MySpaced out

As this goes to press, Southern Exposure and Glowlab’s anti-social-networking experiment at www.nosoproject.com is still under construction.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of places to experience anti-MySpace sentiments in action, and it should come as no surprise that most of them are on the Internet. Simply Googling “anti-MySpace” reveals a panoply of sites dedicated to trashing Rupert Murdoch’s hottest equity. It seems best to begin with the first site on the list, www.myspacesucks.com, which offers a critique of social networking that goes beyond scathing.

Site creators Katie McIntyre and Casey Primeau title their manifesto, “Why MySpace Sucks and So Do You,” and began by eviscerating the various elements of the by now familiar MySpace profile. “These schmucks are not cool,” the disgusted duo write about the Cool New People section. “The fact that they are the first thing you see when you log on is a fucking travesty.” MySpacers who insist on taking their own photographs for their sites should “at least have the decency to wipe your dried jizz off the mirror.”

They save their most vehement vitriol for MySpace founder Tom Anderson, the Tom who appears as the first friend on any new user’s account.

“How does a lonely, single nerd become the antichrist of the internet?” McIntyre and Primeau ask. “He creates a worldwide network for people just like him, with no friends, and automatically puts himself on everyone’s ‘friends’ section.

Tom is perhaps the most universally hated person on the Internet, or at least at www.anti-tom.com, a site that claims its “modus operandi is to take banal pictures of Tom from his profile and the internet—as well as the banal things he writes in bulletins and messages—and transform them into funny and sometimes shocking artwork via Photoshop.”

Works of “art” archived in the site’s gallery include Tom as Jesus, Tom pointing at a prisoner’s penis in an Abu Ghraib setting and a phony advertisement for a vibrating butt plug. “It fits in MySpace perfectly,” Tom beams from the cover packaging.

MySpace sucks so bad there’s even an anti-MySpace laptop computer, reports Nicholas Carlson at www.internetnews.com. It’s called the Neo and its made by a company called AlphaSmart. “What Neo means is no more worrying,” the company advises in a press release. Now there’s no longer any need to count on iffy filters to protect your young ones from MySpace whores. For just $249, parents get the latest in technological innovation: the Neo has no internet capabilities.

“OK, yes, that’s the same price as a new Toshiba laptop at Best Buy,” Carlson deadpans. “But the Toshiba is a stripped down model without the no-Internet feature you’re looking for.”

Not that Internet access is required to encounter MySpace haters. More than one local employer has blocked employees from accessing social-networking sites during work hours. Some antisocial alpha geeks, irritated by the MySpace’s omnipresence, spend their spare time monkey-wrenching the site. One local tech type used a stock photo to set up a phony MySpace identity—age is the only parameter in his profile—then added a marketing program that crawls through MySpace and requests users to become friends with his fictitious identity.

“I want to see how many people will add me as a friend with no clue who I am,” he says. After a week, he’s up to 163 friends, and counting.

“I have no intention of replying to anyone,” he snickers.