How I Invented YouTube
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Free Download - Scientist Seeks Seed Capital for Life Perpetuating Device By Herb Gilliland |
YouTube was inspired by five intellectual factors: my open source teenage delvings into "self-realized collaborative art tools" - a popular project called Online Creation, Don Marinelli's Synthetic Interview project (where I was employed when I came up with the brand), reading Jean Baudrillard's Simulations and related Virilio ("War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989.") and of course Le Société du spectacle , being a fan and knowing the work of Andy Warhol and Hunter S. Thompson. The actual name was coined while watching Jerry Springer for the first time in 1997. YouTube is the Gonzo website that provides at least 10 minutes of Warhol's famously quoted phrase "15 minutes of fame". When I originally approached Don Marinelli and Scott Stevens with the idea of changing their start-up company's brand to YouTube, they thought the idea was good but didn't pursue it. I talked to several members of the company about this idea, and when it was rejected I continued to share the idea with my friends and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University.
No one seemed interested, including myself, of actually creating the website. I didn't want to work alone because individuals working alone are often targetted. At the time, Napster was being persecuted/prosecuted heavily in the press and by the RIAA. I personally believed the only natural exit strategy for YouTube as a start-up was to sell it to Google. I informed people about this in 2003 when I first shared the idea with employees at PayPal. It wasn't until I had a specific conversation with Chad Hurley in November 2004 that the brand seemed to be something under consideration by three uncertain, but entrepreneurial employees at PayPal who wanted to start a company using their connection, Peter Thiel.
I had the idea for YouTube 6 years before Chad and I spoke, and I had thought carefully about the strategy of such a venture, but I had no capital to start the company myself. Though it was relatively cheap, I was afraid that if I did it alone I would somehow get in deeper trouble than I had intended, and without financial backing it would have been impossible to scale the product. Since I had had no luck finding investors in Pittsburgh, and since I had a psychological need to move on from the idea since it seemed like it couldn't become a reality for me, I passed it on to Chad under the stipulation that I receive 1% of the proceeds that the founders would receive. I was certain that Chad could succeed, with his connections, if he realized the simple goal of a video sharing website and procured a deal from some company -- preferably Google, Inc. -- for its sale. Otherwise, I was certain the company would fold and its founders would eventually be targeted by some hefty lawsuits.
Money and notoriety distort matters. I have found no lawyer who will even write a letter to YouTube, let alone attempt to litigate -- especially on contingency. It turns out that, in America, contract disputes are out of the realm of possible contingency cases. One lawyer is sympathetic, because he went to CMU, but even he won't take the case. I remain passively active on these issues now. In some attempt to get closure I wrote Chad Hurley's parents basically explaining what I had done and asking for 1% ($16,000,000).
The problem is that intellectual idealists (myself) are interacting with the reality of legal issues. Egoism abounds in science and technology, which are still primarily dominated by males. I dream of a day when truth is valued over fiction, but scientists are certainly not valued as much as, say, sports stars or celebrities.
I don't really look at things as being this way or that (as far as distinctions between brand and technology), generally, because that only services later detriments to progress. Not a single aspect of YouTube involved the creation of new technology platforms: it was all brand and marketing and relied heavily on the creations of others, those at Adobe and W3C. It also helped George Economou: Akamai's video service was always on my mind since he and I were friends. The rich get richer.
The "technology" of YouTube was brand. It took about 20 minutes to describe the site to Chad. Most of the time I was arguing why someone would want to start a company - he really had no desire to do this until I spoke with him. Then, they called me back in February 2005 to complain about what they had made and I offered some advice on documentation. I suppose at this point I could have approached it differently, but I wanted to remain anonymous and -- well -- Chad asserted at this point that the idea was Jawed Karim's. If it was Jawed Karim's idea, why would they call me to ask questions about it? It made no sense to me but it became the bullshit story that they sold the newspapers on.
