Math Science Vision Approvals Budget

Mr Beast; entertainment, pain, & everything you need; project management.

“Meditative, I drive my little wagon of the apocalypse over the smooth, silent, odor-free asphalt, the asphalt of eternity.” — Guido Morselli, Dissipatio H.G.

“I wish I was like you: easily amused.” — Nirvana, All Apologies

*

Mr Beast is laying in a coffin. He has been down there for four days. He is tired, but cannot sleep — now he’s crying. Not very much or very loudly, but he is crying. “Why am I crying I don’t know,” he says, his bored and gorgeous monotone enlivened by his sniffling.

Maybe on a certain level he does these stunts in order to feel something, anything at all, to get a rise out of himself. “Sometimes I forget I’m only 21” he wrote online in 2019¹, and why wouldn’t you, if this was what you did and who you were. He seems older. He seems younger. He is right in your face, now, talking, shouting. He sometimes seems barely there at all.

You and I understand why he’s crying: He is torturing himself. Crying is the only thinkable reaction, not crying would be unthinkably weird. At times he almost seems to understand it, or to grasp what’s truly going on. But never fully. (“I’ll try to act like I’m not depressed. Almost there!”) Whether it’s the effect of the coffin or the camera, the true understanding always apparently retreats. Like someone who hasn’t realised their emotional self-regulation strategy is perpetual busyness telling themselves “I just need to get through this week” every week forever.

Listen, we all do, we’ve all done weird shit. We’re all at least adjacent to the weird. Beast might not be so unusual in the level of weirdness, I think, or I suspect, but in the commitment and publicity he brings to it. Also, he has insane mental fortitude. In this challenge and in a later video in which he locks himself in solitary confinement for a full 7 days, he goes far less insane than most people would go (certainly far less than I would). He even remains lucid enough to do the sponsorship spots inside the coffin and the cell, which gives these spots a kind of sociological fascination that means you simply cannot look away. Most other youtubers are so, so fucking lazy compared to him, they don’t even integrate the sponsorship spots into their normal videos that they make while they’re, like, talking on their couch. This guy does it in a prison cell. The whole time I’m somewhat flabbergasted, like Can he really do this? But he can.

Mr Beast — it should be MrBeast, but I hate it — was once a real boy, named Jimmy. Jimmy is alive in there, certainly; but how far removed from Beast, I doubt even he could tell you. But at this point that does not matter. Whoever he is would do anything. Because he knew, long before he did this, what would be the inevitable result: Hundreds of millions of views.

This is probably the wildest thing you can watch on YouTube without feeling like you have crossed into the abyss.² I think that is part of why the videos are so popular. Beast has an unerring instinct for that line. His first viral video was “I count to 100,000” — Sorry, “I counted to 100,000!” — a 23 hour 48 minute and 5 second video that, he first in his title card assures you, is sped up from 40 hours of footage. The next title card begins ominously:

The most you’ve ever tortured yourself so far, Jimmy. So far.

Look, I hate to say it, but is this not straightforwardly a type of performance art? Don’t you think somewhere Marina Abramović is eating her own tasty gruesome heart out about and for this? She could make that an installation: I watch 400 hours of MrBeast footage and I get so depressed I have to be administered ketamine. Listen, someone who poses for four minutes with an arrow pointed right towards their heart should know this.

But now that almost feels quaint. I mean it’s still dangerous, obviously, and to weigh the circumstances up too much brings that frisson of terror, surely, but now that I have Beast to contend with I have another thought, a terrible thought, an uncharitable, awful thought to have, and that is:

Only four minutes?

Beast would have done that for hours.

In Rest Energy she put herself at the mercy of a single man. In I Spent 7 days Buried Alive, he puts himself at the mercy of the boys, who have to dig him up again later.³ In Rhythm Zero, Marina, at the mercy of the museum-going public. Beast, though he walls himself off behind silicone, puts himself at the mercy of the world. It’s turbo-Abramović. (I am not the only person to have made this connection, in fact we seem to be across it here on substack (sigh), but I doubt there are more than dozens of us.⁴) Oh, she would hate it. But I think primarily because she hadn’t thought of it, that she didn’t get to it first.⁵

Obviously, in a literal sense, you can’t get him the way you could get her if you happened to be in the right place and time in NYC. And yet you can get him, we can all can get him, it’s just that the mode of access is his desire: his desire for our attention, his yearning, above all, to please.

