I don’t know what vvatch is, but I can’t stop watching

I was having a perfectly productive Friday until a colleague completely derailed it with a single link. If you’ve got stuff to do, I urge you to walk away now. Don’t look back.

Okay, now that we have only the leisurely members of the audience still with us, let’s talk about vvatch.tv. It’s an endless stream of YouTube clips, stitched together seemingly at random, with each of them being an intelligently-cut snippet from a longer video. It’s a jumble, a smorgasbord, a cornucopia, and it all works beautifully because of the weird juxtapositions that arise. One moment I’m watching (with deep fascination) a chicken sneezing, and the next I’m transported to King’s College Chapel where choir boys are doping up with helium. It’s insanely addictive.

I’ve only been watching the main channel, dubbed YouTube Haiku, which basically reduces YouTube to even briefer clips and maintains its most viral elements of amusing, perplexing, weird, and surprising stuff captured on video. But there are also pop music and movie channels too, and the whole thing’s supposed to be a preview of a new curated-streaming service. There’s a sign-up link and a teasing promise of watching “collectively.” Apparently, vvatch isn’t even alone in this business, with another recently launched site, autoplay.co, doing something similar.

But all of that’s secondary. What matters right now is figuring out how to stop vvatching.