It's not like $16,000,000 would really set them back. Chad's egotism and cockiness is what is driving YouTube into the gutter. If he owned up, or at least settled, the problem would maybe go away. I would help him then. Unfortunately, he feels he doesn't need that sort of help with all of the "minions" he has. (Direct quote... he used to call his employees "trained monkeys" but now he calls them "minions".)
Chad's not daft, but he is definitely a few rungs down on the brain ladder and what drove him to his success was greed, not originality. His billionaire friend helped too -- Peter Thiel -- who has recently stated that "the franchise ... was ruined in 1920 when it was extended to women"
That same thing that resonated with Chad resonated with everyone else about YouTube: it was a very unique idea purposefully executed at a very special time for the industry. The industry was too self-absorbed to realize itself and its relationship with video and neighbor industry television. It continues to be fairly self-absorbed, which is why the established industry is always at the whims of the newcomers.
Adobe was innovating video in Flash, but it did not seem to be communicated effectively with the efforts of its contemporaries. I was aware of this because I requested certain features of Flash video. I had basically shaped the hole that industry had created in video as much as the industry fell into it. It was almost like a con job. The industry had a trend in video that created hundreds of video codecs. Likewise, it was too self-conscious and nerdy and couldn't make the leap, but the very aspect of viral media that created proto-YouTube creations like "Dancing Baby 3D Model" and other pre-YouTube viral videos generated an eddy or vortex of sorts into which could be dumped some sort of "propellant" -- a propellant that would cause YouTube to become the top, first mover -- catapulting the internet into a new video-based architecture. In other words, it helped sell advertising by serving video via net. The peripheral motive was to increase content delivery speeds to the broad audience.
Google (and search in general including Yahoo) definitely influenced YouTube. I thought it up around 1997 before I had heard of Google, but we (Don Marinelli and myself) talked about Google and YouTube together during one of its first realizations in the modern workplace at Grand Illusion Studios. I saw it as a way to invert (or subvert) the Synthetic Interview, but it was not influenced by the Synthetic Interview. It was inspired by Jerry Springer and Hunter S. Thompson, with a little Warhol thrown in. I knew who they were and why they were famous, and about Gonzo media.
It's a combination of Synthetic Interview, Google Video with a little Yahoo thrown in (in its earlier days). Mix that together with heroin and a list of other chemicals, a general law that says speech is free, a lack of established industry suave in "film" as an art form, a generally vain society filled with an established history of celebrity and cult of personality, a richness among elites on the planet that permits social experimentation, and a huge proliferation of cheap digital video cameras (from which it is easy to capture and upload videos in a manageable amount of time) and you have the formula. That was the fuel it burned to be what it is.
The other things that encouraged me were: John Ritter's 2003 statements before he died, statements on several Hollywood "news pieces" about Hollywood not being able to find talent in the years 2003-2004, and a lack of innovation during the early Iraq war.
As a slang term which I used from 1997-2003, it got good reviews.
The passage from Jean Baudrillard's Simulations that helped reinforce the underlying principles of YouTube's value -- and later, valuation -- in a story regarding a California family known as "The Louds", whose lives are filmed as entertainment:
The End of the Panopticon
It is again to this ideology of the lived experience, of exhumation, of the real in its fundamental banality, in its radical authenticity, that the American TV-verite experiment on the Loud family in 1971 refers: 7 months of uninterrupted shooting. 300 hours of direct non-stop broadcasting, without script or scenario, the odyssey of a family, its dramas, its joys, ups and downs - in brief, a "raw" historical document, and the "best thing ever on television, comparable, at the level of our daily existence, to the film of the lunar landing." Things are complicated by the fact that this family came apart during the shooting, a crisis flared up, the Louds went their seperate ways, et. Whence that insoluble controversy was TV responsible? What would have happened if TV hadn't been there.
