Restaurant spending per capita

Here we have restaurant spending and MySpace traffic, two phenomena that spent the late 2000s moving in opposite directions with the kind of perfect synchronicity usually reserved for divorced couples slowly realizing they have nothing in common. As one climbed faithfully upward, the other descended like a stone into the digital abyss, and both seemed entirely unaware that the other was even a thing. It is the sort of relationship that makes you wonder whether the universe is playing a joke, or whether we humans are simply very good at finding patterns in the noise of our own forgetting.

What actually binds them together, most likely, is something boringly sensible: the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, which made people simultaneously poorer and more likely to abandon dying social networks for newer, less embarrassing ones. Restaurant spending collapsed as household incomes flatlined, while MySpace hemorrhaged users to Facebook at a rate that would have seemed impossible just years earlier—between 2008 and 2012, MySpace's unique monthly visitors fell from roughly 115 million to around 35 million, a drop so precipitous that if you stacked it in dollars it would be the height of a decent office building, and yet nobody remembers MySpace anymore at all. The real correlation, if you squint at it sideways, is probably just economic anxiety expressing itself in two completely different ways.

What we're really looking at is a portrait of a particular moment when the internet was remaking itself and the economy was remaking us, both happening at once, both casting long shadows in opposite directions. We find these paired statistics almost by accident, like discovering two strangers took the same train by pure coincidence, and we feel a strange comfort in the connection. But perhaps that's all patterns ever are: evidence that we lived through the same strange years.