Consider "Star Wars Kid" (2003) or "Bed Intruder Song" (2010). Early viral videos were cruel, but the internet was smaller. Today, an amateur video of a crying child or a distressed elderly person can be viewed by 100 million people in 24 hours. The "discussion" rarely centers on empathy. It centers on spectacle. We have normalized the sharing of catastrophe as a form of economic currency (views = ad revenue).

We are living in the golden age of the amateur viral video. In a digital landscape saturated with high-production influencer content, polished PR campaigns, and algorithmically optimized ads, the raw, unpolished clip filmed on a phone in someone’s kitchen has become the most powerful currency on the internet.