Time capsules spin in the most unexpected places online. This came about by design. It’s a YouTube video, dated September 25, 2010. In it, dozens of people crowded on a dark dance floor raise their hands in anticipation of the beat dropping. When he does, more hands go up in the air. Grainy and less than 60 seconds long, the video is a holdover from that era, three years after the first iPhone, when people were still learning about its capabilities and house music was entering its Coachella sibling phase. The video, whose file name is IMG 0107, has nine views.
IMG 0107 landed on my screen via IMG_0001a website created by San Francisco engineer Riley Walz that pulls all the videos uploaded to YouTube from the iPhone’s long-lost “Send to YouTube” feature. Because the iPhone used to name video files “IMG_XXXX,” Walz says he was able to use the YouTube API to extract all videos named in that format. He identified around 5 million. On his site, those videos are displayed in no particular order, like a random playlist, offering what Walz calls “pure, unedited moments of random lives.” It’s the kind of single-service site that few people create today, but also one that speaks to today’s longing for a bygone digital age.
“It’s almost like these videos are extinct now,” Walz says when I call him to ask about his site. “In reality, they will never be produced this way again. It’s like a time machine.”
Nostalgia for the lost Internet is rampant in certain corners. Bluesky, who’s been winning around one million users per day Since Election Day in the United States, it has been full of people looking to recreate Twitter circa 2009, before the platform was flooded with insults and trolls. As WIRED reported earlier this week, fans had to scramble to save Sexypedia data after Fandom deleted the wiki, taking the Tumblr Sexymen repository offline. Tumblr, meanwhile, is always dying. People who want to remember what the Internet was like a decade ago often rely on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but even the future of that database seems uncertain.
Reminiscing about the Internet of yesteryear remains, ironically, one of the web’s favorite pastimes. People still wax poetic about it. space jam website. (Officially, it’s now a landing page for the LeBron James-led 2021 reboot, but the old site is still on spacejam.com/1996.) Sites like BuzzFeed, which now seem old school, still often publish lists of Internet memories. But Internet Archeology, a site dedicated to collecting ancient home pages, has gone. (WIRED has a small collection of their finds.)
Googling this story, I found an AI overview that informed me that “remember the old Internet” refers to “looking back to the early days of the World Wide Web.” Thank you. I also got an old Reddit feed, a WIRED story, and a piece from The Atlantic about “digital rot,” the phenomenon of the disappearance of the web that online archivists want to save. The problem with archiving, however, remains that you can archive a still image of an AOL Instant Messenger screen, but you can’t archive the feeling that you got kicked out of the chat because your mom answered the phone. The same goes for the feeling of seeing that a celebrity liked your tweet, something most people haven’t felt in a long time.