GIFs are short, silent looping videos that work nothing like videos in consumer appliances have ever worked: they don't have pause, rewind or fast-forward contr

GIFs are short, silent looping videos that work nothing like videos in consumer appliances have ever worked: they don't have pause, rewind or fast-forward controls; part of the effect is that on the first run they tend to run in slow-mo as they progressively download and subsequently run snappy, at times startlingly so. No technical committee or even loose-consensus-running-code working group would ever come up with anything like that. The mode of pop-culture remixing that GIFs epitomize could never have been anticipated; the value that defaulting to silence delivers has still not gotten through to news sites (good ones, too!) that autoplay talking video over your headphones or god forbid the open plan office; it's even been reported[0] that porn works better for women in GIF mode. That's because GIFs were never conceived for video. Consumer computer video was never conceived for pop culture remixing (despite having the experience of turntables to pick from). Porn was never conceived for women, for that matter. GIFs are legacy left for us from a time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the erection of the EU castle when everyone expected planning and bureaucracy to lose out to spontaneity bordering on anarchy. Many important HN recurring themes are here: privacy vs. normalized surveillance, free speech x hate speech x rogue counter-establishment right-wing speech, the freaking Mac App Store. Every "hacker" that defaults to the safe repressive position is someone who would rather that GIF looked that those barely-working WebM or whatever embeds found on Wikipedia, with little transport controls, bureaucratic efficiency and that wrongthink GIF memes were somehow blocked by "good DRM, DRM that prevents Putin from attacking the system". Which system? The one that brought us Medium.com when we used to have Geocities. But we'll always have GIFs. [0] https://www.glamour.com/story/porn-gifs-tumblr https://www.glamour.com/story/porn-gifs-tumblr