Full Retro, Baby: Why Myspace Might Actually Come Back at Exactly the Right Time
- Rich Washburn
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
I built a retro terminal website the other day. Boot sequence, DOS prompt, CRT themes, the whole thing. Spent a couple hours on it, purely for the joy of it. It lives at rwashburn.neocities.org and it's called
"En'Riched Retrovation v3.1" and yes, I'm aware of how ridiculous that is. But here's the thing: I'm not the only one going retro. And this time, it might actually mean something.
The Myspace Relaunch Is Real
The screenshot making the rounds isn't Facebook rumor mill noise. Chris and Tim Vanderhook — the brothers who bought Myspace and have been sitting on it — publicly said in the new Myspace documentary that they're planning another relaunch and are waiting for the right time.
What's interesting isn't that Myspace is coming back. It's how. The vision they're describing sounds almost like a rejection of everything social media became: Chronological feed instead of engagement algorithms. Custom profile HTML again. Background music. Personal pages instead of everyone looking identical. Creativity and music discovery over infinite scrolling. Even the infamous Top 8.
The Timing Might Actually Be Better Now Than Five Years Ago
People are exhausted by feeds that optimize for outrage and attention. We've gone from "the algorithm helps me find things" to "the algorithm decides what reality I experience." A platform that says, "Here's your friends in chronological order. Go make your own weird corner of the internet" suddenly feels refreshing. Not cutting-edge. Not revolutionary. Refreshing. And right now, refreshing might be the most disruptive thing a social platform can be. The wildcard is whether Gen Z cares. Millennials will absolutely sign up out of nostalgia — I'll be right there with them — but nostalgia doesn't build a durable social network. They'll need to convince younger users that ownership, customization, and personality are better than another endless recommendation feed.
Why This Connects to Something Bigger
This actually fits a pattern I've been talking about for a while: as AI makes content creation essentially free, identity becomes more valuable than content. Think about it. If everyone can generate perfect posts, perfect images, perfect videos — then what actually distinguishes you? The content isn't the differentiator anymore. The space is. Having a place that actually feels like yours — not just another algorithmic feed slot, but a corner of the internet you designed, you customized, you made weird and personal — that starts to matter again. Myspace understood this in 2005 without knowing why. The algorithmic social era killed it because scale rewarded sameness. But the calculus is flipping. When content is infinite and free, personality is scarce.
The Lane That Might Actually Work
If they lean hard into AI-assisted creativity without letting AI run the feed, they might have found a genuinely different lane. AI-assisted creativity means: give people tools to build wilder, more expressive profiles than they ever could in the original Myspace days. Custom layouts generated from a prompt. AI music tools embedded in the page. Visual effects that would've melted a 2005 browser. Make the profile a creative canvas again, not a content slot.
Without letting AI run the feed means: no algorithmic ranking. No engagement optimization. No "we looked at what you liked and decided what you should see next." Chronological. Your friends, in order, and the rest is up to you. That combination — AI-powered expression, human-powered curation — is genuinely different from everything else on the market. It's not competing with TikTok's algorithm or Instagram's feed. It's competing with the idea that a social platform should be a place you make yours.
Geocities, Myspace, and the Return of the Personal Web
I built my retro site on Neocities. Neocities is essentially a modern Geocities — free hosting, raw HTML, no templates, no drag-and-drop, just you and a text editor. And it has a thriving community. People build weird, personal, ugly, beautiful sites that are unmistakably theirs. No algorithm decided they should. No feed surfaced them. They just exist, because someone wanted to make something.
That's the energy Myspace needs to capture. Not the nostalgia of "remember when we had Top 8?" but the actual feeling of having a space online that's yours. Not a profile on someone else's platform. A place. The old web was made of places. The algorithmic web turned them into slots. If Myspace can bring back the feeling of a place — not just the aesthetics of one — they might have something.
The Real Question
This is a much more interesting story than "Myspace is back." The real question isn't whether Myspace specifically succeeds. It's whether the cultural appetite for algorithmic, optimized, engagement-maximizing social media has finally peaked. Whether people are ready to trade convenience for ownership, curation for discovery, and personality for polish.
I genuinely don't know the answer. But I built a retro terminal site for fun last week, and I'm writing about Myspace on a Monday morning without irony. Something's in the air.
Maybe the future of social media looks more like the past than we thought. Not because we're nostalgic, but because the things the old web got right — identity, ownership, personality, place — are exactly what the new web erased. And the new new web might need them back.
I'm going full retro, baby. Come find me at rwashburn.neocities.org. The boot sequence takes a second, but the CRT glow is worth it.
Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.
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