The Top Five Things YouTube Taught Me

Today sees the launch of the first episode of our YouTube show, VICE Today. And nobody is more excited about this than me. YouTube is pretty much the greatest site to have ever existed (apart from this one, obv) and the internet was a piece of shit without it.

It has democratized the internet, which I'm sure has some kind of big important global implication. Like, something to do with Arab Spring or "citizen journalism" or something? I don't know. I'm sure there are a million articles you can read about it. But here are five ways in which I feel YouTube has changed the internet for the better:

IT EXPOSED ME TO A WORLD THAT I WOULD OTHERWISE HAVE NO IDEA EXISTED

A guy doing a choreographed dance in a canoe to "Lady in Red," which manages to be simultaneously hilarious and the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life? Sure, why not.

IT TAUGHT ME ALL KINDS OF THINGS ABOUT PUBLIC FIGURES THAT I WOULDN'T HAVE OTHERWISE KNOWN

Obviously Steven Seagal is the worst. Nobody would dispute that. But without YouTube the most ridiculous thing I would know he'd done would probably be the time he (allegedly) kept a sex slave, or when he (not allegedly) killed all those chickens. I never could have dreamed that something this incredible might have existed. Can you imagine if you could go back in time to 1999 and tell your younger self that one day you would be able to hear Steven Seagal saying things like, "Me want the poonani see for make me nice," and "We jammin'," whenever you wanted? Your brain would have exploded.

Also, shockingly, I learned that Celine Dion is not the worst. Which was a pleasant surprise.

IT CHANGED THE WAY COMPANIES MARKET PRODUCTS

Sure, if YouTube didn't exist, I might have walked through a bookshop and seen that Tyra Banks had written a Harry Potter rip-off about models called Modelland and LOLd to myself for a minute. But if YouTube hadn't changed the way that companies feel they have to market their products to people, would I have gotten to see the sadness in Tyra's eyes when she talked about how it took her "five long years" to write it? Would I have known that the main character is called "Tookie De La Creme"? Would I have known that she wrote the book to show young models that it doesn't matter how weird-looking they are, that all models are beautiful? No. I would not.

IT DID WONDERS FOR MY SELF-ESTEEM

Next time you're feeling a little down about yourself, just think about this video. Think about the fact that there is a three-minute-long tutorial out there on how to wear a hat. Think about this woman, recording herself giving advice like, "Just gonna make sure the hair is pushed away from your face, so you don't have any hair hanging in your face," and uploading it to the internet because she thought it was something other people would want to see. You are basically the smartest person in the entire world.

IT MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR PEOPLE TO FORGET THEIR MISTAKES

Which sucks if you're the guy who's going to be forever haunted by the video of yourself saying, "My mom is dad. She's dad!" But for the other 6,840,507,002 of us, it's probably the best thing to have happened in a long time.

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