It is not our will that he makes himself subject to but our unthought-of, subconscious desires. This makes it appear that we have less control over him than I think we really do, and that he has more control over us than I think he really does.

*

The fact that he is doing this to himself is what gives these images, and each video itself, its charge. It also puts into context the fact that he now pays other people, or offers them cash prizes, to do other stuff just like this to themselves.

I think Beast Games is on some level knowingly dystopian work, though I haven’t spelunked enough through the interviews to be able to fully tell — and if he can’t entirely figure it out that burying himself alive is torturing himself (like, he knows it, intellectually, but does he emotionally know this? I think not, and then) I’m not 100% sure he’s going to get this: that he shouldn’t make people live for 48 hours or 138 days on top of a beanpole or in a beanbag or whatever it is. But his doing that shit is somewhat aesthetically tolerable to people — some people, not all people, of course — because Beast can and would and does do this to himself, and I think everyone who participates in these things fully knows this. I suspect they, too, have watched the coffin video. Again, and I can’t over-stress this, it has 300+ MILLION VIEWS.

And the other remarkable fact about all of this is it’s not the views per se that are of interest to him — it is the confirmation of his theories about how views are produced. His own understanding of virality itself, of how views work, of attention in the aggregate, is his true core interest. These horrible videos are lab experiments. So far, he has confirmed most of his hypotheses.

Of course, the fact that it is in pursuit of knowledge and that there is someone (in this case me) to whom it does not feel clearly exploitative does not necessarily mean that it’s all ok. Abramović also got in trouble for paying people — arguably too little — to do stuff she would also have clearly done herself. To be perfectly honest with you, I still do not know how I feel about all of this.

I think there are pretty strict limits to what one can do to others under the proviso that one would do them to oneself, and it seems arguable to me that Beast has already breached them — arguable, but not clear. The twin facts that he is so in tune with people’s attention and so, so far out of touch with the normal way that people expect to be treated and indeed expect to live are probably directly related to one another. It’s hard to know exactly how common or widespread this kind of fully whacked-out masochism is. It can’t be that rare, but I think it is not as common as weirdos who do PhDs think it is, or general hikikomori internet people’s circle of friendships suggests (but I repeat myself, etc). The more one can be among these types of people, also, the more one discovers distinctions between them, and not only in preferences and beliefs. I don’t want to bury myself alive; I also couldn’t do it.

Beast, or I suppose in fact Jimmy, grew up the child of poor, divorced parents, as a direct result of the US subprime mortgage crisis. And if he wasn’t Beast himself, then he would be one of these competitors. When you watch these competition videos, it could not be more obvious that he sees himself in them, and they see themselves in him right back: they love him. (Except after all that, maybe, when they sue him.)

I don’t remember how I got interested in Mr Beast. I think it was the Diary of a CEO video, but that’s strange even to me, since it’s not like I make a habit of watching them. But they are beloved of the relentless algorithm, and I, too, am bored, and like to be served. (Well, bored, or curious, or was hostage to the landing page, whatever.) The intro sequence to the Diary of a CEO episode about Mr Beast is astoundingly interesting — and also the tagline, “If you want to be liked, don’t help people”, which is, in fact, startlingly true (and not without some reason). But it continued. It blew out beyond all reason. I watched the whole thing and in fact I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The people on Diary of a CEO usually feel to me like a different species of animals, but not this time. This guy is like us. That was my thought.

Actually here there are two things. The first honestly is that he sounds like an insane academic, or some other sort of real obsessive. He sounds like a crazed, put-upon grad student living in the lab of a madnut delirium professor. He looks like somebody’s sad RA. Next title card please:

youtube.com/watch?v=xWcldHxHFpo

You know, being averse to watching this is not the same thing as being indifferent to it or unaffected by it. He has ways of making himself hard to ignore. That seems less academic to me — we are by and large screaming for people to ignore us — and more in line with the instincts of the poster, who, yes, seeks expression, but also seeks to make others react, often by a complex inducement. Self-deprecation works. Self-deprecation is, I think you’ll agree, a sliding scale. In excess, of course, it’s unseemly; but when handled just right, people like it so much they eat it up. Beast has that flair and that instinct; why wouldn’t he? He took the time to perfect it. He would do anything to induce us to watch him, that’s on him — but it’s our fault that the inducement has to be so rotten in general, not his. It’s our fault that we yearn to see him half-mad, tormented, in pain.

