The Most Beautiful Corpse on the Internet
MySpace predates almost everything—Facebook, the iPhone, the cultural assumption that your social life belongs on a server somewhere. It was genuinely awful: cluttered profiles, music that started playing the moment you landed on someone’s page, animated gif spam in your comments, the occasional unsolicited message from someone who’d clearly been banned from the local park. And Tom. Tom, who became your best friend the instant you signed up, the original parasocial relationship, the only trustworthy presence on the whole platform.
Nobody talks about MySpace anymore except as the first great failure of the social web—the empire that handed everything to Facebook by getting greedy and confused at the same time. My sister still brings it up as shorthand for things that seemed important and turned out not to be. Self-portraits taken at a forty-five-degree angle in a poorly lit bathroom. An Evanescence song on autoplay. An entire aesthetic era that we collectively agreed to never speak of again.
Which is what made the relaunch so disorienting. New ownership, new direction, and Justin Timberlake as one of the faces driving it—which should have made the whole thing easy to dismiss. Then the preview video dropped and I made the mistake of actually watching it. The profile pages, the timeline layout, the overall visual language: genuinely beautiful. The kind of design that makes a Facebook UI developer put their head down on their desk for a moment. I wasn’t ready for it to be good.
The problem is I’m already exhausted. The list of platforms I’m supposed to maintain—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Foursquare, Last.fm, Pinterest, and whatever else launched in the last six months—produces a low-grade guilt that follows me around. Adding even a beautiful new platform to that stack doesn’t solve anything. It just creates another place to feel bad about neglecting.
Maybe it finds an audience in people who weren’t around the first time—the ones who missed the pedo friend requests and the slow-motion decline that played out over five years like a corporate funeral. For them it’s just a beautiful new thing. I genuinely hope it works. I just won’t be there.