Videos Before Content

Classic videos from the time when there were no 'content creators'

I think a lot about having grown up with the internet. When I was an infant, the internet was in its infancy. When I was an adolescent, the internet was in its adolescence. My family’s first home computer was a DOS computer that took *actual* floppy disks¹ and had no internet. I remember getting AOL for the first time, and the bizarre yet thrilling sound of going online. I remember graduating from AIM to LiveJournals to MySpace to Facebook, back when Facebook was unfathomably cool.

Some of you will be nodding along, while others will be calling me grandpa. But like most of us who lived through it, I can’t help but be nostalgic about the earlier years of the web. It was a different internet back then. You spent far more time going to individual, unconnected websites. You spent much less time locked into particular platforms. Using the internet felt like you were doing something new and exciting and transgressive and revolutionary all at once. It was chaotic and anarchic and free in a way today’s internet just isn’t.

And importantly, the internet wasn’t yet dominated by capital-C Content. There were essentially no professional content creators using the internet to support themselves. When you saw blog posts, websites, and videos online, it was almost never put there with the intent to make money. Instead, you got a view into humanity’s collective id - weird, terrible, and utterly captivating.

I miss that age of videos especially. When videos went viral (pre-YouTube or in the very early days of YouTube) it wasn’t because of algorithms - it was pure word of mouth, both online and IRL. So in the spirit of the old internet, I want to share with you some of my favorite videos from the days before Content.

Maybe you’re younger and haven’t ever seen these before, in which case, buckle up. Maybe you’re older and this will be a trip down memory lane. Either way, this is me showing respect and love for my readers in the only way I really know how - by showing them my favorite internet links.