Just today I heard the news that the owners of MySpace, a website that has surprisingly still existed this whole time, are thinking of relaunching the site into an algorithm-free social media site like it used to be in the good old days. If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you already know that I was a big fan of the old internet—that is, I have a lot of nostalgic feelings for technology that was around in my formative years. I try my best to navigate the modern world positively, with as few “Old Man Yells At Cloud” moments as I possibly can, but with a Substack and TikTok algorithm that seems to push nothing but “are bisexual women actually irredeemably evil?” and “Sabrina Carpenter is promoting pedophilia by being small AND cute” content, an old school social media site seems like the perfect thing for me, an adult who still wants to be addicted to the computer.
Because I was a young millennial with parents who were weird about the internet in the mid-2000s, I didn’t have a MySpace account until 2008, where my friend made me both an MS and Facebook account on a sleepover one night. I had maybe a year of MySpace use until the Zuck site took over for the rest of high school. None of my close friends used MySpace either, so my top 8 was absolutely whack and full of people I haven’t talked to in almost two decades. I do remember that my middle school crush had a profile and I would look at it daily like a freak (I was, obviously, never on that top 8). Needless to say, I don’t have a strong memory of using MySpace. We were more of a Neopets and Gaia Online crowd because we were dorks who listened to our parents (boo!).
What I was, though, was emo and the emo subculture basically ran on MySpace. Through websites that definitely no longer exist, my friends and I would get the news on what our favorite band members and scene queens were doing on The Forbidden Site. Color me surprised in 2015 when I learned that Jeffree Star entered the mainstream. The people just a few years older than me showed me an aspirational future to my high school days, but that quickly flopped. Was it because I wasn’t cut out to be a cool scene kid, or because Facebook usurped all social media attention? Who knows!
As someone who has been hanging out on the computer for over two decades, I’ve been on the front lines for how social media has changed. We went from simple websites that looked kinda like shit but forced all the girls to learn a little HTML, to sites with no customization but chronological posting, to where we are now: the endless scroll algorithm. Social media used to be where you could see what your friends were posting in real time, now social media is a giant personal billboard created by scraping all your data and playing mind games on you while you sleep and you never see what your friends post. Very different vibes. MySpace, for example, used to be where people found new bands out of nowhere. Sure, they had to post, but they didn’t have to try to, say, manipulate the Instagram reels algorithm by posting the same content, just different, on the daily in any attempt to be visible and relevant. Posting your new song on a forum is just objectively a lot less work.
Now that I’m getting older, I personally am not a fan of video-based content pushed by an algorithm. This is because I don’t like video editing and also don’t have that youthful beautiful appeal of a younger influencer. I am not an influencer, but I am a comedian and writer and it is hard to get people to read your writing. It’s never been easy, but at least with text-based mediums like Twitter there used to be a possibility to get your stuff out without relying on your face. People have never liked to read, but they like to read it less when it’s my face and voice telling you to click on a link in my bio. The algorithm likes to bury promotional posts. But with an algorithm-free MySpace, there are so many possibilities of promoting my work—such as, having my close friend circle see my stuff and also not interacting with it or sharing it, just like god intended.
In our new age of tech evil and doom, the news that a new social media that will look just like the old social media seems too good to be true. Will the relaunched MySpace actually let you customize your page with code and links to playlist dot com, or will there be a subscription model and/or ads everywhere? Are the people who own MySpace going to be on the board of Palantir? Or are they just guys who want to have a cool site that people will be excited to use? If there’s anything we’ve learned over the years, it’s that nothing is free and you are the product. So where will that fit in here? Or will we just have a cool website that people will use? Or will it be a gimmick for a while and then everyone will forget it to go back to short-form video content? Will we ever stop calling things on the phone “content”?
MySpace is currently a website that is functional and exists. After it really fell off around 2011, the site was still used with some musicians for sharing music. In 2016, a server migration error mass deleted every photo, video, and song that was posted before that year. The accounts themselves were not deleted, though. I did a little perusing recently and while I don’t exactly remember my username, I know there is an account attached to my old AOL email address. In an attempt to password recovery, I had to try and login to that old email, which I haven’t done since probably 2013.
I remember the password, but now AOL is trying to get slick with us and require answering a security question. A security question from 2006. Not what my mother’s maiden name is, or my first street name. No. My very intelligent ass picked the questions “What is your favorite food?” and “What is your favorite movie?” I guess thinking that these answers will be timeless, that me at twelve years old will be the same as me now, twenty years later.
The answer is ruining my life because I apparently have lost myself. I do not remember the past me the way I thought I did. I typed in every single movie I thought I loved back in the day, with no dice. I said “Chinese food” for favorite food because that was a delicacy saved for only the most special occasions. I thought all I ever do is reminisce about the past, but is that past even real? Or am I just a complete sham? Have I actually rewritten history, pretending to have been someone who I never was? Who am I, actually?
SHOWS!
Tease & Resist is putting out our first-ever ZINE and you can get it and see some fun performances from the contributors next Wednesday, August 12th at Cafe Mustache. Party starts at 7:00 and the zines will be $15 a pop. Be there! I’m in it!!
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