Here’s your terrible year in review according to Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram

How was your 2016? If you were on the internet, it was probably awful. But don’t tell that to YouTube, who released their annual Rewind video today, an exhausting, seven-minute odyssey through a Black Mirror-esque universe in which everyone is a viral star preening for your approval. PewDiePie, the “Damn Daniel” kid, Trevor Noah, and dozens of preteens with elaborate hair are present, as well as actual famous person The Rock, who maybe needs to be a little more selective. Or maybe doesn’t, since this thing already has 34 million—[Reloads page.]—45 million views.
Its endless exuberance has the feel of a cellphone commercial programmatically created by Google’s page-rank algorithm. It will do very well.
As New York notes in a caustic summary of the video, many of the participants and trends spotlighted in the video actually owe their virality to Twitter, although that doesn’t necessarily point toward YouTube’s obsolescence so much as Twitter’s stubborn unwillingness to become obsolete. Anyway, if one were to look for a year in review of Twitter itself, they would probably see an anime character calling a dumpster fire a cuck, so perhaps we can take YouTube’s Rewind video instead as a look at the more innocuous, commercial-friendly year on the internet, as determined by one of its more innocuous, commercial-friendly giants.