A long, long time ago, back when twitch was just the word for a sudden convulsion and the phrase "hot tub meta" was moon-man talk, the internet was a simpler place.
Come back with me to 2007, dear reader. A raft of brand-new video game franchises have just been born: Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, BioShock. Halo 3 has seemingly bought Bungie's epic series to a close, and Spider-Man 3 makes us hope that Sony is done with the webhead for a good long while. Meanwhile, a website called YouTube is growing bigger and bigger.
Before we go on, take a look at some of the funniest wins and fails from Twitch streamers - a fitting reminder of what the internet is like today.
Long before YouTube became what it is today, it was a relatively modest home for dumb cartoons and other harmless viral videos. One of the biggest of the era? Charlie Bit My Finger. The 55-second video of a young boy named Charlie biting his brother's finger was first uploaded to YouTube in 2007 and swiftly became one of the most talked-about clips on the planet.
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It's at this point I'd usually leave a link to the video in question so you can watch it yourself, although with 880 million views to date, there's very little chance you haven't seen it. Oh, also I can't leave you a link, because Charlie Bit My Finger has now been erased from YouTube.
So what on Earth happened? The video's creators made the decision to delete the video and convert it into a NFT, which is currently up for auction. It's all part of the current (controversial) trend around non-fungible tokens, crypto-digital art that creates the illusion of scarcity by providing the owner of the content with "exclusive" rights. Yes, it is weird and dumb.
The auction has now come to a close, with what looks like a winning bid of $760,999. I can't even imagine what that amount of money looks like, let alone spending it on a 55-second video of a small boy having his finger bitten. The winner of the auction will also "get the opportunity to create their own parody of the video featuring the original stars, Harry and Charlie." That's the least they could do for that amount of money, to be fair.
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Will Charlie Bit My Finger ever find its way back to the internet, then? I suppose now it's up to the person who just spent $760,999 on the video. Then again, this is the internet and we all got warning that the video was being taken down. I'd be amazed if it doesn't start to pop up across social media sooner or later.
Featured Image Credit: YouTube