Me at the zoo

If the computer can do, and the robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?

Valerie Veach is the writer and director of the documentaries Me at the Zoo and Love Child.

She's a graduate of the New School for Social Research and holds a degree in Culture and Media Studies.

Her award-winning work deals with the intersection of technology and society.

You know, my films have always dealt with technology and society.

And specifically, like kind of my earlier work, kind of in a more abstract and artful way, and in this film, a much more direct way, these films seek to challenge the rhetoric around so-called emerging technologies and then the social realities kind of left in the wake or that exist along with these technologies.

So my first film is called Me at the Zoo, which was named after the first YouTube video, was called Me at the Zoo.

And although it's not about the founders of YouTube at all, it is about YouTube as a vehicle for a kind of new sort of celebrity.

Yeah, and I thought this was kind of funny because it sort of talks about different things, but it sort of went into YouTube's history.

It says, when YouTube's first 19-second video, which was called Me at the Zoo, right, appeared in April 2005, it demonstrated the platform's original appeal.

Ordinary people could record something, upload it, and potentially show it to the world.

That's why it's actually called YouTube.

This is my question at random Yeah Do you know what the first video ever posted on YouTube was called? Oh Seb knows it Uh, I, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna guess it Seb?

Me at the Zoo?

Really?

Brilliant.

Who by?

Just some random dude just posted on YouTube, Me at the Zoo

Wow

And so every day I get a little crossover with the ABS crew, and Rudo told me about the first YouTube video.

It's called Me at the Zoo.

[laughs]

And it-

Nope.

It's-

Me at the Zoo.

Th- it says Me at the Zoo.