The Day YouTube Wept: Marcus Batto’s Found-Footage Memorial to Michael Jackson
did:plc:hncia4jn3l56imtqhydzwsoa
June 2, 2026
A day in the life of the internet is impossible to reconstruct as a feature film. The pace of the scroll is too quick; any given snapshot is too algorithmically myopic to be comprehensive. There’s too much that evades notice, and still more that evades preservation. With the slow obsolescence of search engines—lost first to advertisements, then to optimization, and now to artificial intelligence—our digital past gets blurrier still. With There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night, Marcus Batto attempts the impossible, reconstructing June 25, 2009, the day of Jackson’s death, exclusively through the found footage available online. Batto, […]
Source
Discussion in the ATmosphere