When Harry Jackson pulled his small motorcycle into Kathmandu on September 8, he had no idea the city was exploding in protests. He didn’t even know there was a curfew. People in Nepal, largely driven by Gen Z youth, had taken to the streets, and that day riots broke out when nearly two dozen people were shot and killed by authorities. In the middle of it all was Jackson, a travel vlogger riding from Thailand to the United Kingdom on his bike.
Within a day, the mass demonstrations that filled the capital would do the seemingly impossible: defy trigger-happy law enforcement, storm the grounds of parliament and set fire to the building, and oust a prime minister. Jackson, who had been documenting his journey for months on YouTube, Instagram, and other social media under the @wehatethecold channel, became one of the main ways people around the world saw what was happening in Nepal as youth-led protests toppled the government.
Anger had been simmering in Nepal for months, much of it driven by widespread corruption among politicians. Many of those politicians’ children also flaunted their wealth, often on social media. They in turn were called out online by Nepali people, and on September 4, the government banned 26 social media platforms. Protests started, and large demonstrations broke out on September 8, with police using tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition on crowds of largely young demonstrators. That’s when Jackson arrived, filming his way through marches and capturing the sounds of gunshots.
Video still courtesy of @wehatethecold
Jackson had been in Nepal earlier in June but returned due to other geopolitical issues. He had planned to be in Kathmandu for a short, easy stop to get his Honda CT125 shipped for the next leg of his journey. He had been in India, trying to cross into Pakistan. But the border was closed, so he headed north to Nepal. After getting a hotel and catching up on events, he decided to tag along with some people and see the protests the next day. He’d been told it wasn’t safe for tourists but said he was willing to roll the dice, especially after having ridden his bike through some unsafe roads for weeks. On September 9 he was out among the protests for several hours, and by midafternoon decided to get back to his hotel to quickly edit the footage and get it published.
“This footage just has to go online. I was watching it back and reliving the time and thinking, wow, this is insane,” he tells WIRED. “They’re burning parliament, this is huge!”
Jackson was with crowds as they moved through narrow streets, eventually descending on the large area around the parliament building. The footage Jackson captured that day shows a mix of chaos—including hundreds fleeing gunshots—and mutual aid, with people stopping to hand out water, check in on each other, and help those hurt by tear gas. In the video, Jackson, 28, moves through the protesters, asking what the latest is, following the crowds as they get closer to the seat of power. His video took off, racking up millions of views in just hours, and it has more than 30 million views on YouTube alone.
Video still courtesy of @wehatethecold
“I have truly witnessed history, on a stupid trip from Thailand to England on a fucking moped!” Jackson shouts into the camera over the sound of chants, drums, fire, and upheaval.
Over the course of those two days, more than 70 people were killed and more than 21,000 injured. Several buildings were burned, including the parliament building and the homes of several politicians—busy shopping areas and popular neighborhood spots were left untouched, however, as Jackson’s videos show. The protests got results fast. K.P. Sharma Oli stepped down as prime minister after retaking office last summer. Nepal’s president dissolved the government and set new elections for March. Sushila Karki, a former chief justice, was named interim prime minister, in part following heavy debate and votes on the Discord messaging app, which activists had turned to regularly to communicate ahead of and during the protests.
After he started filming the protests, Jackson said in his videos and on social media that he does not consider himself a journalist, just a tourist filming what’s around him. “I don’t know what constitutes journalism and what doesn’t. I could be filming temples and asking people about temples; is that journalism? I went into this with the intention of being a YouTuber. I don’t have a journalist visa. I don’t have a journalism degree.”
Video still courtesy of @wehatethecold
As for why his videos took off, he admits that being a foreigner—specifically, a white, British one—probably played a small element in the international attention. But he put it more on him being a foreigner who was able to get up close to the events and capture dramatic footage. Jackson notes that there were plenty of local Nepali media and foreign news outlets there, but especially on September 9, many seemed to be hanging back, filming from a distance as fires raged. Jackson says that he asked many of his new Nepali friends about that dynamic. He said he was told it was in part because he showed up genuinely out of the loop, so he came into the protests without any bias or political lens, just filming the protests raw.
Since that day at parliament and after Oli was ousted, the protests have gotten attention in international media, but Jackson is surprised it hasn’t become a bigger story. He notes that other protests around the world had gotten some larger attention, but not the successful ones in Nepal. “It didn’t spread as much as it should—that was the literal collapse of a government,” he says.
Video still courtesy of @wehatethecold
The coverage that did come out, Jackson says, seemed to boil it down to singular causes, like the social media ban. “Trust Gen Z to protest—they’re without dopamine for a day,” he says sarcastically. Jackson says he had no intention of trying to speak for the people of Nepal, but from the conversations he’d had since arriving in Kathmandu, people told him that it was more about long-simmering issues over corruption that drove the organizing. He pointed to the nearly 20 people killed on September 8 as a catalyst for the escalation on the streets that led to the major government upheaval. “You know, ‘You shot 20 people, so we’re going to go harder,’” he says.
The massive surge in viewers also turned Jackson into a “weird local celebrity,” he says, bemused. In his videos since September 9, he says, people keep coming up to say hi, grab a selfie, or ask if he’s the guy from @wehatethecold. And there are the memes, both in Nepal and elsewhere. Edits of his protest videos, with Jackson running around the chaos, have spread, often with captions like “Guy goes on a holiday and ends up at a revolution.”
Video still courtesy of @wehatethecold
In the aftermath of the protest, Nepal’s new government is looking to investigate what led to the police violence earlier in September. The new prime minister set up a commission to investigate the assaults, deaths, and arsons.
Since those two chaotic days, Jackson has continued filming, using the new attention to his channels to show the people he met in Kathmandu and parts of the city that aren’t burning or surrounded by armed security forces. Shops are reopening, people are going out, and there is a positivity around the city, he says. After initially intending to get in and out of Nepal quickly for his journey, Jackson now says he’s going to stick around a little longer. He wants to show what’s going on in Nepal after the chaos from his first videos in the country, and some of the connections he has made since coming back have opened up new opportunities for what kind of places he can visit.
Video still courtesy of @wehatethecold
“I haven’t had any bad experiences,” he says. “And it was kind of my duty to do that, to keep filing. They’ve helped me so much.”
