Viewless YouTubers: What I learned watching humanity's quieter corners

The world seems a bit rubbish right now, doesn’t it? Open any digital device and a bleak picture is quickly painted. I don’t have to tell you that it’s gloomy out there. In response I was going to write another version of how to survive when the world has gone to sh*t, but I’ve done that already. I wanted to try and tell a different story about human beings in 2025. I wanted to take a closer look at how humans lived away from the algorithms and the news feeds and the headlines. I wanted to try and find an unvarnished look at human life: away from the competition to be popular, attractive, controversial, political, angry, or emotional. So I went to YouTube. The video platform turned 20 this year, meaning the 15 billion videos it currently holds is a unique record of human experience over the last two decades. While you might think it’s a hyper-curated place where creators pull in mega views, in reality: the median video has been watched just 41 times and posts with more than 130 views are actually in the top third of the service's most popular content. In other words, the vast majority of YouTube is a treasure trove of human experience, not sorted and ordered into a manicured view of the world by machines. It’s a big dollop of life, unrefined and unfiltered. So in this week’s Brink I wanted to know: what does humanity look like in 2025 according to those far from the limelight?