As someone who came of age alongside the birth of social media, I was excited to check out Myspace, a new documentary that made its world premiere at Hot Docs Festival on Monday.
The film, I thought, would offer a chance to revisit the optimism and unbridled excitement of the mid-2000s internet, observed from the vantage point of a present dominated by increasingly enshittified apps, AI slop and the erosion of traditional media. I was hopeful it might shed light on how early social media platforms were co-opted by corporate interests and bad faith actors, paving the way for the emergence of oligarchs and techno-fascists with unprecedented access to state power.
Sadly, Tommy Avallone’s Myspace is a shockingly incurious film, one that does not bother interrogating these questions or asking where it all went wrong. Forgoing any semblance of political or social analysis, it instead serves up 96 excruciatingly boring minutes of pop culture nostalgia, corporate back-patting and blinkered optimism.
Myspace was founded in 2003, and quickly emerged as the first social network to massively take off. The platform revolutionized how people connected online, and became a vital space for musicians, artists and influencers to build their audiences. By the late-aughts, every celebrity and even politicians like Barack Obama had incorporated Myspace as a tool for marketing and connecting with global audiences.
It’s a well-known, and relatively uncontroversial origin story. And yet Avallone’s film goes to great lengths to convince his audience of the unique utility of the platform. To that end, he blends archival footage of A-list acts like Adele, Katy Perry and Drake talking about Myspace, with original interviews from an absolute laundry list with past-their-prime celebrities and influencers, each of whom repeat the same point ad nauseum.
Dane Cook wouldn’t have had his career without Myspace, the comedian insists! Nor would Lil Jon have his music career! Tila Tequila? The same boat! And if those three aren’t able to convince you that Myspace was a game-changer, perhaps you just need to hear from the singer of All-American Rejects, or maybe actor and filmmaker Kevin Smith, or the novelty rapper Mickey Avalon.
Chris Carrabba, frontman of the emo-rock band Dashboard Confessional, goes so far as to compare Myspace to iconic venues like CBGBs or “Studio 54 without the velvet rope.”
The presence of this motley crew, I suppose, is designed to evoke a rosy nostalgia for an era characterized by emo-pop and MTV reality shows; to gin up a longing for a simpler, less complicated time when MySpace was at the centre of culture. What we get instead is a deluge of millennial cringe that will leave you feeling queasy and slightly ashamed.
We also spend time with the Myspace founders (Chris DeWolfe, Aber Whitcomb and Tom Anderson), who are portrayed as archetypal start-up bros: scrappy, innovative and ultimately noble. All was going well until 2005, when the founders made the decision to sell the company for $580 million to News Corporation, the infamous media empire owned by Fox News tycoon Rupert Murdoch. That decision, the film argues, marked the beginning of the end for Myspace, which was soon eclipsed by more ambitious and moneyed platforms like Facebook and YouTube. By the start of the 2010s, Myspace had fizzled into oblivion.
Vexingly, Myspace never expands its scope beyond the narrow confines of its subject matter: this is a movie about the meteoric rise and unfortunate fall of a once innovative tech platform, but nothing more. We are told that Myspace’s DNA exists in almost all the social media platforms that would come in its wake, but the film has no interest in discussing the myriad ways in which those corporate platforms have transformed the social and political fabric of our world, for better or worse.
Given the sheer volume of talking heads, it’s clear that Avallone clearly worked his rolodex, yet we don’t meet anyone critical of social media and its well-documented impacts, such as on mental health and addiction. What’s left is a naked attempt to enshrine the legacy of Myspace. It’s an utterly uncompelling attempt to convince audiences that the world was a simpler, kinder, more colorful place when Myspace still existed at the centre of pop culture.
But the documentary’s biggest flaw is that by almost exclusively focusing on Myspace’s business potential, it overlooks what it actually felt like to be a normal young person on the internet during the rise of social media — the excitement of building connections with new people, the ability to perform or shape your identity in novels ways, the awkward flirting, the bullying, the loneliness of sitting on your computer late into the night.
For viewers who want to explore those emotions, I highly recommend 2024’s Dìdi, a moving coming-of-age film about an awkward eighth grader navigating the pressures of middle school, and the ways in which incipient social media played a role in forming one’s identity in the early aughts.
Myspace, unfortunately, is a wasted opportunity, and a waste of time.