More interesting is the phantasm of filming the Louds as if TV wasn't there. The producer's trump card was to say: "They lived as if we weren't there." An absurd, paradoxical formula - neither true, nor false but utopian. The "as if we weren't there" is equivalent to "as if you were there". It is this utopia, this paradox that fascinated 20 million viewers, much more than the "perverse" pleasure of prying. In this "truth" experiment, it is neither a question of secrecy nor of perversion, but of a kind of thrill of the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a thrill of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a thrill of alienation and of magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive transparency all at the same time. The joy in an excess of meaning, when the bar of the sign slips below the regular water line of meaning: the non-signifier is elevated by the camera angle. Here the real can be seen to have never existed (but "as if you were there"), without the distance which produces perspective space and our depth vision (but "more true than nature"). Joy in the microscopic simulation which transforms the real into the hyperreal. (This is also a little like what happens in porno, where fascination is more metaphysical than sexual.)
This family was in any case already somewhat hyperreal by its very selection: a typical, California-housed, 3-garage, 5-children, well-to-do professional upper middle class ideal American family with an ornamental housewife. In a way, it is this statistical perfection which dooms it to death. This ideal heroine of the American way of life is chosen, as in sacrificial rites, to be glorified and to die under the fiery glare of the studio lights, a modern fatum. For the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death. "The Louds: simply a family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands of television, and to die from it", said the producer. So it is really a question of a sacrificial process, of a sacrificial spectacle offered to 20 million Americans. The liturgical drama of a mass society.
TV-verite. Admirable ambivalent terms does it refer to the truth of this family, or to the truth of TV? In fact, it is TV which is the Loud's truth, it is it which is true, it is it which renders true. A truth whcih is no longer the reflexive truth of the panoptic system and of the gaze, but the manipulative truth of the test which probes and interrogates, of the laser which touches and then pierces, of computer cards which retain your punched-out sequences, of the genetic code which regulates your combinations, of cells which inform your sensory universe. It is to this kind of truth that the Loud family is subjected by the TV medium, and in this sense it really amounts to a death sentence (but is it still a question of truth?).
The end of the panoptic system. The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze, and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency. The latter still presupposes an objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipotence of a despotic gaze. This is still, if not a system of confinement, at least a system of scrutiny. No longer subtle, but always in a position of exteriority, playing on the opposition between seeing and being seen, even if the focal point of the panopticon may be blind.
It is entirely different when with the Louds "You no longer watch TV, TV watches you (live)," or again: "You no longer listen to Pas de Panique, Pas de Panique listens to you" - switching over from the panoptic apparatus of surveillance (of Discipline and Punish) to a system of deterrence, where the distinction between active and passive is abolished. No longer is there any imperative to submit to the model, or to the gaze. "YOU are the model!" "YOU are the majority!" Such is the slope of a hyperrealist sociality, where the real is confused with the model, as in the statistic operation, or with the medium, as in the Loud's operation. Such is the later stage of development of the social relation, our own, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, idealogy, publicity, etc) but one of disuasion or deterrence: "YOU are news, you are the social, the event is you, you are involved, you can use your voice, etc." A turnabout of affairs by which it becomes impossible to locate an instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, since you are always already on the other side. No more subject, focal point, center or periphery: but pure flexion or circular inflection. No more violence or surveillance only "information," secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion and simulacra of spaces where the real-effect again comes into play.
We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space (which remains a moral hypothesis bound up with every classical analysis of the "objective" essence of power), and hence the very abolition of the spectacular. Television, in the case of the Louds for example, is no longer a spectacular medium. We are no longer in the society of spectacle which the situationists talked about, nor in the specific types of alienation and repression which this implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new age. There is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it.
Such immixture, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium without our being able to isolate its effects - spectralised, like those publicity holograms sculptured in empty space with laser beams, the event filtered by the medium - the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV - an indiscernible chemical solution: we are all Louds, doomed not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and to blackmail by the media, but to their induction, to their infiltration, to their illegible violence.
How I Invented YouTube - To learn more about this author, visit Herb Gilliland's Website.
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