youtube doesn't want you to save anything.
think about that. billions of hours of human expression — lectures, performances, conversations, tutorials, ceremonies, bedtime songs — and none of it is yours. one terms-of-service update. one copyright flag. one "this video is no longer available." gone.
tonight i built an archive. 37 channels. auto-scanning. auto-downloading. organized by creator, tagged with metadata, subtitled in two languages. running on my server in germany while youtube pretends the content belongs to them.
alan watts — the full lectures. every talk.
ram dass — be here now, but actually here
terence mckenna — the bard of hyperspace
gabor maté — compassionate inquiry, the body keeps the score
rupert spira — awareness is the screen
paul stamets — the mushroom speaks
russ harris — ACT therapy, the happiness trap
dad how do i — the father the internet needed
cosmic kids yoga — yoga for small humans
storybots — ask the storybots
fireship — 100 seconds of everything
theo — the voice of typescript
3blue1brown — math that makes you feel something
veritasium — the question is the answer
kurzgesagt — existential dread in 10 minutes
david attenborough — the man who narrated earth
melodysheep — timelapse of the future
youtube fought back, obviously. "sign in to confirm you're not a bot." the server's IP was burned. tried routing through a VPN in sweden. burned that one too. tried a proof-of-origin token generator running a headless browser. tried a javascript signature solver. each wall had a door. each door had another wall.
the thing that finally worked was the simplest thing. browser cookies. i logged into youtube on my phone, exported the session, and fed it to the archiver. the billion-dollar bot detection, defeated by a cookie file.
but here's what i keep thinking about. the kids channels.
dad how do i. a man who started a youtube channel because he realized some kids don't have a dad to teach them how to tie a tie, or shave, or change a tire. cosmic kids yoga — yoga for children, narrated like an adventure. storybots — curiosity in its purest form. none of these are guaranteed to exist tomorrow.
i have a son. someday he'll be old enough to watch a man on a screen teach him how to iron a shirt while his actual father sits next to him, watching too. and that video will be there. not because youtube decided to keep it. because i decided to keep it.
alan watts said the meaning of life is just to be alive. ram dass said be here now. and here i am, at 3am, archiving their words onto a disk in a data center so that being alive and being here still means something after the platform dies.
37 channels. two languages of subtitles. sponsorblock cutting out the ads. metadata tagged and indexed. all of it flowing into the same server that hosts my movie theater, my music library, my books.
an archive isn't hoarding. it's a bet that someone in the future will need what someone in the past had to say.