It’s 2023, and Donald Trump still dominates American political discussion. The internet is filled with wild MAGA nonsense, and if you follow politics online you’ve probably also learned what a Tankie is against your will. But it’s not just politics - everything seems insane. Influencers are doing crazier and crazier stunts to go viral. Pop culture fights happen more often and with more venom. Niche communities seem to fall into deranged niche drama more easily than ever.
To understand how Donald Trump used the internet to take over American politics - and why everything else is also going insane - we first need to understand MrBeast.
You have to go bigger
YouTuber MrBeast could fairly claim to be the biggest online content creator in the world. He’s the most-subscribed individual creator on Youtube. He has more than 290 million followers across his YouTube channels and his videos have collected more than 45 billion views. And it’s possible that no one in the world has thought as deeply about how to go viral as he has.
MrBeast has talked at length about his obsession with YouTube, producing content, and going viral. He often talks about how he’s been uploading videos since he was 11 years old, how he’s probably spent 40,000 hours discussing content creation tactics for the YouTube platform. He faked going to community college to live at home with his parents and make content 15 hours a day. He’s the kind of guy who has extremely detailed (and evidence backed) opinions about the facial expressions that go on video thumbnails, how often a video should jump cut, and what types of videos will get views. So it’s worthwhile to think about some of his earliest viral videos, what he’s making now, and what it says about the nature of virality. (...)
MrBeast was 19 and a small-time YouTuber, nowhere near a household name. He was offered the biggest sponsorship he’d ever been offered to date - 5,000 dollars - and his immediate reaction was ‘Double that and let me give it away to a random homeless person’. He ended up being right, and the video went insanely viral. He knew that the bigger the number (especially if it could break into five digits and be 10,000 dollars) the better the video would do.
The instinct to go bigger has informed virtually everything MrBeast has done since then. He soon had a new video giving away $20,000 to homeless people, then $100,000, then an actual house. He is always pushing the limits, doing bigger and wilder and more, and not just when it comes to giving away money. He’s driven through the same drive-through 1000 times straight. He spent four million dollars to enact a real life Squid Game and bought a train so he could run it off a cliff. He spent two days buried alive in a coffin and a week stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean. He’s given away a private island a cured 1000 blind and deaf people.
The biggest and probably most knowledgeable content creator on the planet has one philosophy - if you want people to watch, push things to the extreme. And this rule doesn’t just govern YouTube videos. It governs everything we do online.
The MrBeastification of Everything
Think of a relatively normal and uncontroversial thing to be a fan of. Let’s pick hot sauce - imagine yourself as a hot sauce aficionado. If you were living 30 years ago before social media, your options were pretty limited. Maybe you’d know a couple restaurants nearby with pretty spicy food. Maybe you read an extremely niche hot sauce magazine that would publish twice a year for a tiny audience. Maybe you knew of a mail order company that sold some really hot stuff, hotter than you could get at the supermarket. But fundamentally, even as an obsessive fan, your options were pretty limited.
Today, your options are not limited. There are dedicated hot sauce forums online. There are mountains of social content analyzing hot sauce, discussing hot sauce, watching celebrities eat incredibly hot chicken wings. There’s a hot sauce subreddit with hundreds of thousands of subscribers where people have incredibly strong opinions about this topic.
We can even measure this empirically - the hottest pepper in the world today is up to 10x as hot as the world’s hottest pepper in the 1990s. And it’s also far more accessible. You can buy hotter sauces than ever before, easier than ever before, and it’s all thanks to the power of the internet. Hot sauce is undergoing MrBeastification - always pushing for hotter.
There are times where it seems like this extremism is happening to everything online. Celebrity fandoms are more extreme than ever - in fact, it’s no longer enough to be a wildly deranged stan, you must also engage in the anti-fandoms that are now common. Sorority rush has gone from a relatively understated affair to a giant social media production requiring intense planning. Our financial scams have gone from straightforward ponzi schemes to meme stocks and cryptocurrencies that border on being actual cults. Fringe beliefs in every field - economics, vaccinology, history - are flourishing. The more conspiratorial and extreme the view, the better it tends to do on the internet. Everything is being pushed to be the most extreme version of itself.
The Incentives We’re Chasing
What’s causing this? It’s the social web. There are a couple of structural ways in which the internet empowers and incentivizes extremism. (...)
