YouTube is the carousel

04 Jun, 2026

The late, great Steve Albini, inadvertently describing YouTube:

There are active online communities for every kind of music and its subcultures. Whether you’re into Dusty’s Deep Cut reggae, minimal electronics, symphonic pop, Texas blues, Japanese noise, power electronics, children’s music, christmas music, Raymond Scott, or Burl Ives, I guarantee there is an online community where you can connect with other enthusiasts to indulge the minute specificity of your tastes.

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Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section.

Don Draper, inadvertently describing YouTube:

Nostalgia - it’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where a place where we know we are loved.

Two accidental definitions of YouTube's pull and power.

A place where every strange taste has a room and every memory has a play button.