He absolutely knows this. Up top of the counting video he asks us to “Think of the pain I’m about to be in” — oh we are. The top comment is “Imagine realising that your Camera wasn't on...”. More pain.

*
Speaking of voyeurism, someone leaked The MrBeast Production Company Onboarding Handbook, which mostly reads like an old lj post (complimentary).⁶

Kyla Scanlon called this the first Gen Z business manifesto. But I recognise this document — it reminds me of two other seminal documents about the challenges of work and project management: Matthew Pearson’s How to survive your first year of graduate school in economics, and Gentzkow and Shapiro’s Code and Data handbook. At least, these were seminal in my life. So if this is the first Gen Z anything, well, plus ca change.

In fact some parts of the subheadings of his doc almost seem like they’d be more at home in our docs — I like “Math Science Vision Approvals Budget”. The entire section reads “Everything you need can be solved by one of these 5 things above. Math Science Vision Approvals Budget.” Everything? Everything. That’s it for us, as well. This is a clear cut description of what we do, and, indeed, some of us do that all for attention also. (And of course we can relate to another of his subheadings: “NO DOES NOT MEAN NO” — heinous, yes, but he will win you over in that section.) This is the kind of personality that invents vaccines and proves impossibility theorems, but the things he got insanely invested in are (1) youtube (2) ethically sourced chocolate bars (the vast majority of the chocolate we all eat involves child labour, but not Feastables, his brand).

“I spent basically 5 years of my life locked in a room studying virality on Youtube.” (Handbook). That’s spitting distance to what a PhD is. And he has learned a lot about how attention works. Here’s another excerpt from the handbook:

“I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.

I think you have to agree with this. I think you are not free to deny it. Whatever else you and I might want to say about Mr Beast, he knows what will grab and hold people’s attention. I think the only people who are not interested in this or affected by this on some level are people for whom sitting in a bathtub filled with ketchup is usual to them, and who are interested in things way, way more different than that.

Also: He is using the term exponentially correctly! He is explicitly looking for extreme draws, and the distribution he is intentionally trying to draw from has incredibly fat tails on purpose, and the tails are especially what interest him.

He also has a relatively sophisticated way of thinking about all kinds of metrics. At the top of page 7 of his company handbook he spontaneously reinvents the ceteris paribus reasoning that we use to interpret regression. He does so to avoid errors of reasoning about levels of viewer loss over runtime (emphasis mine):

On this particular video we lost 21 million viewers in the first minute of the video (which surprisingly compared to other channels is above average) and could have been much worse. Let’s say the start of the video wasn’t well-lit, I didn’t match the expectations of the clickbait, I didn’t pre plan what I’d say, and we didn’t front load some interesting stuff for the first minute of content, we would have lost much less then 21 million people. Because it wouldn’t have even got 21 million views lol. But if the views were hypothetically fixed then instead of still having 39 million viewers at the 1 minute mark it would be more like 20 million viewers.

More popular videos will lose more viewers in the first minute in absolute terms than less popular videos, purely because the ceiling is higher; I think he’s actually groping his way towards the notion that dropoff should be measured as a percentage change for a headline metric, but then again maybe not, because even in percentages the relationship is probably nonlinear, and I could think of reasons that more popular videos (in levels) have a structurally higher or lower percentage drop-off than less popular videos (in levels).

In any case: this is just econometrics. He’s doing applied econometrics.

It seems to be tempting to people at this point to say that despite how intelligent this is, it is not that he is exceptionally smart, but rather exceptionally motivated. This claim was made in one of the essays I linked to, but you see it repeated everywhere when people discuss Mr Beast. But actually, (1) I think he is smart, and (2) those are the same thing in almost all real applications. (Actually, (2) might be a bit romantic. Conspiracy theorists are motivated. Let’s stick with (1): he is smart.)

What’s impressive to me here is the level of insight and the accuracy of the observation. E.g. (Handbook): “in general once you have someone for 6 minutes they are super invested in the story and probably in what I call a “lull”. They are watching the video without even realizing they are watching a video.” (Emphasis mine again, sorry, I can’t help but put my finger on the scale.) You can’t convince me this is a normal person’s understanding of conscious experience. This guy knows ball.

