Bananas are the worst food on earth

The more we study MrBeast thought, the brighter our hearts will become

In a recent essay, Drew Austin proposed that digital media forms have broken down the traditional formal divide between content and ads so that “ads are implicit in everything.” He argues that “so much of the digital landscape is effectively an ad for itself that the distinction becomes irrelevant.” That is, the “digital landscape” is one long experiential ad, and advertising is the entire territory, not something that interrupts the “real” content experience. You can’t step away from the ad and leave it playing somewhere else; media and surveillance technology is such that the ad tracks along with you and appears only where it detects your presence, increasingly tailored to what marketers and data brokers believe they know about your immediate needs, your interests, and your vulnerabilities.

As technology permits this closer integration of ads with our attention, as it leaves open fewer means of escape, the nature of entertainment content must change to make this tolerable — to make the more thorough suffusion of our lives with ads feel not like suffocation but exhilaration. One of the forms this can take is an intense and extravagant pandering for your attention, in which whoever is trying to entertain you (and sell to you) is going to such great lengths that you can’t help but feel flattered, that you have a known place in the world. Their eagerness, which manifests at the same time as as servility to metrics and “the algorithm,” comes across as a kind of personal submission to us, in which their obsequiousness is so total that they obey our implicit commands to make content before we even are conscious of wanting it. Like effective ads, they manufacture a desire for content in us that allows us to believe we needed it all along.

Perhaps the avatar of this is Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, whom Mark O’Connell describes as the “Mozart of the attention economy” in a recent essay for the Guardian — very much worth reading regardless of whether you have seen any MrBeast videos or eaten any MrBeast lunchables or bought any MrBeast meme coins. “I’m not going to try to convince you that these videos are even necessarily good, whatever that might mean,” O’Connell writes of MrBeast’s oeuvre. “But I do feel quite strongly that Donaldson is some type of genius — a prodigy of a form that, as degraded as it is, deserves to be taken seriously as one of the signature artifacts of our time.”

That seems right to me, that the “form” Donaldson has mastered and made visible in some ideal, essential expression of itself — a Platonic form of “pure content,” as O’Connell describes it — is a “signature artifact of our time”: the video optimized for algorithmic promotion and consumption. In describing one of MrBeast’s works — a 13-minute video called “I Survived the 5 Deadliest Places on Earth” — O’Connell offers what could be taken as a definition of this form. Thirteen minutes, O’Connell reminds readers,

does not leave a lot of time for old-timey narrative conventions such as establishing a context, or making the viewer understand or care about why any of this is happening in the first place. It just is happening. That’s the thing with MrBeast: everything that happens is always just happening, and if you want a reason for it, it’s no more or less than the fact that you yourself are watching.

“Why anything is happening” is just because you, the individual, wants to see — other causes and reasons are obscured, made to seem irrelevant. History unfolds because of the universal demand for content. And the content exists because you will watch, and moreover, your anticipated watching is what the videos are all about, the implicit subject matter of all of them. You can watch “wanting to watch” as a compulsively watchable thing. “To watch his videos is to feel your prefrontal cortex practically vibrate,” O’Connell writes, “like a fulfilment hub under the extreme pressure of market demand.” That vibration can also be understood as a kind of attunement, of becoming one with algorithms, surrendering to them as Donaldson appears to have done, letting go altogether of the pretense that they deduce something about desires that pre-existed your first contact with them.

That level of synchronization feels like deep recognition, of being known better than one knows oneself, because one would never have put into words or thoughts a desire for the specific images and actions that appear in algorithmically optimized videos. Instead one realizes simultaneously with the sensation of being compulsively “engaged” by something more or less arbitrary a sense of being a subject brought into high definition by wanting an arbitrary thing. Subjectivation — it’s “just happening,” regardless of subject matter. You don’t need to develop a coherent narrative of your own life or an explanation for what you want out of it — you just need to be fed lots of content that automatically places you in the subject position, and then never be disconnected from screens.

This short-circuited self-recognition through “whatever” content invests the tightened media-surveillance enclosure with pleasure. When ads become incessant and inescapable (because screens and surveillance are everywhere), the content with which they are symbiotic also becomes more immediate, its supposed appeal construed as more direct, more irresistible, somehow directly derived from your innate scopophilia (which is also presumed to be always on, always operating, always inescapable). It all exists because you want to watch, not because you are constantly being compelled to watch.

MrBeast gives this complex a human face and a parasocial alibi. Initially, this took the form of elaborate displays of masochism: O’Connell highlights an early MrBeast video in which he counts to 100,000. (Why not a million?)