Fundamentally, the social dynamics of the internet turbo-charge this extremism. When the amount of content available online is near-infinite, why wouldn’t you gravitate towards the content that is the most of whatever it is you’re searching for? Why watch a video where a cook bakes a 10 pound cake when you could watch a 50 pound cake? Why watch someone give away a thousand dollars when you could watch someone else give away a hundred thousand dollars? MrBeast recognized this early on and he’s correct - this is how things work with social content. People always want bigger and crazier and more extreme.
YouTuber MrBeast could fairly claim to be the biggest online content creator in the world. He’s the most-subscribed individual creator on Youtube. He has more than 290 million followers across his YouTube channels and his videos have collected more than 45 billion views. And it’s possible that no one in the world has thought as deeply about how to go viral as he has.
MrBeast was 19 and a small-time YouTuber, nowhere near a household name. He was offered the biggest sponsorship he’d ever been offered to date - 5,000 dollars - and his immediate reaction was ‘Double that and let me give it away to a random homeless person’. He ended up being right, and the video went insanely viral. He knew that the bigger the number (especially if it could break into five digits and be 10,000 dollars) the better the video would do.
The instinct to go bigger has informed virtually everything MrBeast has done since then. He soon had a new video giving away $20,000 to homeless people, then $100,000, then an actual house. He is always pushing the limits, doing bigger and wilder and more, and not just when it comes to giving away money. He’s driven through the same drive-through 1000 times straight. He spent four million dollars to enact a real life Squid Game and bought a train so he could run it off a cliff. He spent two days buried alive in a coffin and a week stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean. He’s given away a private island a cured 1000 blind and deaf people.
The biggest and probably most knowledgeable content creator on the planet has one philosophy - if you want people to watch, push things to the extreme. And this rule doesn’t just govern YouTube videos. It governs everything we do online.
The MrBeastification of Everything
Think of a relatively normal and uncontroversial thing to be a fan of. Let’s pick hot sauce - imagine yourself as a hot sauce aficionado. If you were living 30 years ago before social media, your options were pretty limited. Maybe you’d know a couple restaurants nearby with pretty spicy food. Maybe you read an extremely niche hot sauce magazine that would publish twice a year for a tiny audience. Maybe you knew of a mail order company that sold some really hot stuff, hotter than you could get at the supermarket. But fundamentally, even as an obsessive fan, your options were pretty limited.
Today, your options are not limited. There are dedicated hot sauce forums online. There are mountains of social content analyzing hot sauce, discussing hot sauce, watching celebrities eat incredibly hot chicken wings. There’s a hot sauce subreddit with hundreds of thousands of subscribers where people have incredibly strong opinions about this topic.
We can even measure this empirically - the hottest pepper in the world today is up to 10x as hot as the world’s hottest pepper in the 1990s. And it’s also far more accessible. You can buy hotter sauces than ever before, easier than ever before, and it’s all thanks to the power of the internet. Hot sauce is undergoing MrBeastification - always pushing for hotter.
There are times where it seems like this extremism is happening to everything online. Celebrity fandoms are more extreme than ever - in fact, it’s no longer enough to be a wildly deranged stan, you must also engage in the anti-fandoms that are now common. Sorority rush has gone from a relatively understated affair to a giant social media production requiring intense planning. Our financial scams have gone from straightforward ponzi schemes to meme stocks and cryptocurrencies that border on being actual cults. Fringe beliefs in every field - economics, vaccinology, history - are flourishing. The more conspiratorial and extreme the view, the better it tends to do on the internet. Everything is being pushed to be the most extreme version of itself.
The Incentives We’re Chasing
What’s causing this? It’s the social web. There are a couple of structural ways in which the internet empowers and incentivizes extremism. (...)
Fundamentally, the social dynamics of the internet turbo-charge this extremism. When the amount of content available online is near-infinite, why wouldn’t you gravitate towards the content that is the most of whatever it is you’re searching for? Why watch a video where a cook bakes a 10 pound cake when you could watch a 50 pound cake? Why watch someone give away a thousand dollars when you could watch someone else give away a hundred thousand dollars? MrBeast recognized this early on and he’s correct - this is how things work with social content. People always want bigger and crazier and more extreme.
by Jeremiah Johnson, Infinite Scroll | Read more:
Image: MrBeast
[ed. Reveal parties, celebrity outfits, weed, $400 million gift planes... everything.]
