The British Film Institute’s video archive will preserve the weird and wild sides of web culture

The British Film Institute is committing to the preservation of internet history, no matter how silly that history may be. Iconic viral clips like “Charlie Bit My Finger” and “Badgers” are part of a 430-video collection filled with culturally significant media.

The content of the archive is a mixed bag that spans more than three decades of web history. Entries include cooking video from Great British Bake Off contestant Chetna Makan, a video essay about queerbaiting from Rowan Ellis, a tabloid video making fun of former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, and my personal favorite inclusion, “I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This.”

The goal of the collection is to provide a layer of protection that isn’t offered by the internet’s biggest video hosting platforms. British Film Institute Curator Will Swinburne told The New York Times that companies like YouTube “make no promise to preserve and save the work” they distribute. The presence of an established archive ensures that notable videos will not be lost to history if the platforms hosting them shut down.

That threat is more palpable than it may seem. There was a chance, for example, that “Charlie Bit My Finger” would disappear from the public internet after the video was sold as an NFT in 2021. And an unknowable number of short-form treasures were lost when Twitter shut down Vine in early 2017.

“The videos have this almost scary ability to document so much of modern life,” Swinburne said. “If you imagine losing that, you would lose access to what life was like at this time and how people were expressing themselves.”

As those classics have endured more wear and tear, preservationists have sprang into motion. Another British institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, recently acquired the video file for the first YouTube video — Jawed Karim’s “me at the zoo” — as part of an exhibit showcasing the history of design. VidCon’s Hall of Fame is another initiative that aims to enshrine individuals who played important roles in the development of creator culture.

While these efforts may not be intended as nostalgia trips, they also function that way. As more internet users find themselves caught in the thrall of endless, slop-filled social feeds, they are yearning for the era when discovery was not dictated by algorithms and platforms like Newgrounds captured the offbeat spirit of the internet. The BFI archive, which includes pre-YouTube favorites like “Badgers,” acknowledges how different websurfing used to be.

If you want to recall the carefree nature of Web 1.0, the BFI archive is a fun deep dive. It’s filled not just with iconic videos but also interviews with the people who made those clips so memorable. No matter what happens on YouTube over the next 35 years, these legends will live on.