The production of destruction: How employee values shape platform afterlives

Abstract

This article addresses how platform closure is produced by drawing on interviews with former employees of MySpace, the social media platform popular in the mid-2000s. Focusing on how staff grappled with user-generated content and user data while sunsetting an old version of the MySpace platform in 2011 to make way for a newly configured MySpace platform that debuted in 2013, it chronicles the decisions that platform employees were faced with while closing a platform, and the values and worldviews that ultimately shaped what remained of the old site. The article shows that sunsetting a platform and acts of technological destruction more generally are not arbitrary or neutral processes with fixed outcomes, but rather processes of sociotechnical production that vary in consequential ways.