useless videos - 2026/02/23
now more than ever, i think it's become increasingly rare for people to take on endeavors that have no real payout. while the internet certainly has exploded over the past 20 years, many of the weird and niche communities and content that used to define the internet now has been put to the wayside. i guess this is the natural consequence of our day and age, where hypercapitalism has led to both a mindset and arguably a necessity to accumulate as much attention capital. media of all sorts is now made with the algorithm in mind, prioritizing making everything attention grabbing and palatable to a wide audience. even modern internet subcultures and "aesthetic microcommunities" often only exist transiently, where the community gains value more so for the niche/obscureness in contrast to the mainstream, and not for the content itself. i think it's interesting that post covid, there hasn't really been any new and strongly atomic internet subculture.
i do grieve the internet that many of us grew up with. if you were willing to wade through all the content, you were likely to stumble across someone's niche creation. from music, to daily blogs, and even entire software projects, the cyberstranger would dedicate an absurd amount of time into a given personal project, and publish all of it for free and without much curation to the internet. back then, views meant nothing, and there was no money to be made on the internet. what this also meant was that everyone who was creating was creating out of a love of creation itself. the internet was effectively a publishing house for all the unprofitable, non-marketable, and fringe creators of the world. and with the lack of algorithms, things mainly spread from word of mouth (or more aptly, word of forum post). since you never knew how the wind carried your name, you only created on the presumption that first and foremost, the content you were making was meaningful to you.
it's a shame that day and age is gone. in an ideal world, i would ban all algorithmic feeds, and try to foster the grassroots fringe communities that the internet was uniquely home to. i recognize that this would be unreasonable; it was inevitable that capitalism would find its way to take advantage of the hyper efficiency of cyberspace, and push it like a drug (arguably, the internet was only able to reach today's ubiquity thanks to those interests). however, even with pandora's box being opened, i still look for little wisps of that bygone era, letting myself go down deep youtube rabbit holes or scrolling to the 9th 'o' on Google.
i recently came across one of these strands of internet-past, on the youtube channel useless videos. from what i can tell, this person has been posting a ~32 second clip every single day for the past 4+ years. as the channel name suggests, these videos are wholly useless, only showing a random single unedited scene. they tend to be of incredibly mundane things, such as a concrete block or a bench. and yet, despite how mundane the content is, i find the entire channel so interesting. for one, there's something that feels weirdly nostalgic and even pretty about the no frills video of things that never normally deserve attention. but beyond that, i think the fact that this person has continued to contribute to this project every day for so long despite averaging 10 views per video makes me wonder what type of person they are. do they just have a lot of free time? are they some sort of cinematographer with a bunch of b-roll? do they go out of their way to find a new scene to film every single day, or is their life dynamic enough that they have yet to start posting duplicates? how old are they? where are they from? so many questions, and no way of answering them with the empty description fields and the 30 second voiceless clips.
the videos are well done, despite being of below average fidelity. some days, they choose to film things in a cinematic way as if it was to be used for b-roll in an indie film. other days, it feels more like a kid was playing with their parents iphone's camera. the raw nature of the videos brings a certain haunting intimacy towards whoever runs this channel, despite not having any real information to even form the basis of a parasocial relationship with them. just by seeing these unnamed mundane snippets of their life makes me feel like i'm a ghost in a foreign country. this paradoxical cyberproximity that i feel watching their videos is exactly the vibe i used to get scrolling the internet of the past, and is exactly what i hold so much nostalgia for. i wouldn't be surprised if this feeling subconsciously drove me to make this site, in an attempt to similarly make a space like that for someone who i'll never get to talk to again. who knows.
my partner just made me dinner, so i will go now! please take some time and check out their page; get lost in it for me :)