Leadership Quote by Mike Fitzpatrick

The flex here isn’t Myspace; it’s scale as a political argument. Fitzpatrick drops a hard-number recital the way lawmakers often do when they’re trying to smuggle urgency into a room built to move slowly. “Just over 80 million” isn’t color, it’s a warning label: you’re already governing a space bigger than many countries, whether you admit it or not. By naming rankings (“sixth,” “eighth”) he translates a slippery cultural phenomenon into the only language policy reliably respects - league tables, measurable dominance, the kind of statistic that can justify hearings, regulations, or budgets.

The subtext is that the internet has stopped being a niche medium and started behaving like infrastructure. Politicians don’t cite a site’s popularity unless they’re building a case about consequences: data, speech, minors, crime, campaigning, surveillance, corporate power. Myspace, in its mid-2000s peak, was also the messy prototype of today’s social platforms: porous privacy settings, identity play, and a sense that culture was being made in public by teenagers and bands as much as by institutions. That chaos is part of the point. A platform that large isn’t just entertainment; it’s a social commons with private ownership.

Context matters because Myspace now reads like a fossil, which sharpens the takeaway: the numbers weren’t about loving Myspace, they were about recognizing an inflection point. Fitzpatrick is pinning a moment when governance lags behind technology, and he’s trying to make “online” sound less like a hobby and more like a jurisdiction.