First as Tragedy, Then as Slop

We meet again, MrBeast. To recap from some of the analysis last time, I think itโ€™s safe to identify MrBeastโ€™s primary schtick as the fusion of two favorite ultra-rich past times, philanthropy and decadence. MrBeast is far from the first tycoon to master these crafts. However, his Frankenstein brand of philanthropic decadence is the novelty that has propelled him to the top of YouTube, becoming the first โ€œbillionaire YouTuberโ€.

Since we last checked in, many things have happened in the MrBeast universe, and precisely none of them have been good. To the surprise of about as many people struck by lightning last year, it turns out that MrBeast has been staffing republican lobbyists for years. There is, of course, the highly publicized scandal involving his staff and their histories with minors and sexual harassment, which unfortunately there is not space for here. Most recently MrBeast struck headlines when it was revealed he and the Department of Defense were once in talks of a deal for a recruitment ad. Perhaps MrBeast was crafted in a lab by spooks, deep in the dungeons of Langley, VA. That would be highly consistent with everything else discussed so far.

Yet, it would also seem there is nothing new on the horizon. See, MrBeast produces slop, and the slop donโ€™t stop. His newest video, reaching over a million views in just a short half hour, is titled โ€œI Helped 2,000 People Walk Againโ€. Of course, MrBeast did not invent the phenomenon of recycling his content, but his mastery of it extends beyond his usual blockbuster YouTube upload. MrBeast has recently created โ€œBeast Gamesโ€, his Squid Game inspired contestant game show. Like his prosthetics video, I refuse to watch Beast Games, and not out of my allergy to MrBeast, but because I feel like Iโ€™ve already seen it. The โ€œreal life Squid Gameโ€ has been done before, not only by Netflix but MrBeast himself, who released his own version of Squid Game shortly after the hit series captured the world in 2021.

Squid Game is special to me in ways MrBeast could never decipher. Iโ€™ve remarked before that both Squid Game and Parasite (another favorite of the Hell Joseon genre) both use Morse Code as a plot device.  In Parasite, the differences in Korean and English Morse code botch an escape. Poorer, older, working-class people know the Korean Morse code, unlike wealthy children who learn it in Scouting and are raised with English. In both, the Morse Code is used in the contexts where the characters are trying to break the hellscape. It is these kinds of small details that give these films their meaning and utility. This kind of ornate subtlety does not survive the replications of Squid Game.

Slop often arises without reason or mediation. Luckily for us, a new book by Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism gives us a way to understand the flowchart of slop anyways. For Kornbluh, a theorist of aesthetics, mediation is the active process of relating things. Itโ€™s easy to see that โ€œslopificationโ€ is a product of the process by which content is stripped of its mediation. Kornbluh points out that the twenty highest grossest films of the 2010โ€™s were sequels, and eighteen of them produced by Disney, and remarks โ€œwhat matters in a universe is its endless replicationโ€.

Yesterdayโ€™s โ€œcringeโ€ is todayโ€™s โ€œslopโ€. The word โ€œslopโ€ has ascended to describe the banality of most of what is sold to us today. Slop can also mean โ€œgruelโ€, synonymous with mixtures of mac and cheese meant to be served to children as it is with the deep cuts on any multi-platinum pop album. Slop is of the lowest common denominator, but it is not without novelty or value. In 2022, four of the nominees for Best Picture at the 2022 Academy Awards were remakes, it would seem imagination has become scarce. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is composed of slop, its movies costs hundreds of millions and make billions. Slop has always been here to an extent, and I am not above slop myself. Slop and immediacy arenโ€™t just about taste, they are about circulation and production.

A rather inevitable problem has been plaguing YouTubeโ€™s Shorts section. Instead of finding your usual slop straight from the source, pirates are taking the average content you see and splicing it with โ€œoddly satisfyingโ€ videos (clips of pressure washing, domino chains, soap carving, etc.) Suddenly youโ€™re seeing the same funny woman who jokes about French grammar and her life as an American in Paris, but on a different channel splitting the screen with crayons being crushed through a hydraulic press. Before you can figure out whatโ€™s even going on, your brain is fixated on the twisting and churning of the colors in the wax. This serves a dual purpose, it both keeps you from scrolling onward for just a few more seconds, and helps the pirates evade detection from YouTubeโ€™s auto-moderation. Even worse, AI is now plagiarizing and generating YouTube content all on its own. The automatons of horror and nightmares may already be upon us, finding any contagion they can and replicating.