In the section “Own your mistakes” he says the reason he wants to immediately fire what he calls C-players (with severance) is not because they make more mistakes (they don’t) but because they don’t learn from the mistakes they make and so they don’t improve — a C-player is a person whose mistakes are always wasted. That reflects an advanced understanding of the essential human parts of project management.

The last thing that stuck out to me about the document is how much and how often he talks about authenticity, and about love — his own love, his emotional connection to the work, the love that it is necessary (for success) to engender in other people.

Abramović talks about authenticity also in her manifesto; AN ARTIST SHOULD NOT LIE TO HIMSELF OR OTHERS AN ARTIST SHOULD NOT STEAL FROM OTHER ARTISTS etc etc (It was capslocked like this when I first saw it, on the cover of Mono Kultur #35).

Beast:

We don’t fake things

Beast:

Don’t ever put me in a situation where I have to lie, because I won’t and it will screw the video.

No dull moments in videos

You can’t fake intensity in videos

The video endings must always be abrupt to protect retention.

He elaborates somewhat in another part:

I’m not fake and I will be authentic, that’s partly why the channel does so well. And if i’m not excited by the video, we’re fucked. Luckily, I’d say I’m a pretty predictable guy. (at least in this regard haha) What excites me is what I believe will make the audience happy. That’s what it always has been and always will be. I’m willing to count to one hundred thousand, bury myself alive, or walk a marathon in the world’s largest pairs of shoes if I must. I just want to do what makes me happy and ultimately the viewers happy. This channel is my baby and I’ve given up my life for it. I’m so emotionally connected to it that it’s sad lol.

Because:

The goal is to make them fall in love with the story, the people in the video and the overall video itself.

Is this not the direct echo of how Polya talks about teaching math?

*

“Our audience is massive and because of that you have to be simple, for 50 million people to understand something it must be simple.” (Handbook)

Here we have the departure. Polya wants you to fall in love with math so that you will be inclined to persist with it when you discover it is not simple. But Beast’s end goal, every time, is your attention. He wants you to understand only because he himself understands that you will struggle to keep your attention sharp on certain things that challenge you. Therefore, he does not challenge you. He shows you only what you already understand.

There is a real distinction between being desperate for attention and being desperate to understand how attention works. Yes. In the course of a quest to figure out the second thing one probably has to end up trying to get attention, but the attention is just a means to an end. I think this is some of what sets Beast apart from thousands of other bored-looking dead-mic hopefuls.

But why be so desperate to understand how attention works?

Also is he only interested in that? Wouldn’t someone who was mainly interested in that start, like, I don’t know, publishing their findings? Running conferences about attention? Am I being too academiapilled here? Am I wrong?

And anyway, on the third hand, isn’t attention always a means to an end? The raw experience of having eyes on oneself is …. uhhhh … neutral, is it not?

I feel like I’m circling the voyeurism issue once again. In a Freudian view and in a feminist analysis of these situations it’s the voyeur who has all the power, not the individual on display. Beast fits that description. He’s rich now, but he doesn’t use the money to advertise his ventures or bribe corrupt politicians to give him special treatment or whatever, as far as I can tell. He has no power to compel you to look, he receives no government subsidy or institutional privilege, he has or at least he had no press network, pulls no strings.⁷ He could do all that! But he doesn’t. He gets you to look at him only by offering you what you like. It is exactly this debased position that the desirable woman occupies under patriarchy.

So now some guy does that to himself? And for what? For followers on youtube? Day 5 in the underground coffin: “I’m doing this thing where I’m crying. And I’m not 100% sure why I’m crying. Hitting 200 million with the boys was fun but now I’m just … alone. And trapped in here again.”

This is a succinct demonstration of desire’s path to the moment when it comes to fruition. You almost could not script a thing so good.

I really wanted to address all of this less in my capacity as an academic and more in my capacity as an internet weirdo. He seems like a native of the internet, someone who was essentially born online in all the ways that matter. Obviously, like most of us who fit that description born before 2008, Jimmy was a weird child. A sad, unhappy loner. But in that sense, he is sort of a relic of the old, core internet, before it was taken over by facebook and facebookification.

So why does it not feel like it?

It’s not speculation from me that he was a loner, by the way. (God, that would be rude.) He tells it on the podcast for the CEOs. He says he has always been this way. Stephen or whatever his name is asking why. Beast: I think a lot of people have these weird tendencies and I think they try to, uh, unlearn ‘em …. and…. people were very intimidated by me … And I was like, is this, like unhealthy? Should I try to be more like a normal human? It’s a lot easier!! It’s funny —When you’re making lots of money, it’s admirable, it’s respectable, look, those are traits we want … but when you’re not successful, you know, you’re, a lunatic, when you have all these traits.

