Nationalise YouTube
How a video streaming service has become our collective memory
How I think about YouTube completely changed — and it’s all down to a search command.
If you type “before:YEAR” into the video platform, it will give you results from that time period. For example, in the image below I searched “amsterdam before:2006” to see videos of the city from the not-so-recent past:
Glimpsing back into this low resolution world, I realised I’d never grappled with quite how old YouTube is. Intuitively, I knew it’d been around for ages, but in internet terms it’s a pensioner.
YouTube launched in 2005, when I was still in secondary school. I remember a schoolmate introducing me to the site on some old-ass, creaking Dell in a cold classroom. I don’t need to tell you how impressed I was.
Back then, the majority of online videos were hosted on sites like Newgrounds. They were buggy and Flash-based, nothing like, say, playing a video file on your computer.
YouTube changed that. It made uploading, embedding, and watching videos on the internet easy. As teenagers, this meant one thing: spending hours finding and sharing the silliest possible stuff amongst ourselves.
It was a ridiculous time, but YouTube professionalised video on the internet, standardising and centralising it in a way that hadn’t been done before.
We don’t need to spend too much time on the next part of the story: Google bought YouTube, the platform went stratospheric, and it spawned an entirely new internet economy.
That’s not our focus today, but if you’d like to explore YouTube’s growth more, this podcast from NPR is a good place to start.
Really, it’s the other side of the video app, its role in our collective memory, that I’d like to dig into.
In a delightful bit of serendipity, this week a software engineer called Riley Walz released a web app called IMG_0001.
Between 2009 and 2019, the iOS Photos app had an in-built ‘Send to YouTube’ function. A large number of these uploads kept their default filename, which was “IMG_XXXX.”
Walz built an app that finds and plays these videos, and it’s magnificent. I’ve pissed away a good couple of hours flicking through them.
If you play about with IMG_0001 yourself, you’ll see why I’m addicted. It’s eerie, it’s fascinating, it’s almost perverse, peering into these slices of a long-past life.
That’s why we need to make sure they’re preserved.
I’ve written before about disappearing digital memory, especially around the early 2000s when digital photography was everywhere, but easy backups weren’t. This created a vacuum between the end of analogue photography and the start of cloud services, and while not seeing pics of my teenage self is good for the ego, it’s upsetting that so many keepsakes vanished into the ether.
My worry is a similar thing may happen with YouTube.
Google has never released detailed figures on YouTube’s storage, but some estimate that a petabyte of data is uploaded every day. That’s a thousand terabytes every 24 hours. It’s incomprehensibly big.
And while YouTube’s revenue is increasing, it’s unclear whether it’s actually profitable for Google.
So, what happens if there’s an economic crunch? If Google suddenly needs to cut corners and make more cash? Well, the obvious option is to start deleting videos and limiting access to the platform in favour of big creators.
Content that few have watched and has been online for over a decade — examples of which will number in the hundreds of millions — could be on the chopping block. I’m not saying it will happen, but it’d be naive to not view this as a possibility.
When we were younger, we were told something along the lines of “the internet never forgets,” but, as time plods on, this seems increasingly untrue.
The Internet Archive — quite literally an archive of the internet — recently lost a legal battle that could lead to it being sued out of existence.
Already, 38% of webpages that were live in 2013 are no longer accessible.
The internet is forgetting. What we once considered immovable turned out to be far more fragile that the paper it replaced.
The digital services we now take for granted can fold, whether through legal pressure or funding drying up. This could lead to internet stalwarts like Gmail or Wikipedia changing or vanishing. And those are huge, what about smaller, niche sites? They may have no chance at all.
The internet that acts as our collective memory, the sites serving as a digital marker of our existence, could literally disappear at any time. While most movies and TV shows from our youth can be found, the things we watch online and absorb today are nowhere near as solid.
So here’s my plea: nationalise YouTube.
Such a wealth of information shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies or governments. It should be owned by us, the people. Those who made it what it is.
For better or worse, YouTube isn’t just entertainment, it’s a vast catalogue of the human experience, the digital age writ large in its endless complication via a uniquely modern medium.
It’s mundane, thrilling, upsetting, embarrassing, inspirational, and every other possible emotion. YouTube is a document of humanity. It’s as close to a real Library Of Babel that we’ll ever get, and letting that slip away is hardly worth thinking about.
Nationalise YouTube. It’s the mess we deserve.