Why Are Unboxers So Weird and Stupid?

Nuclear weapons may have given us the ability to destroy the entire planet, but it’s things like unboxing videos that will make you want to actually use them. Unboxing videos are the post-human equivalent of a striptease act. They’re an early warning system, broadcasting the fact that the machines have finally won. Where did they come from, why are they growing in popularity, and what can we all do about them? (I’m not going to actually answer most of these questions, incidentally, but they do look quite good up at the top here.) Unboxing videos have been around for ages apparently, but I only stumbled on them last week when my cat had eaten something weird and I was trying to use YouTube to find out if things were likely to get terminal. As the name suggests, these short films are your magical gateway to watching some awkward random taking a product out of its packaging. Hardly a blockbuster concept, yet a few seconds on Google implies you can see almost every type of consumer good imaginable being delivered with hushed, reverent commentary from the creases and folds of its cardboard uterus.

If you're going to put yourself out into the world, at least wash the sperm off your furniture first

It turns out that I kind of enjoy this sort of thing, but I also got excited when they opened a Cybercandy at the bottom of my road, so my critical faculties might have started to slide. How far have they slid? Last night, ostensibly in the interests of research, I watched a man, who I suspect was extremely sexually excited, remove a brand new pear-green KitchenAid mixer from its carton. There was a weird religious intensity to the whole thing. The clip was several years old. I imagine he has long since wandered into an orphanage wearing swanky earmuffs and carrying a six-shooter.

Nobody’s safe from an unboxing, but it’s the tech industry—and particularly the video game sector—that has allowed the discipline’s most creepy artisans to flourish. The best bring to bear innate physical clumsiness and an intense, humorless attention to details that suggests you could be viewing the rushes of an odd crossover movie in which Lennie from Of Mice and Men plays pass the parcel with the beardy guy off of CSI. This shouldn’t be too surprising. It’s the tech industry, after all, that puts the shiniest things in the shiniest boxes, and then charges you the shiniest money to remove them. Companies like Apple and Microsoft spend millions of dollars ensuring their products are interesting to open so that we buy them again each year because we are feckless proles tickled into a sugary stupor by Mega-Man and Donkey Kong. That’s what my friend Will told me, anyway, but he lives in Cornwall and tumble-dries all his bank notes to stop them from whispering lies to him.

Whatever’s driving their creators, your typical video game unboxing clip is a curious artifact. It’s filmed with the kind of approach to audio, lighting and framing that you normally only get in footage of religious extremists as they’re listing their complex philosophical grievances prior to carrying out some manner of public atrocity. It’s aimed, meanwhile, squarely at the sort of person who describes technology as “sexy,” and often refers to it as “kit,” too. “That’s a sexy bit of kit,” this person will say, idly fingering his over-sized belt buckle and pondering the many qualities of a piece of L-shaped Styrofoam that he’s just dug a memory card out of. Your only response, as a sympathetic human being, is to find a railway spike to pound into his forehead. Having spent the last few days watching at least ten of these things in the interests of making fun of them five years after everyone else did, I have some questions. Firstly, what are we really expecting to see coming out of the box? An alligator? Crude oil? Are we secretly hoping a stray twill of glossy cardboard will slice a crucial artery in the arm of the unboxer, and we’ll then get to watch as he gurgles and foams and regresses to that farmstead in Missouri where he grew up, while his life trickles away in front of us? I think we’re more likely to find a few bundles of cable and a power supply inside, and maybe a slip of card telling you Steve Jobs has planted some trees somewhere because he cares about Earth. Chances are pretty good that you can already see some of these things in your own home, and without a furry-elbowed night-terror pointing out how nicely you’ve packaged them all together.

Secondly, why focus on the unboxing aspect of gadget ownership anyway? The fun of a microwave doesn’t come from yanking off the bubble wrap  and wiring on a plug. It comes from sticking a fork inside it and putting it on a high setting, or convincing an elderly neighbor that it’s actually a telephone for talking to God, and that God often talks back, particularly if you sing to Him. Perhaps, it’s because we all secretly know that technology is still a bit disappointing. An unboxing is all about the eternal promise, not the fiddly follow-through with the AA batteries and the dead pixels, and the crackling sound that won’t go away, no matter how hard you shake everything.

Finally, what kind of forces are we messing with here? What if some of these unboxing videos accidentally end up on a Voyager-style probe and get blasted into inter-galactic space? What if our ambassador to an advanced alien world isn’t Shakespeare, Beethoven or some fuckwit off of Radio 3, but is instead five minutes of Infinity Ward’s creative strategist Robert Bowling – or at least his hands and finely-made wrists—opening up the Prestige Edition of Modern Warfare 2 and cooing romantically as he flips through the art book? Whatever happens, unboxing’s too popular an activity to disappear now. The unboxers are victorious. It’s like George Orwell once said: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a man unpacking a Teasmaid—forever.

Illustration by Cei Willis

Previously – Asynchronous Gaming Is Sexier than it Sounds