YouTube Parasites

I'm really starting to get sick of some of the stuff people send around on YouTube.

Today I was sent a video of somebody falling two stories out of a window, entitled "Idiot falls out of window playing wii". The justification for sending this video was "to celebrate the start of the Olympics we are trying to win a viral competition with this terrible accident".



Notice how I am deliberately not linking to this video. It wasn't funny, it didn't say anything, it was just a video of an accident.

Another one that recently wound me up was the Justice video for "Stress" which is remarkable only for utterly relinquishing any responsibility to any sort of morality - it's a nasty, ugly piece of ghetto tourism, promoting a bland, generic piece of music. But it was sent to me without caveat or comment, just because it was clearly 'different' in some way.



People, you need to start putting filters on this shit. Your attention is a very important resource, and one that can easily be infiltrated by parasitic rubbish. We should be teaching children how to protect themselves from memes that take attention without giving anything back. When you see something vaguely interesting on the internet, don't just blindly send it on to your friends, think about whether it deserves to thrive as a memetic organism. If it's just nasty just keep it to yourself.

Examine these things in terms of beauty, humour, strangeness, insight or whatever, but never send something on merely because it is 'remarkable'. Be a bit more sophisticated and think about what sort of remarkability you want to spread into this world.