Greatest Viral Video of All Time

These are the clips that got emailed to everyone you knew, back when that was genuinely how the internet moved things around.

The era they come from is specific and gone. There were no algorithmic feeds, no autoplay and no recommendation engine — a video spread because individual people decided to forward it, which meant it had to be short, immediately legible, and worth the small social risk of sending. What survived that filter is almost entirely accident: a webcam, a bad idea, a child recovering from anaesthetic, a brother biting a finger. Almost nothing here was made to be famous, which is exactly what separates the period from the one that followed.

The field here is forty-four videos, and the bracket is closer to an archive than a competition.

Several of these are genuinely unwatchable now, and that is part of the point rather than a flaw. The bracket does not ask whether a clip is good. It asks which one you would show someone to explain what the internet was like.