I know Friendster is still alive out there, but even my Indonesian pals question whether it’s a good idea to use a social site (now) of that country.

The outcomes give away its origins, the social media thing that we’ve come to love, hate, get roofied by and wake up face down, pants off, and loosely covered by shit stains and a confederate flag. Sure, the drinks started fer free and old friends were found as we sang Blister in the Sun, but how we got that bad taste in our mouths, we might know, but surely want to forget.

You see, things are coming around again, as they do. As left goes way too far left and right goes way too far right, they meet at the other side of the circle and the collision of sameness comes with mayhem. The social sites started out wide open?—?a front porch, not a toilet?—?but that was before the herd of lemmings and louts showed up. A lot of folks thought getting everyone together was a good idea, until the front yard got covered with trucks, engine blocks and hippies so crunchy they despise their own bodies because they’re made of leather. Now our Twitter is something else entirely. Facebook and Meta aren’t throwing the kind of party with drinks anymore?—?they’re hosting the kind where someone turns on all the gas and passes out Bic lighters. And those of us who just wanted to talk and learn and see if we’d still fuck our high school sweethearts? We can’t get to the front door fast enough, but the exit’s clogged with every sort of freak we can imagine.

So MySpace. Yeah. It’s still there and it is a bit of a joke, but maybe it’s our joke to tell and activate. If you still have a login, it’s probably still there. You’d want to change your passwords and your photos will likely be long gone, but it’s been kept alive by a string of owners and dwindling value over the years. What was once valued at 7 billion dollars, bought by News Corp for 580MM, and eventually dumped for 35MM, can be yours for the price of us just showing up. There are some people still there. If you remember who they are, you might be luckier than they are. There’s no phone app, it’s clunky, and the UX/UI hasn’t moved in decades. And maybe it’s a good thing.

We could talk about some sort of social apocalypse or decline or whatever, but the whole neighborhood analogy describes it pretty well. People leave small towns to see the bigger world and as streets fall into disrepair, folks find or fix up nicer ones where the people have common connections and care. For this generation of the social neighborhood, the fires began burning, the uglier celebrations of Halloween have started and something I’ll call ‘bright flight’ has a lot of people setting up shop on Bluesky, Substack and other streets, pretending their digital brownstones won’t eventually suffer the same fate as every other gentrified corner of the internet. I’m gonna head back to the space that was mine and yours and maybe you’ve never even been to as my next stop. I hear once we replace the lead paint and clean out the asbestos, it’ll be worth something again.

You can find me there as “Bureau of Bad Decisions.” If you get lost, just ask Tom.