When I first moved to Chicago, I was unemployed. Everyday I would wake up and spam job applications online until my eyes got sore from looking at my phone, go to whatever interviews I had scheduled for the day, then around 8 o’clock at night I would smoke marijuana in bed and watch MrBeast videos on the TV. Jimmy Donaldson, better known by his screen name MrBeast, is the first and only person to become a billionaire from posting YouTube videos. There’s something kind of hypnotic and pacifying about MrBeast’s content. It almost has an addictive, tranquillizing quality. The videos generally involve MrBeast doing very generous giveaways, wild stunts, or having contestants compete in a series of “challenges“ for money and/or fabulous prizes. I would watch, totally captivated, as Mr. Beast locked contestants in burning houses, buried them alive, or made them complete a series of embarrassing and dehumanizing tasks to prove how bad they wanted to win. There’s an argument to be made that MrBeast is the greatest single purveyor of slop entertainment in the world.
There’s kind of a mystery to how all of this works for me. One video I saw involved a contestant being given MrBeast’s credit card with full permission to buy whatever materials he needed to build a protective barrier for duffel bags full of fake money (symbolizing the actual prize money of $500,000). MrBeast would then launch a volley assault on the barrier with an onslaught of tank fire, flaming cars, and “bombs” being dropped by crane on the protective barrier. The objective of this challenge was to protect the symbolic prize money from being destroyed. When I saw this, I asked the obvious questions: “How did Mr. Beast purchase multiple tanks and presumably have permission to fire them for his video? Who gave Mr. Beast a bomb? Is this an ordinary consumer product that anyone can purchase?” No answers.
Another video I alluded to earlier involved a segment where the contestant was buried alive only for MrBeast to reveal that the contestant’s symbolic prize money was treading down a conveyor belt into a flame, and that every few seconds a couple thousand dollars would fall into the fire until the contestant could liberate himself from the makeshift grave and shut the conveyer belt off with a switch. While the contestant was in the background using an ax to break the lid of his coffin, MrBeast cut an ad for Jack Links beef jerky.
The contestants in these videos are always enthusiastic, voluntary participants and usually sympathetic characters. We often meet their families or hear about what personal aspiration they intend to fulfill with their prize money. One contestant was a farm owner who hoped to convert his property to run on only solar power with his winnings. Many other contestants have families as their motivating principle to compete in these contests. They want to set up a college fund for their kids; they represent a charity or a little league baseball team that needs new equipment. Many want to start a small business they’ve been fantasizing about. In other words, they are human beings with dreams and aspirations beyond themselves. MrBeast on the other hand comes off as an out of touch, disingenuous, and plainly unrelatable person. For someone so publicly dedicated to generous philanthropy, he is unable to evince the slightest notion that he cares about these people or sees them as human. What he offers is a grim and emblematic spectacle of America’s ever growing problem of wealth inequality.
MrBeast is not particularly handsome, talented, or charismatic, and yet he owns and operates the most successful YouTube channel of all time. As of this writing, MrBeast’s main channel boasts over 500 million subscribers — the most of any channel in YouTube’s history. His success has spawned an entire genre of copycat channels of people who do similar forms of viral slop content. Video titles like “I Only Ate Gold For A Day” and “Pranking The Police With Magic Tricks”. Many of these videos have the same format of thumbnail: an AI rendering of the author’s face looking shocked against a background that gives a taste of whatever the video is about. One sub group of creators taking notes from MrBeast are online gambling influencers. I’m referring to internet personalities such as Stevewilldoit and Togi — who often use Beast inspired cash giveaways as a way to promote themselves. The popularity of these channels illustrates an idea i keep coming back to: America is becoming a casino for the dispossessed, and a playground for those with the money to throw in your face. In that sense, MrBeast is the perfect avatar of capitalism.
