I wrote this in response to someone who simply said, “I agree, it is sad that MySpace is a necessity of communication between friends these days. Perhaps we could sabotage the system?” in reply to my rather sad return to MySpace after about a month away from it.

It would be nice to go back to the days of AIM screen names or just email addresses, but it’s far too late for that.

If you’ve seen the movie Network, and if you haven’t–you should, there is, I think, a great parallel between the anchorman who was once a rising star now being the burden bringing the network down, and MySpace once seeming like such a great idea that has now turned into a clumsy lethargic beast that is bringing all of us down. The fate of the anchorman and the fate of MySpace should be one in the same.

As someone who has spent over half his life on the internet, it is amazing how awful it has become. There was always bullshit on the internet, but Blogs and MySpace have made it all so easily accessible that it’s impossible to escape from. Small islands of reprieve, there are, but amid an ocean of people screaming ‘look at me! tell me i am interesting.. or at least just tell me i’m hot!’ and I guess I am one just like all the others.

You probably didn’t expect a lengthy rant, but I’m not done yet, oh no! I suspect our lives would be better without the internet. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never lived a life without the internet or a cellphone, but I have this nagging suspicion that things would simply be easier. Our lives would be smaller. People would be more valuable to us if we couldn’t look at our MySpace profile and say, “Ahhh, it’s OK if I lost one friend, I’ve got hundreds more!” I wonder if people were happier back before telephones, when the only way to communicate with someone was to walk over to their house, and if it was too far to walk you just didn’t know them.

I remember growing up that all the neighbors on my street knew each other, we all talked. They were all old people who have died and the people who have moved into the houses to replace them don’t talk to each other. I’ve been back here for three years now and I don’t know any of the people on my street, and my parents have since grown reclusive like the majority so they don’t know either. It seems so strange to me. I, myself, am reclusive and made uncomfortable by the presence of unfamiliar people in social settings, and I wonder how much of this is the responsibility of the internet neutering my ability to comfortably meet new people through anything except a screen?

There’s a story, The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, that you should read. There’s a copy of it here.

What is amazing is that about seventy years before the internet even begins to exist, Forster accurately describes all the social dysfunctions that are only now beginning to plague us as a society. I already have friends (friends Juan shares with me) who would rather stay home and play videogames on Xbox Live rather than get together and, well, play games face to face, or anything else. I’ve got a friend who isn’t addicted to videogames or anything of their ilk but is more than willing to admit to the fact that he just doesn’t like to leave the house any more. People like this have always existed, I guess, but they were people on the fringes of society. The internet is the great uniter, people of all sorts of fucked up quirks can find each other and breed their sicknesses (think of furries, the whole YIFF thing, underground communities of pedophiles who once had to trade kiddie porn secretly through envelopes passed hand-to-hand can now just upload it to a server where hundreds of them can receive it all at once!) in relative private, or in many cases, fully public. How unfortunate it seems to me, then, that the internet is uniting us all in one big anti-social dysfunction and the programs behind it–Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, et al.–are actually crafted under the guise of being “social applications”.

Maybe I am being overly doom-and-gloom about it, but I have been watching it build over the last couple years, and a lot of it hasn’t anything to do with the internet specifically–Los Angeles has always been an anti-social kind of place, and America at large is becoming a national full of people isolating themselves from each other–but the internet is certainly helping the process along and I don’t think it’ll be long before what Forster describes actually happens, but his story has a protagonist that tries to wake us up from a bleak future, albeit somewhat accidentally. By the time our future becomes that, will there even be an organized machine to bring down? Myspace itself is already too big to be taken on by a single person, no hacker no matter how experienced could possibly delete MySpace entirely from existence. What happens when it’s the whole of the internet that becomes the slowly lumbering beast of burden weighing down our ability to communicate with people face-to-face?