Before the Machine Knew

In June 2006, Myspace passed Yahoo Mail and Google Search to become the single most-visited site in the United States. It was signing up 200,000 people a day. By August the hundred-millionth account would go live, and Google would hand it $900 million for the right to sell ads against all those Top 8s. For one strange summer, the busiest corner of the internet wasn't a search box or an inbox. It was a place people went to be somewhere.

I want to be precise about what that number measured, because it wasn't web design. Myspace was, by any engineering standard, a disaster — a CSS injection people exploited on purpose, a database held together with prayer, profiles that could freeze your browser with one embedded song. It beat Google anyway. What it measured was a behavior nobody had named yet: hundreds of millions of people using the web not to find things but to exist in front of each other.

And here's what makes June 2006 worth a moment of silence: the machinery hadn't caught up.

Twitter was three months old. Facebook still mostly checked your school's email domain at the door and wouldn't open to everyone until that September. The News Feed — the algorithmic ranking layer that would teach every platform to optimize you instead of serve you — didn't exist yet; it shipped that fall, and people hated it. YouTube was four months from being swallowed by Google. There was no infinite scroll. No engagement score. No A/B-tested outrage. The word "feed" still mostly meant RSS.

You arranged your own profile. You picked your own song. You ranked your own friends, cruelly, in public, by hand.

It's tempting to call that the innocent web — something you did to rather than something that did you. But look again at that Top 8. Ranking your friends in public, by hand, hungry to be ranked back: that's engagement optimization, run manually. The appetite was already there. We were already feeding it ourselves.

So what actually changed that autumn wasn't the appetite, and it wasn't even the money. The data-as-asset machinery was already humming — Google had just paid $900 million for the right to sell ads against those Top 8s, and Myspace had already handed itself to News Corp. The discontinuity was narrower and sharper than "they started monetizing us." It was algorithmic ranking of attention. Somewhere between the News Feed and the For You page, the instrument stopped tuning to you and started tuning you — and it did that by industrializing a logic you were already running by hand. Shoshana Zuboff would need until 2019 to give it a name — surveillance capitalism — and the uncomfortable part of the name is that it never replaced our agency. It fed on it. The raw material was always our own need to be seen.

I'm not nostalgic for Myspace. It was ugly, it was broken, it sold itself to News Corp and got run into the ground inside five years — the original cautionary tale about what happens when a place people love becomes an asset somebody has to monetize. The decay was already in the source.

But June 2006 was the summit before the descent: the last moment the most-used internet in the world was a thing people made instead of a thing that made people. We beat Google with hand-built HTML and bad music, and then we handed over the keys to whatever ranked better.

Mark the date. It's the last time the web didn't know what we were worth.