A major selling point in MrBeast’s content output is the idea that you could be one of the lucky ones. He often does giveaways to random subscribers and draws video contestants from his own fan base. He’ll say something like, “This week I’m giving away $10,000 to a random subscriber, so click the button if you aren’t subscribed.” It gives the impression that by being a viewer, you’re entering a lottery where you may be selected for a chance to win. During the first season of Beast Games, there were QR codes shown on the screen for audience members to scan with their phone to enter a sweepstakes sponsored by a company called MoneyLion, which gave away a total of $3 million dollars to people watching at home. With the current state of the US economy, this idea can be very appealing to some. It’s the same reason online gambling has become so popular in recent years. People are looking for a lucky break to ease their money woes. Can you blame them? The large financial incentives offered by Mr. Beast creates a dynamic where contestants will happily degrade themselves for an audience of hundreds of millions just for a chance to escape their condition.
What I find most interesting about MrBeast is that he doesn’t seem to be particularly motivated by money. Even as a $1 billion brand, Beast doesn’t seem interested in earthly luxuries or fame. What motivates him beyond anything else is getting views. MrBeast is first and foremost a student of the YouTube algorithm. In many interviews, he talks at length about spending his early adulthood staying in the house, ordering DoorDash, and scanning the YouTube algorithm to see which kinds of videos performed the best. It’s not about making the best video, or providing anything of value, but rather to compel the highest amount of viewership.
The fact that the YouTube algorithm rewards the kind of entertainment MrBeast creates shows how vapid and meaningless a lot of the content on the platform has become. YouTube was once the great equalizer of the internet. If you had an idea, something to say, or a talent to share, anyone could record and upload a video for others to see. This created a new path to stardom outside of the Hollywood machine. Take Anthony Fantano as an example. He is one of the most influential music critics of the internet era. He runs a YouTube channel called The Needle Drop where he rates albums on a scale of zero to ten. The self proclaimed “internet’s busiest music nerd” didn’t come from a particularly privileged background that you would associate with someone who goes into the creative fields. He was just some guy who loved music and wanted a platform to discuss it online. MrBeast has reached a new plateau of internet celebrity status, and his influence on the online ecosystem threatens to diminish the equalizing value of YouTube for creators like Fantano who would rather try to offer some kind of substance over expensive slop entertainment.
This brings me to Beast Games, MrBeast’s very polarizing game show hosted on Amazon prime. The games featured in the show are heavily influenced by the landmark Netflix series Squid Game. It feels as though MrBeast had the exact opposite takeaway from the series that one would hope. He was unable to grasp the anti-capitalist messaging of the show and instead thought, “What if I made this real?” The first season of Beast Games featured 1000 contestants who competed for a $10 million grand prize, the largest of any television game show in history. It also included more modest giveaways throughout the course of the season. People are incentivized to take bribes, lie, manipulate, and betray one another to advance in the competition. In addition to the games, there’s a psychological and social aspect to all of this. People form alliances, conspire against each other, and make strategic decisions based on who they do and don’t associate with. It was one of the most stomach churning pieces of media that I’ve ever encountered in my life. Beast Games makes the Stanford prison experiment look like child’s play by comparison. It put me into a spiritual black hole. There’s something so disturbing about the fact that a man can float a couple hundred thousand dollars into a prize pool and make people act like total savages to one another.