It is, of course, very little fun to watch, even in small doses. Literally nothing happens, apart from Donaldson counting to 100,000. In this sense, it is nothing like his later videos, defined as they are by a near-demented commitment to maximum viewer-stimulation. But it centers on a punishing endurance challenge undertaken for the purpose of amassing clicks — a central idea he has pushed to further extremes, and pumped with increasingly massive amounts of cash, throughout his career.

This captures something of how what it means to “watch” begins to shift under the conditions of ubiquitous screens and unbroken connectivity. “Maximum viewer stimulation” (i.e. measurable manipulation of the audience) replaces conventional ideas of what is “fun to watch” (which is some kind of unmeasurable reaction that takes place in a viewer’s consciousness). In a video like this, there is no vicariousness, no suspension of disbelief — it is fully premised on the opposite of those things. You are given a kind of proof that this inane activity is happening, and that it is being performed by essentially a “random” person with no special talent or distinguishing qualities — you don’t have to imagine what it is like to be a person like that because you already are one. It’s not “fun” because it is interesting but because it’s completely undemanding of the viewer’s imaginative capacities. “Me like simple. The simpler the better,” Donaldson says in “How to Succeed at MrBeast Production,” an “onboarding document” for new hires at his production company that circulated online last year.

It’s not that MrBeast reorients his videos toward being “fun to watch” in the old sense; instead they become more effective at simplicity: delivering the charge that a humiliating but immediately legible endurance challenge offers. O’Connell points out that a typical MrBeast video “bypasses any kind of narrative setup and goes straight for the emotional payoff,” which means that “emotional payoffs” become no more than reflexes. There is no story to follow, no one to try to understand. The videos demonstrate to viewers that narratives and empathy are irrelevant to “emotional payoffs,” which mean nothing other than that a button was pushed in them. Thoughts are made irrelevant to feelings.

Later MrBeast videos would seem to have a more ostensible purpose, but this is never permitted to distract from the overwhelming goal of attracting attention for its own sake. “I kept having some version of this thought, watching MrBeast videos: that their animating ideas, and the content generated by them, could easily provide the material for works of conceptual art,” O’Connell writes, but the key point is that they aren’t conceptual art. The videos are committed instead to snuffing out “readings” of the “artist’s” deeper intentions, because they strenuously insist in their form and content that only our attention matters.

Since new media conditions no longer require spectacles to bring people to a screen or hold people’s attention for very long — just a few seconds, not even long enough to get to a conventional TV commercial break — the spectacles can condense into attention-grabbing ideas, headlines, thumbnails. They just need to register intermittently, just long enough to count as a “view,” as acute moments of engagement, underwritten by a masochist’s commitment to a stunt or a philanthropist’s commitment to arbitrary charity, as in MrBeast’s later work. The further the performer is willing to go to get attention, the more valuable the audience’s attention-giving capability becomes to themselves. (“Sycophantic” chatbots serve this purpose as well.) The more pointless the challenge undertaken is, the more unmotivated or rational the charity is, the less it interferes with the audience’s experience of the value of their ability to watch — how “important” their passive viewing can be made to feel. That feeling replaces conventional “fun” or “interest.”

That sense of importance, in turn, excuses how the audience is being watched ever more intently. Videos like MrBeast’s offer a chance to seem to watch with the same intensity as advertisers watch us, with the same sort of context-less intensity. “That’s one of the secret weapons of MrBeast Productions,” Donaldson explains in the onboarding document. “We aren't stuck in any old ways of thinking and you can literally turn anything into content.” Content isn’t some subject matter that is especially interesting or information or but a way of thinking about the world: that everything exists only to be viewed within an algorithmically controlled environment. If it can’t be manipulated to increase your score, it doesn’t really have any being.

For instance, O’Connell in unnerved that “Donaldson’s acts of charity are bestowed, randomly, upon people who are themselves explicitly presented as ‘random’” — they have been denied a narrative, a story that develops and extends beyond the video’s metrics. They aren’t meant to elicit empathy; they are presented instead as objects that can be controlled directed by nothing more than your desire to watch. They are like resources or characters in a game. “As far as he’s come from posting Minecraft playthroughs,” O’Connell writes of MrBeast, “consuming his work still feels, in some sense, like watching a guy play video games.” In a video game, the character’s every move depends on the game’s structure and rules; a character can’t do anything that isn’t permitted and prescribed by the game’s code, none of its actions are private, unobserved — that concept makes no sense. Characters don’t think, they act. MrBeast videos invite us to enjoy the trials and tribulations of humans reduced to video game characters to distract us from (or to teach us to enjoy) how we are becoming no more than video game characters too, racking up various scores within a closed system of total observation.

MrBeast’s onboarding document couldn’t be more explicit about the approach he takes to content creation:

Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that.