So back then I thought like, man, should I try to be more normal, but I just could never do it…

One time a high schooler told me when I was in middle school: All you do is talk about youtube, do you know how to do anything else, you’re like a freak. And I tried to watch south park… and I just couldn’t. … And I tried to do all these things to fit in … and I eventually just like stopped talking, because I just didn’t relate to anyone … um … people used to call me mute.

*
Eventually I started to succeed, found other lunatics, and now life’s great….

*

No, man, life’s not great. You’re winning. Those are not the identical thing. It’s just that this personality only makes sense to the outside world when you’re winning. That’s a hard lot, in life. To feel that in order to make sense to others, you have to win. No wonder he vaulted the hurdle. In life you clear that bar or die trying.

And all of this, tormented as it is, seems less mentally degraded to me than the rest of the chocolate company CEOs who don’t give a shit about child labour and slavery in the supply chain. The entire back end of the Diary of a CEO interview is about that. Or you can watch this video: Rescuing Child Slaves in Africa. Only 19 million views, which is 17 million more views than there have ever been on anything put out by a development economist.⁸ The video is not too bad. Bit of old school poverty porn, but far from the worst example of it, which is impressive given that he’s a youtuber.

Of course it is sordid. I’m not making any excuses. Beast has some notion that something is wrong with all this, especially in America: “I don’t think, in America, ‘the most successful country in the world’, someone’s only hope of seeing again should be a Youtuber.” But that is the current reality. So, he says, well, if I don’t do it, those people will just be blind. The counterfactual seems to be that he spends the money on a giant inflatable bouncy castle filled with custard or pudding or something instead. It sounds like he truly wants a better solution; in fact it sounds like he’s just begging people to tax him. (Maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my end.) But would the money be spent on anything better than a bouncy castle by any budget that could currently get passed in the US? No, it would not. I guess he could start lobbying congress. But perhaps that would feel sordid too.

Beast Philanthropy is not exactly a secret, but it’s also by far his least popular account, and the one for which he gets the most hate. As most development economists know, people’s emotional relationship to charity and poverty is complex. The fact that Beast does this anyway shows that as a person — inasmuch as he is still a person and not a youtube monster (but he did all this by himself, he didn’t have a wife and his mother kicked him out for it) — he does not only care about views. He definitely cares about the chocolate. It’s just that these concerns are incredibly compartmentalised.

Most successful people know a lot about compartmentalisation. Again, I am struck by how usual and ordinary all of this is. I suspect it’s only on account of the dumbass clickbait aesthetics on offer here that people think there’s anything much that’s really new, or worrying, or apocalyptically portentious, or they themselves are above this, or that this is particularly wrong and the existing supply chain or the world before youtube is “right”. I find Mr Beast’s thumbnails and the general slant of his videos hideous, but “I spent 7 days buried alive” is interesting. Of course it’s interesting. It’s one of our collective greatest fears, and he did it to himself for youtube. Not because he had to. He wanted to.

Want is a strange word here.

People want all sorts of weird stuff. But I have never believed that there is anybody who just wants to make other people happy and I am not about to start to believe that now. Such a person would truly be vacuous. To be alive, one has to want something for oneself beyond that which implicates others. Which I guess is to say that in order to exist there has to be a notion of privacy, and private satisfaction. By definition, that’s something we can’t tell about each other in the culture, but I don’t think we will ever stop trying.

I think he wants to do the charity, I mean I think the charity is sincere. In fact I think if someone were to contact him to tell him he could help more people more effectively without doing these stunts or as well as doing these stunts he probably would want to listen — maybe I’m wrong, but I think he would at least be open.

But also, as he himself says it: “people don’t know what they want. The viewer may think they want a format forever, but they don’t. They want new and fresh things (this is evident because every channel that rehashes formats for years always dies).” It would be too much to call Mr Beast an applied psychologist, or even an applied existentialist, but watch me skirt the border of this claim.

