I discovered the YouTube channel “Global Worldwide” while engaging in one of my favorite time-wasting activities—looking up “weird websites” on Google. In this particular instance, I was reading a reddit thread on strange and haunting YouTube channels. Several YouTube channels that popped up were legitimately creepy and depraved, but one stood out in particular that wasn’t so creepy—just abstract.
“Global Worldwide” is a completely innocuous YouTube channel. It consists of many hundreds of videos, none longer than 25 seconds. Each video has a cryptic visuals, sometimes appearing like a glitching computer screen, other times like a scene caught on a security camera. Equally cryptic are the audio and titles to these videos. Every one of them has a title that resembles a fragment of conversation, something you might hear in passing on the streets. The audio, on the other hand, sounds like snippets of lo-fi industrial music that you might hear on an independent producer’s SoundCloud, one where the tracks average 300 plays and 11 likes.
“Global Worldwide” isn’t so much creepy as it is futuristic. In a society where entertainment caters to the increasingly shortening attention span, “Global Worldwide” is a preview of things to come. What “Global Worldwide” content lacks in temporal length it makes up for in mysticism. The video titles, the audio clips and the visuals—none of these things explicitly tells the viewer what to think or feel, and this is what makes the videos have so much substance despite their short length. In this sense, “Global Worldwide” suggests that in a hyper-distracted world, depth will be conveyed in things left unsaid, logical connections left unconnected, and meaning prescribed not so much through explicit messages, but association and general “vibes.”
If you are looking for content that can challenge your mind and also be consumed like popcorn, “Global Worldwide” is worth checking out. The content on the channel evokes an aesthetic reminiscent of Death Grips music videos and glitch art on Tumblr. However, unlike these art forms, which have a sinister aspect to them, there’s something about “Global Worldwide” that’s delightfully disarming. The channel draws the viewer in with a sense of dark mystique, and then invites them to watch more content with its playful, harmless sense of fun and nonsense. In this sense, “Global Worldwide” is a seed that might set a new era of audiovisual expression in motion.
