Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary

A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
● 20/07/2024
“Myspace’s ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that.”
– Author and tech pundit Cory Doctorow, recalling the DIY aesthetic of Myspace. In a screed against generative AI, Doctorow contrasts the “ugliness-as-a-feature” of early web counterculture to the homogenized aesthetic of AI art—which he rebukes as “born coopted.”
Pluralistic
● 16/03/2023
“MySpace had neither the edge of a New York City digital media startup. Nor the loose libertarian spirit of Silicon Valley.”
– American writer Joanne McNeil, recalling a more innocent era of social media. In the first episode of Main Accounts, her new podcast on the rise and fall of MySpace in the 2000s, McNeil engages journalists Julie Angwin and Taylor Lorenz about the social network’s spyware-adjacent origins and its infamous 2005 sale to News Corp.
Main Accounts
● 03/12/2021
“The revival of pixel art may be a quest for the kind of variety and texture that massive social-media networks have gradually banished, a harkening back to a messier, more human moment in our digital lives.”
– Writer Kyle Chayka, parsing the current wave of digital nostalgia as seen in MySpace clones, Neopet preservationism, retro videogames, and, recently, NFTs
The New Yorker
● 20/03/2021
“We’re in the CompuServe age of this stuff. Like, we haven’t even gone to AOL or MySpace or, you know, even Facebook yet in terms of lineages, of how technologies develop.”
– Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw, on the transformative potential of NFTs. “It’s an asset bubble, it’s a hype bubble, and it provides some opportunity for artists to have some traction,” Threw explains. “[But] it’s a market that’s just as interested in buying memes as it is in buying art.”
San Francisco Chronicle
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