In MrBeast’s YouTube videos, the losers are generally gracious and thankful for the opportunity to compete. In Beast Games however, there were multiple adult tantrums throughout the span of the show. There were people that cried and acted like children when they were eliminated, as if they were about to be killed like a character in Squid Game. Each contestant uses their couple seconds of camera time to give you their sob story for why their choice to compete is actually a noble and selfless act, which in many instances does not get narratively developed and is quickly forgotten the second they’re eliminated from the contest.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. When the game came down to the final 10 players, MrBeast made an offer to the contestants: A million dollar prize pool prominently displayed in a cage that each contestant would be allowed a turn to draw any amount of money from. Each decision would be irreversible and done under the cover of night. The other contestants would only find out how much each person took the following day. The contestants agreed beforehand that the most fair outcome would be for each person to be honest and only take $100,000 each, which would make it an even 10 way split. It’s easy to make that promise when you’re looking someone in the eye, but it’s harder to keep that promise when it’s just you and the MrBeast crew sitting in front of a cage with a million dollars cash. Player 566, a man known as “JC” was third to draw from the prize pool. It’s important to mention that he was the second person to break the agreement of the group to only take $100,000 each. He gave us his sob story, as many others did, claiming that he was in approximately $535,000 in debt. Because of that, he opted to take more than anyone else would get out of the prize pool: $650,000, leaving almost nothing for the remaining seven people. This led into a dramatic sequence of JC and the “guards” shoveling large amounts of cash into duffle bags to take back to his house in the Beast City. There he was, surrounded by the money he had taken from the new friends he had made, crying alone in his room.
Maybe I’m being overdramatic. After all, this was just a silly game show where the goal was to win as much money for yourself as possible, but it didn’t feel that way. JC came off as a sad, desperate man making a selfish decision to solve his own personal debt problems. It wasn’t an enjoyable experience. It gave me a stomach ache to watch.
Many contestants who make it far enough to become fan favorites try to parlay their fifteen minutes of fame into brand deals, podcasts, creator collabs, and anything else to profit off their exposure. You can easily find them online, almost always wearing their contestant jersey in their profile photo, hocking whatever nonsense someone paid them to promote. Even the experience of watching the show on Amazon Prime abrasively confronts you with its capitalist absolutism. You are shown ads for over priced crap in between segments, and a button will appear on the screen that says “add to cart”. So while you’re watching, you can click a button on the remote that will add the product being advertised on the screen to the Amazon cart attached to that Prime account. This paints a bleak image in my head — mindless zombies watching this horrifying spectacle and ordering junk off the television during intermission.
As consumers of media it’s important to understand that we are influenced by the things we watch. Most of MrBeast’s audience skews towards the younger side, people that aren’t even old enough to drive. I have friends with children who watch MrBeast’s videos. We should ask ourselves what kind of messages they’re getting from this kind of media. It suggests that all of your money problems could be solved if you manage to come in contact with a benevolent billionaire and are willing to humiliate yourself for the entertainment of others.
Many of MrBeast’s defenders online will point to his many philanthropic efforts to suggest that he’s actually doing a lot of good in the world. He has made videos where he builds water wells in Africa, gives homeless people homes, and even restores sight to the blind. It almost seems Christlike, but a more critical examination would point to the fact that MrBeast is ultimately using these philanthropic efforts to extract value from unfortunate people. All of these acts of kindness are being done in front of the camera for an audience of hundreds of millions, and he stands to profit in the long run while explaining away criticisms that what he does is a gratuitous display of unearned wealth.
When we were children with dreams we wanted to be artists, musicians, actors, athletes, etc. The modern equivalent of that for kids today is wanting to be a famous YouTuber or streamer. That’s who they look up to and who they see living luxurious lives with the freedom to do anything they want, but what are the bulk of these people offering? A musician makes music, an actor makes movies, an athlete competes in sporting events. What does a YouTuber or a streamer offer? Some of them play video games for the entertainment of others; some make silly video skits meant to be absorbed in short 30 second bursts. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these things, but the over saturation of slop content doesn’t bode well for the future of these children and the values they absorb from watching this kind of content. My artistic heroes were people like Ice Cube, Rage Against the Machine, and Violent J. They made music that moved me and I in turn wanted to move other people by being in a band. They made me want to understand the mystery of how good music was made. Artists like Green Day and Rage Against the Machine made me want to understand politics. The cartoons I watched made me want to learn how to be funny and tell stories. What kind of dreams does MrBeast inspire for the very young people who look up to him? What kind of effect does he have on their value system and understanding of the world? I don’t think you’re going to like the answer.
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