Before It All Blurs Together

YouTube Rewind 2012 does what those annual compilations always do: compresses a year into four minutes of cameos, callbacks, and collective in-jokes, then posts it right as everyone is already starting to forget. Gangnam Style, Call Me Maybe, Felix Baumgartner dropping from the edge of space, KONY 2012 consuming a week of everyone’s outrage before evaporating entirely—the internet’s attention in that period was genuinely strange, unified in a way that already feels historical. There’s something melancholy about the whole format, even when the video is cheerful. A monument to shared experience that knows, the moment it’s posted, that it’s already becoming nostalgia.