Perhaps it’s not that Beast wants attention, or even wants to understand attention, or even wants to win. I mean he does want to win. But maybe it’s just that he wants to keep whatever is going on now going, because this is the only place where he feels like he himself makes sense. This has a Sartrean aspect. I must find a way to make myself make sense to you, I must redeem myself in your eyes. In fact, Beast no longer has to do this. He is rich, he could retire wealthy. But while the money obviously changes much for him, particularly his ability to provide for his mother, it changes nothing about his relationship to his own endeavours. Like Abramović, he pours all his money back into his art. Like Garcin, the door is open, but he cannot leave the room. The people who matter to him now are all in there.

Does he need help! Obviously yes also! But we all need help. If Beast seems to an extent unaware of what torture is, is that really so unusual? Or is not being able to recognise harm in fact normal? If you watch the coffin video you will see him go in and out of lucidity, both in general and around what exactly the situation he has subjected himself to is. It’s actually kind of fair and sensible not to grasp what you’ve done to yourself while you’re still busy doing it. This drives anyone insane even if they’re not trapped under 6,000 lbs of earth.

Who knows what he’ll eventually make of all this. Maybe he’ll come to feel that it was wrong, to feel like he has been one of his own small contestants. Orson Welles said I regret almost everything; I regret that I fell in love with movies.⁹

Is Beast connecting with us, per se? Does what we have even deserve to be called by the term “parasocial”? I’m being parasocial in a sense, by engaging with him like I am in this essay, but is that gross? Am I being gross here? I hope not. I think I’m writing this because I think I understand what happened here, in a sense. (Nevertheless, I hate this. I am going to go back to analysing fictional characters next. Maybe I should just have cut to the chase here and written the whole essay about Dissipatio H.G.)

I suspect he is only marginally more in contact with us or with the outside world at all times than he would be if sealed in a bunker and connected to us by a radio. Actually that’s exactly what the coffin stunt was, so. I would guess that Jimmy staging these extraordinary stunts and games in which he himself and other people risk their psychological and physical wellbeing for money is less of a business decision and more of an exteriorising compulsion.

He says that his favourite thing to do is to walk around Walmart at night. Actually I could kind of relate to this. And when I read Dissipatio H.G., when Morselli’s narrator wandered the desolate town halls and hotel kitchens, it made me think of Beast in the Walmart wandering the aisles. It sounds to me like that feels soothing.

I’ve walked myself into a difficult position here. I don’t per se want to defend him. But I’m so drawn to this obsession, this detail-orientedness. I understand finding that kind of wandering soothing. I admire the drive and the achievement as much as I think it goes wrong far too easily, as much as I’ve seen it go wrong, and I know how often this all sits adjacent to disaster. I think some things would be better if he did not do all of this. Yet in a sense I admire the insanity, in him and in myself to some extent and people like this. I do think, if you will excuse me from quoting a psychoanalytic encyclopedia (imagine if you will such a thing):

“The history of civilizations, sciences, and religions is overflowing with neurotics, perverts, and psychotics who, basing themselves precisely on the fantasy that governs the logic of their psychic lives, have enabled the determining advances that constitute the heritage of humanity.”

*

But I do think that what he does is ephemeral.

Not only in the sense that everything anyone does is ephemeral, but moreso in the sense that his medium itself has — all his media, actually, youtube, curing sickness, making chocolate, have — a profound immateriality. Abramović talks about and worries over this in her own work. In Mono Kultur #35 she talks about the concept of a digital temple, a stone copy or a record of what is now only precariously recorded on unstable, unreliable devices, a copy that instead could survive a nuclear blast.

One has to be of course either absurdly altruistic or absurdly egomaniacal or both to think hard or much about preservation. Awkward that those two sit close together.

It’s hard for anything a single person makes to last, or to influence anything really, let alone to end up being load-bearing in the society or the culture. Perhaps there are very, very rare exceptions to this — Shakespeare, Dante, but they both got in at the ground floor of a moment. Dante was writing at a time when knitting together pagan and christian cultures was a societal priority even if that was not articulated, and Shakespeare was writing around the time of incredible reform, and during a literacy explosion; the Homeric texts had just been translated into english. I mean they are also geniuses, but: Timing is everything, as connoisseurs of virality know. And they both — by construction — heavily used existing things made by other people in the foundations of their art. They forced themselves into the record, explicitly drawing on a previous and contemporary collective.

