For the past hour, Ive been watching decade-old clips uploaded from iPhones onto YouTube.
He discovered something magical.
The first image you take is named IMG_0001, the second is IMG_0002 and so on.
September 19, 2012: Woman hands holding an Apple iPhone 4. iPhone 4 displaying loading video screen of Youtube application.© hocus-focus vis Getty.
Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely searchable name.
To this day, there are millions of these videos.
Wallace suggests doing a search on YouTube with a specific number in mind.
See what you get!
But programmer Riley Walz decided to take things a bit further.
Inspired by Wallaces posts, Walz built a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million IMG_XXX videos.
He thenmade a websitethat serves them up to interested viewers at random.
As Wallace noted in his blog, theres something haunting about these videos.
The grammar for the short-form video that Vine and TikTok would establish doesnt exist yet.
The fidelity is often low-res.
Youre sometimes capturing people in intimate moments.
It feels like the 2010 version of finding anold box of Polaroids.
Once I started watching them, It was hard for me to stop.
Heres an incomplete list of what I saw in the first hour.
November 13, 2012.
Grainy footage of a garage door closing.
Jan 10, 2012.
It looks like trouble is brewing, but the camera cuts off before anything happens.
June 28, 2012.
Out of focus and sideways footage of a man lifting weights at a gym.
December 15, 2011.
A wordless tour of a suburban home at night.
The sound of children playing can be heard faintly in the background.
The video sweeps through the home the way a real estate agent might.
December 23, 2011.
The nighttime detonation of a homemade bottle rocket.
So out of focus, its hard to tell whats happening.
March 19, 2012.
There are a lot of laughing babies.
May 10, 2010.
Two guys lip-syncing to a rap song in front of a Marlboro sign in a house.
Two takes, unedited.
The camera twists from portrait to landscape several times.
The stereo screws up halfway through the first one and they restart.
Its the kind of thing that, if filmed properly, would kill on Vine in two years.
March 19, 2013.
Young people dance in a club while lights flash and EDM music plays.
It strikes me that everyone in the video is ten years older now.
I wonder whats become of them.
October 8, 2012.
A woman drives down the road while complaining about her husbands friends to people unseen.
June 18, 2012.
Six black and white kittens lounge and play.
There are fewer animal videos than I expected in the sample I saw.
October 3, 2010.
A man tracking down someone he played a game of Madden against in Xbox Live.
March 09, 2013.
A Pink Floyd concert.
Theres lots of concert footage.
March 26, 2013.
Footage of a majestic horse.
April 08, 2013.
A young woman talking directly to the camera about protesting an internet cafe ban in Jacksonville, Florida.
April 08, 2012.
Someone scrubbing through footage of aCall of Dutymatch.
Wallaces search idea and Walzs website help capture a specific moment in time.
The iPhone was only two years old in 2009.
YouTube had only been around for four.
Theres an innocence here that I dont typically see on the internet anymore, a naivete.
I view nostalgia as a negative emotion, something harmful to indulge in.
But just forgive me, I just want to click through a few more of these IMG_XXXX videos.
I want to see another 420p kitten or a human caught on camera, unready for the take.
I want to see more intimate moments from the time before we began to craft our digital selves.
News from the future, delivered to your present.
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