There is something about repetition that satisfies something in our heads. I am always fascinated by the people in my life who love Post Malone. Nobody from my mom (whose musical comfort zone has the square footage of a Japanese capsule hotel) to my punk friends (who feel compelled, perhaps by irony, to immortalize his overrated records within their vinyl collection of rarities) can escape his captivating chants. Post-Malone has a lot of gimmicks, and industry caretaking. But his music follows an ingenious pop formula, diatonic (all notes within one octave, to make it immediately accessible to sing along to), hooks that land early, and lots of repetition in the lyrics. A USC study found that more repetition makes a song more likely to chart higher and perform better. Capitalists eagerly squeeze the risk out of everything, so replication and repetition mean we can expect an army of viral clones to arise and descend upon us from the onset of any successful artist.

It is oft repeated that kids today dream of being YouTubers instead of astronauts. I wonder why an astronaut is held with such superiority. I may have decided long ago that I would like to live in a world where my fellow species want to explore space, but Iโ€™m reminded of Carl Saganโ€™s thoughts on this in his book Pale Blue Dot, โ€œIn our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselvesโ€. Perhaps the vantage point of childrenโ€™s dreams is not where we should stand to see the future. In the greatest history book of all time, Black Reconstruction in America, WEB Du Bois talks about how southern planters were the envy of the world. The southern planter class was seen as sophisticated and cosmopolitan. They were educated at Ivy League universities and were more widely travelled than their northern counterparts. They could be common in origin but could hold more power than aristocrats of old. They were seen as gentlemen and behaved like playboys. They also owned people and were worthy of all the doom and ruin that would befall them, but they were undeniably what one generation of poor children wanted to be. Suddenly the child who dreams of being MrBeast isnโ€™t so bad.

What comes up must come down, as true as all things are to come. Many are asking if the influencer bubble could burst. YouTubers increasingly have to rely on integrating other sources of income as YouTube itself holds back ad revenue from the creators, leading to less money being made directly from YouTube itself. A gold rush of Crypto scams has become a way for the sweatiest talking heads to get their bag, with even MrBeast unable to resist the temptation. Of course, MrBeast is too big to be brought down by such revelations. But smaller sensations such as Hailey Welch, also known as โ€œHawk Tuah girlโ€, do not have such luxuries when scamming their audiences. It would seem that Welch cashed in on her short-lived viral fame last year, being nowhere to be found after collecting millions from her audience for her new crypto-currency. The squeeze comes for everyone, sooner or later.

There is certainly worse content being beamed in the minds of the youth today. Considering all this, MrBeast is rather archaic in a world where live streams and reel/short videos on TikTok are quickly becoming the most popular medium. For the first time, it seems MrBeast added some commentary to his content, a rare break with his brand: โ€œJust uploaded a video where we helped 2,000 amputees walk again. Many lived in America and it feels so disgusting that in a country with this much wealth, a fucken YouTuber is their only option to get a prosthetic leg. We need to fix this.โ€ Is the spectre of philanthropic decadence no longer towering above us?

And as I said last time, itโ€™s nothing personal, Jimmy. If not MrBeast, it would be the next person in line, his brand was inevitable. The โ€œfucken YouTuberโ€ of childrenโ€™s dreams now dreams of being US president. It would seem like MrBeast wants to conquer everything, his โ€œMrBeast Burgerโ€ restaurant uses a new โ€œghost kitchenโ€ format exclusively on food delivery apps. This allowed him to drastically offset costs and fill in gaps in the market created by the pandemic. Uber and Doordash pay the deliveries (for now, until they are replaced by flying drones), failing restaurant chains can double their back-of-houses as MrBeast burgers, bringing MrBeast to your doorstep with cutting edge logistics. Could philanthropic decadence ascend to the moon? Or is Jimmy joining the ever-replicating cast of gilded age billionaires with political axes to grind? Only time will tell, but one thing is sure, it will be a replication of something weโ€™ve seen before. 

…I think itโ€™s safe to identify MrBeastโ€™s primary schtick as the fusion of two favorite ultra-rich past times, philanthropy and decadence. MrBeast is far from the first tycoon to master these crafts. However, his Frankenstein brand of philanthropic decadence is the novelty that has propelled him to the top of YouTube, becoming the first โ€œbillionaire…

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