I wonder if things that matter, things that lift heavy weights, are always imparted to the world by a collective. Maybe that’s pushing it a bit far. But I do think the things that we make as part of a collective are always amplified by their embedding in that broader work. There is some sort of measure theoretic trickery afoot: the ocean also merges into the drop. And so while it would be uncontroversial to say that, for example, Wikipedia has contributed more to and exerted more influence on humanity than Beast ever could, has, or will, I am about to go further, to say that the person who contributed, say, a single graph of the Digamma function — anonymous defunct user Nschloe — has contributed more than the multi-million view-bedazzled videos of Beast.

Maybe it’s just that the internet is now too old for anyone one person to do it. Maybe if you get in on the ground floor you can — maybe Maddox and Homestarrunner are as much a part of the fabric of the internet as AOL chatrooms were simply because they were there so early that they seeded some part of the internet’s cultural tone — But actually this could also be about Mr Beast specifically. Nothing he has produced has influenced how people talk or think or use internet culture. Not beyond mere reference.

I don’t think this is because Beast isn’t good at what he does — he is good, but what he does is get attention. He has no plan for you, no desire for you to be changed by the video. I said before that he is studying you, me, us, but he seems oddly unchanged by whatever he has learned, if anything he has receded and become less for having tried to entertain us. For having succeeded in entertaining us. Is it possible that he has been diminished by engaging with us without wanting to change us? Because it strikes me as odd that he does not seek to influence us, while allowing us to have this enormous, outsize influence on him. He lives his life for us, and yet, if we are changed by him, that is almost incidental. In fact I suspect he would prefer that we weren’t, because that makes us harder to predict.

I think this lack — to all appearances — of any intrinsic or generative desire is what produces vacuity. To me this suggests that to some extent we are constituted out of our desire to impose on what is outside of us, to influence things and people, to get something for ourselves or change something for others. Simply wanting others’ attention isn’t anything. It’s not anything even if you get it, if you win, because you win from the grave. It feels good. Then nothing happens. Nobody is made from this or transformed by it.

That’s not true of achievement in general. There are things you can achieve which change you. It’s just that getting people’s attention is not one of them. If anything, it does the opposite.

At some point in the Diary of a CEO interview, the guy asks Beast what he will do or how he feels when the numbers don’t go up or stop going up. Before responding Beast gets that usual weird sheepish smile on his face, the smile that seems to announce that some part of him knows this is bullshit. “The numbers always go up,” he says, “they have always gone up.” Oh, Jimmy.

*

At the end of Beast’s production document he says to go back and read it all again, since he guarantees you will not have retained enough just once. In that spirit, let us look again at the single graph of the Digamma function on the wiki. I found it in my present quest to better understand the Gamma function. It find this picture very beautiful, but have to confess that I do not really understand it.

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MrBeast@MrBeast

Sometimes I forget I’m only 21 because the last few years have moved insanely slow. Maybe it’s because every day I’m doing something different and crazy 😂 Regardless, I love youtube and I want to do this until the day I die :)

2:13 PM · Nov 2, 2019

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642 Replies · 1.08K Reposts · 60.9K Likes

2. At this point it is worth pausing to remember that the mainstream internet experience is curated by thousands of people, mostly in the developing world, being paid to expose themselves to thousands of illegal, horrific videos and images in the course of content moderation.

3. The boys and Ava! Or, “the boys” is gender neutral. (Oh, poor Ava. It’s really not her fault, as far as I can tell. From what I’ve read it looks like her main failing was not realising that not everybody in the discord server was of age. They crucified her for a comparatively normal failing because she is trans. It looks to me like Beast defended her as long as he could, though, then again, who knows.)

4. Though as Everett Helm pointed out in the first link, Tehching Hsieh outdoes Beast in extremity. But he doesn’t court publicity, and thus, he isn’t famous. Also, let me say here: I thought of the comparison to performance art too late in my writing process to reformulate this essay to reflect the fact that I then found out other people have thought of this before me. (This is for long boring process reasons you would not be interested in.) I haven’t scuppered the piece because this thought is still not very widely held, and there is an academic folk theorem that says a result must be published 3 separate times before it becomes knowledge. And because I am going to say other stuff also.

5. In a sense, she can’t get to it, for she is not a digital native.

6. We on the internet are not 100% convinced it was leaked, see Kevin Munger here for more.

7. There seems to have been some kind of media blitz just recently. Not sure what this portends, perhaps this is all to prepare for being sued.

8. There were about 2 million on Esther’s TED talk according to the TED webpage; the number is suspiciously smaller on youtube.

9. And that’s also on youtube!