Google’s Sanitized Mirror

YouTube is shaping culture right now the way television did in the 1980s—relentlessly, in every direction at once, at a speed that makes criticism feel perpetually late. The year-end rewind Google put out is a decent document of that: a fireworks reel of cameos and parodies, Harlem Shake residue, viral moments you’d half-forgotten by October. It’s slick, self-congratulatory, and almost entirely made up of videos that were blocked in Germany for most of 2013.

That’s the part Google doesn’t mention in the reel. Thanks to the ongoing dispute between YouTube and GEMA—Germany’s performing rights organization—huge swathes of the platform simply weren’t available here, a grey error screen where music videos used to be. Americans watched PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles and Epic Meal Time and built shared cultural references out of that; we got a territorial licensing message. The YouTube monoculture that supposedly defines a generation had a conspicuous German-shaped hole in it.

And then there’s the other thing they’re glossing over: YouTube now requires a Google+ account to leave a comment. Not to watch, just to participate. The official reasoning—reducing anonymous abuse—sounds defensible until you notice that the comments are still terrible, and what actually changed is who owns the data attached to the terribleness. Forced migration to a social network nobody wanted, dressed up as community improvement.

The rewind video is fun as a time capsule. Two and a half minutes of pure 2013, worth watching if you can. I just keep thinking about what the version that included everything blocked here might have looked like—and whether I’d have recognized my own year in it.