MySpace quietly repo's 10 years of digital content

To be fair, it was only “quiet” because no one really seemed to care. But last week MySpace announced in a statement that, “As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Let’s unpack this seemingly innocuous statement Popworms.

I’m going to go right ahead and assume that 90% of us have worked in at least one office environment where we primarily rely on computers. Even archaic or traditionally feet-dragging industries, like legal offices, use computers now. What a time to be alive, am I right? So then I can also safely assume that you’ve interacted with a “tech person” in a professional setting. This is the person that has a decoration-free office or a small corner in the back, or perhaps is only on-site once a month to “run a virus check”. They rarely engage with you but when they do, they force you to question how you even manage to turn on your phone without their esteemed assistance. Do you know why that is? Because they are fucking genius-level IT minds that the right-brained plebes who took General Arts or English or Sociology as a major in University will never be able to understand. We exist on completely different planes, and they are acutely aware of this. Trust me, they talk about it amongst themselves. But we aren’t in on the joke, and that’s why they can say things like “server migration project” while we nod and mutter things like, “That makes sense”, or “So I have to save and restart, got it”.

Server migration projects are a big deal. Yes. It’s an upheaval even in a small office. But I have to wonder if over at MySpace, they wouldn’t have a team of highly capable genius-level people on that project. Like, in my office, a server migration is handled over the weekend by “our IT guy” that I’ve never met and only ever had hostile remote IM conversations with about software expiration. At MySpace, a server migration of that size and complexity would have been a major project, with a major budget, involving teams (plural), and I’d expect dependencies and contingencies for if/when shit starts going sideways.

What I’m saying, is that this statement reads to me as one of those things tech people say because THEY know WE don’t know what they mean. You expect us to believe that offloading 10 years of hosted content wasn’t the goal of this entire endeavor? Or, that if it was truly a server migration “oopsy”, that it’s this much of a shrug off? It’s an “inconvenience” at worst? Goddamn that’s disappointing.

That’s the word for it, disappointing. Disappointing that MySpace thinks 10 years of original content renders so irrelevant that we’ll accept their apology for “any inconvenience”. Disappointing that MySpace thinks losing this content is an inconvenience, and not far more personal or significant a casualty. Disappointing that MySpace is showing the decay of the first generation of digital content production. And lastly, disappointing that I found out about this in a one sentence news crawler, and no one is really all that upset.

An excerpt from the New York Times says, “Myspace.com is still online, but that doesn’t mean Myspace didn’t die. It’s best understood as undead: existing in some corporeal form, with nothing left behind the eyes…” Which is less than a sanguine review of the once prolific platform. I don’t disagree, but I find myself thinking that 10 years from now, will we be reading a similar obituary of YouTube, or Facebook?

Even though I am forever an optimist, I still can’t help but think this event is prophetic and should rattle our heads a bit more than it has. How soon we forget, MySpace was our Facebook Events, Facebook Photos, YouTube Channel, Bandcamp. So what makes us blindly trust that our content will live forever on these platforms, and never be “taken back” or repo’d in the future? And guys, when I say future, I literally mean in 5 years. Would that be, inconvenient?

The subtext of MySpace’s statement is that your digital content is only safe if the platform is making money. This was not a server migration disaster, this was a repossession. We just have to be so careful to remind each other, who really owns our content. They do. Remember, if you’re not paying for it, you are the product.

Honestly? I haven’t logged in to MySpace in probably 10 years any way. So I recognize that I’m building a soapbox out of sand here. My message is: don’t let the tech guy say big computer words and confuse you. Listen, pull back the layers, consider what’s really being said, and you might just find that it DOES mean something - much deeper - to you.