How videos on YouTube helped A.S.M.R., a hard-to-describe brain-tingling feeling, become a subcultural phenomenon on the internet
perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.” http://www.nytimes.com/... Julia Carpenter / @juliaccarpenter : Had to break to my mom this week that no, my little sister isn't “weird,” she's just a normal preteen who medically needs to watch and rewatch videos of people crunching tissue paper!!! http://www.nytimes.com/... Kaitlyn Tiffany / @kait_tiffany : “It was posted in 2009 but languished in the algorithmic scrap heap of YouTube on account of its weak, unsearchable title.” love @jamiekeiles on attention-induced head orgasms and am laughing but also learning... http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
A.S.M.R. is a rare case of the internet doing the reverse of its usual work: instead of distributing an existing cultural product, YouTube's search and recommendation machinery surfaced and named a sensation many people had but no shared word for — the Times frames it as perhaps the first feeling the internet has revealed into existence. The story sits between two other portraits of the platform: the algorithmic dark side documented in coverage of YouTube auto-serving traumatizing content to young children and the radicalization-through-recommendations argument, and the quieter finding that most of YouTube is a long tail where the median video has just 41 views.
What changed by April 2019 is that a genre born in that long tail — whisper and trigger videos, some languishing since 2009 under unsearchable titles — crossed into mainstream awareness, complete with preteens like Julia Carpenter's sister who 'medically need' to rewatch tissue-paper crunching. That trajectory matters because it shows the same recommendation engine criticized for extremes also functions as a discovery layer for benign subcultures.
First-order effects
- ASMR creators gain a mass audience and a nameable identity overnight, converting a private quirk into content with searchable demand — while viewers who thought they were 'weird' get a label, a community, and a normalization narrative in mainstream outlets like the Times.
- YouTube gets a reputational counterweight: at the same moment critics cite its role in radicalization and harmful children's content, the platform can point to having midwifed an entirely new, harmless cultural category.
Second-order effects
- Brands and celebrities chasing the platform's aura of authenticity — the Will Smith–era vlogging wave covered by VICE — now have a proven template: adopt or sponsor an organic subculture rather than broadcast at it.
- Adjacent platforms face pressure to replicate the effect; TikTok's own sudden-fame engine, seen with teen stars like Mooptopia struggling under fan devotion, shows the same dynamic producing the same creator-attention problems on a faster clock.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, recommendation algorithms become de facto cataloguers of human experience — deciding which unnamed sensations, hobbies, and communities get surfaced into existence, which makes their design choices a matter of cultural policy, not just engagement optimization.
- The long tail stops being a graveyard: a platform where the median video has 41 views can still incubate phenomena that later define mainstream culture, arguing for treating archival and search quality as strategically central rather than residual.
The trend: Recommendation-driven platforms are evolving from distributors of existing culture into discovery engines that name and popularize previously undocumented human experiences, with ASMR as an early, benign data point.