Time capsules turn up in the most unexpected places online. This one surfaced by design. It’s a YouTube video, dated September 25, 2010. In it, dozens of people packed on a dark dance floor hold their hands up in anticipation of a beat drop. When it does, more hands go in the air. Grainy and less than 60 seconds long, the video is a remnant of that time, three years after the first iPhone, when people were still learning of its capabilities and house music was entering its Coachella bro phase. The video, filename IMG 0107, has nine views.
IMG 0107 landed on my screen by way of IMG_0001, a 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 iPhone used to name video files “IMG_XXXX,” Walz says he was able to use YouTube’s API to pull all the videos with names in that format. He identified about 5 million. On his site, those videos cycle through in no particular order, like a playlist on shuffle, offering up what Walz calls “unedited, pure moments from random lives.” It’s the kind of single-serving site few people make these days, but also one that speaks to the current yearning for a bygone digital era.
“It’s almost like these videos are kind of extinct now,” Walz says when I call to ask him about his site. “They won’t really be produced this way ever again. It’s like a time machine.”
Nostalgia for the lost internet runs rampant in certain corners. Bluesky, which has been gaining about a million users per day since Election Day in the US, is full of people looking to re-create the Twitter of circa 2009, before the platform was awash in slurs and trolls. As WIRED reported earlier this week, fans had to scramble to save Sexypedia’s data after Fandom erased the wiki, taking the internet’s repository of Tumblr Sexymen offline. Tumblr, meanwhile, is always dying. People who want to remember what the internet looked like a decade ago often rely on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but even the future of that database feels uncertain.
Remembering the internet of yore remains, somewhat ironically, one of the web’s favorite pastimes. Folks still wax poetic about the Space Jam website. (Officially, it’s now a landing page for the LeBron James–fronted 2021 reboot, but the old site still lives at spacejam.com/1996.) Sites like BuzzFeed, which now itself feels old school, still often run listicles of internet memories. But Internet Archaeology, a site devoted to collecting old home pages, is gone. (WIRED has a small collection of its findings.)
Googling around for this story I was served an AI Overview that informed me that “remembering the old internet” refers to “looking back at the early days of the World Wide Web.” Thanks. I also got an old Reddit feed, a WIRED story, and a piece from The Atlantic about “digital rot”—the phenomenon of the disappearing web that online archivists want to save. The problem with archiving, though, remains that you can archive a static image of an AOL Instant Messenger screen, but you can’t archive the feeling of getting kicked off of chat because your mom picked up the phone. Same goes for the feeling of seeing that a celeb liked your tweet, something most people haven’t felt in a long time.
Perhaps this is what Walz captured with IMG_0001, why looking at it feels like a gut punch. In his Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick called the site “beautiful, haunting, funny, and sort of magical. Like staring into a security camera of the past.” Perhaps. Or maybe it’s more like staring into the YouTube of the past, when videos on the platform looked like the “Me at the zoo” clip that launched it. Not like a series of ring-lit people in search of brand deals.
When Walz posted his new project on X, the replies were immediate and positive, if conflicted. “This is the perfect intersection of the type of thing that makes the internet special and worthwhile,” graphic designer Jason Combs wrote, “but also if I think too hard about [it] I’m gonna have a depressive episode.”
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Even if it gets lost to time, the internet can always be remade. People like Walz, who also made “Shotspotter, but for music” site BopSpotter, and Neal Agarwal, creator of Internet Artifacts, seek to both preserve the web of yore and make it fun again.
Walz says he didn’t really intend to make something that made people so nostalgic; he wasn’t even sure many people would find it. They did, and it struck a chord. “One of my friends yesterday texted me and was like, ‘I actually was having a really, really bad day, but I looked at the site and I was watching it for an hour and just felt really, really good at the end of it,’” Riley says. “I wouldn’t have guessed that that would be at all a possibility.”
Maybe looking to the past points the way to the internet’s future.
Loose Threads:
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