Pork and Beans

I recently rewatched Weezer’s video for their single Pork and Beans, now nearly 12 years old - a dinosaur in internet terms. The song is great, but the video is a masterpiece, a moment of Internet culture frozen in time, and one that seems almost unrecognisable only slightly over a decade later.

Obviously there is some element of nostalgia and rose-tinted goggles towards how I feel about Youtube and more broadly the web itself at that time, but still, it’s a reminder of just how different thing were. The whole thing wasn’t corporate, entirely about ad revenue and engagement metrics. People could actually make it through an entire 10 minute video without uttering the phrase “don’t forget to smash that like and subscribe button!”. The videos themselves seemed to get a lot of views based on their merits - for being funny, or inspiring, or impressive, rather than for appealing to the lowest common denominator and pandering to the algorithm. Sure, my vision is rose-tinted, but it still seems like it was a better place and time then to me, like the site was something really special, bringing people across the whole together in a genuine and heartfelt way - what the Internet should be about. Can’t we go back?