Internet Culture

Open the Box: How Ordinary People Filming Themselves Unwrapping Stuff Invented a Whole New Kind of Want

Somewhere around 2006, a man filmed himself opening a Nokia E61 smartphone and posted the video to YouTube. It was not cinematic. The lighting was bad. His hands were visible and unremarkable. He said things like "okay so here we go" and "this is pretty nice actually." The video had no business being interesting. It accumulated hundreds of thousands of views.

This was, in retrospect, the canary in the coal mine. The internet had just discovered something about human psychology that marketers would spend the next fifteen years trying to fully monetize: watching someone else open a package feels like opening it yourself. And feeling like you received something is almost as good as receiving it—and in some ways, it's better.

The Weird Science of Watching Someone Else Get Stuff

To understand why unboxing videos worked, you have to accept a slightly uncomfortable truth about how human desire operates. We don't just want things. We want the experience of wanting things, and then getting them, and then holding them, and then showing them to someone who understands why they're significant. The actual object is almost secondary to the ritual surrounding it.

Unboxing videos hijacked that ritual completely. The slow peel of tape. The rustle of packaging material. The moment when the product is revealed, usually accompanied by the creator making some noise of appreciation. The close-up shot of whatever was inside, turned over slowly so you can see all angles. These were not arbitrary choices. They mapped directly onto the physical and emotional experience of opening something yourself, and the brain—a notoriously bad judge of what is real versus simulated—responded accordingly.

Neuroscientists have a term for this: mirror neurons. The internet had a different term: content.

The Early Adopters Were Not Who You'd Expect

The first wave of unboxing content wasn't beauty gurus or tech reviewers with ring lights and branded backdrops. It was hobbyists. Collectors. People who were already deeply embedded in enthusiast communities and wanted to share their excitement with the only audience that would understand it.

Collectible toy communities were early adopters—people opening blind-box figures or limited-edition vinyl toys for audiences who were already invested in the hobby. Tech enthusiasts filmed themselves unboxing new phones and laptops for forums where this constituted genuine consumer journalism. Sneakerheads documented new releases. Trading card collectors filmed pack openings that were, structurally, almost identical to what those Nokia videos were doing, except the audience was already trained to experience vicarious excitement through the rip of a foil pack.

These were niche audiences watching niche content for niche reasons. The mechanism was there. It just hadn't been discovered by the mainstream yet.

When Capitalism Noticed

The shift happened gradually, then suddenly. YouTube's monetization program launched in 2007, which meant that people filming themselves opening packages could, theoretically, make money doing it. This changed the incentive structure in ways that were not immediately obvious but proved enormously consequential.

If you could make money from unboxing videos, then it made sense to seek out more things to unbox. If you were seeking out more things to unbox, it made sense to approach brands about sending you products. If brands were sending you products, they wanted something in return—visibility, enthusiasm, the implicit endorsement of a creator whose audience trusted them.

This is, in simplified form, the entire origin story of influencer culture. And it all flows directly from the logic of the unboxing video: the experience of receiving something is a product. Documentation is the deliverable. The audience is the customer.

By the early 2010s, haul videos had formalized this into its own genre. YouTubers—mostly young women, mostly doing fashion and beauty content—would film themselves displaying recent purchases, narrating each item with the kind of detailed enthusiasm that had previously been reserved for showing your best friend what you bought at the mall. The parasocial dimension was central: the audience wasn't just watching, they were the stand-in best friend, receiving the show-and-tell with the appropriate level of interest.

What Got Lost in the Ritual

Here's the part that nobody really discusses in the breathless histories of influencer culture: something happened to surprise.

When the experience of receiving something became more culturally significant than receiving it—when the documentation became the product—the element of private joy got quietly squeezed out. You couldn't just open something anymore. You had to perform opening it. The unboxing video created an expectation that receiving things was a public event, worthy of an audience, incomplete without documentation.

This filtered down from creators to regular consumers faster than anyone expected. By the mid-2010s, people who had no intention of posting anything were taking photos of their food, their packages, their purchases—because the cultural grammar of the internet had established that experiences were meant to be witnessed. The unboxing video didn't cause this shift alone, but it was one of its most direct expressions.

There is a specific kind of person who now feels vaguely disappointed opening a package when no one is watching. This is not a coincidence. This is a trained response, and the training started with a guy filming his Nokia on a kitchen table.

The Accidental Intimacy Machine

What made the best early unboxing content compelling—and what distinguished the creators who built real audiences from those who didn't—was something harder to name than production value or product selection. It was the quality of company.

Watching someone open things is, at its core, a form of hanging out. The best unboxing creators understood this intuitively. They talked to their cameras like they were talking to a friend. They made self-deprecating comments. They got genuinely excited about things that a purely rational person might not find exciting. They created the feeling of being in a room with someone who was happy, which is—when you think about it—a remarkably powerful thing to offer strangers on the internet.

This is the emotional engine underneath influencer culture that the business analysis tends to skip over. It was never really about the products. It was about the feeling of not being alone while you watched someone get them.

The Nokia video guy probably didn't know he was building anything. He just wanted to show people his phone. But the thing he was actually offering—presence, enthusiasm, the warmth of shared excitement over something small—turned out to be exactly what a generation of internet users would pay attention to, and eventually pay for, in very large numbers.

The box was never the point. It was always about who was holding it.