The goal is not “quality” as understood by any conceivable set of standards you might bring to YouTube, but quantities as measured by YouTube’s audience monitoring capabilities. Anything filmable is understood a game with a score, and MrBeast understands his approach to video making as having a series of “cheat codes” that work in any given situation with any content to maximize the score. As Kevin Munger, author of The YouTube Apparatus, put it in a post about the onboarding document, “The content only makes sense within the context of the platform. Aesthetic evaluations of the content are simply a category error. Beauty, here, is harmony between the content, the platform architecture, and viewer preferences.” The document goes so far as to note that the company only wants “A-players” who “believe in Youtube,” as if its algorithmic structure were a creed.

The document also emphasizes the pursuit of what it calls “extreme,” basically a matter of adding hyperbole and absurdity wherever possible:

“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. Titles are equally as important for getting someone to click. A simple way to up that [click-through rate] even more would be to title it “I Survived” instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth”.

Elsewhere in the document, Donaldson calls it “the wow factor”:

An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.

Adding gratuitous “extremity” is like the opposite of adding “depth.” It eliminates ambiguity about what the video is for, even as it adds nothing particularly clarifying about the video’s narrative, or lack thereof. (“The fact that we lifted a house on a crane didn’t add anything to the title and thumbnail.”) “Extremity” works like the masochism of the stunts; it aims to use words and concepts or spectacles to extract instant physical reactions in audiences (of confusion, revulsion, shock, disbelief, etc.) that the audience could retroactively interpret as evidence of curiosity or desire. These reactions are analogues of clicks, happening inside the viewer’s body. The “extreme” words and concepts are attempts to click the viewer’s brain so they will click back.

O’Connell frames this as the abolishment of boredom in favor of inducing what amounts to a compulsive engagement in audiences.

Everything you see in a MrBeast video is about preventing you from clicking away. His work reflects and intensifies what the internet has done to culture more generally, and to our brains. If boredom, as Walter Benjamin wrote, is “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” – if boredom is a crucial spur to activity, to the capacity to surprise oneself with one’s thoughts and impulses – then one consequence of the last decade or so of technological and cultural change has been the total destruction of that dream bird’s natural habitat, cleared for the strip-mining of the dopamine that drives the attention economy.

Boredom here appears as freedom: freedom from the demands of the attention economy, from the work of watching and being watched. Engagement means being trapped, unable to think, to pause, to develop ideas — one is left capable only of spasmodic responses that register on YouTube’s measurement apparatus.

In other words, boredom is the price one pays for having subjectivity; constant engagement entails some kind of post-subjective state in which one is constantly manipulated, and one’s personality is fully dictated by measurements of their responsiveness to content and the feedback loops built on those metrics. Munger argues that

the rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content.

The subjectivity experienced within this system likewise has no particular content but is just an intensity that is clarified paradoxically by its lack of specific investments. It emerges from the systems’ surveillance capabilities without requiring the internal disciplinary efforts to normalize oneself or conform that the Foucauldian panopticon theoretically required. The continual flow of content automatically accomplishes that, training consumers to see their selfhood as downstream from whatever feelings algorithmically chosen content triggers in them.

From this subject position it becomes pointless to imagine other people as anything but controlled by the most obvious external motivations, by the rules of the game and the compulsion to make everything visible, something short-form videos repeatedly demonstrate. “I want money spent to be shown on camera ideally,” Donaldson writes. “If you’re spending over $10,000 on something and it won’t be shown on camera, seriously think about it.” This takes the “pics or it didn’t happen” philosophy that emerged in the wake of social media and makes into a principle for entertainment, turning it inside out: People only want to see what someone did solely for the purposes of displaying it. They shouldn’t have any other intrinsic motivation that will be opaque or inconsequential to the viewer, who only cares about watchability.

“What excites me is what I believe will make the audience happy,” Donaldson says in the onboarding document, and while that sounds like an empty marketing talk, it’s worth considering what it implies if it were true: He is incapable of generating excitement internally, he can only be excited mimetically. This makes for a closed system of mirrors pointed at each other, a mise en abyme in which performers doing nothing but reacting to audiences who do nothing but react to performers.

For Munger, this betokens a kind of post-authenticity: “The people who have been raised on quantified audience feedback for their every creative gesture have an unrecognizable conception of authenticity,” he writes, which is typified by MrBeast’s onscreen behavior. “MrBeast also turns his entire life into content — by skipping the step of having a life outside of content,” Munger notes. This is akin to being unable to escape from ads because ads have become the only recognizable structure for experience — all activity is a form of influencing.

“The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account,” Munger writes. Not only that, subjective experience consists of nothing but audience reactions. There is no experience conceivable outside of being in or in front of an audience — the Goffman-esque idea of everything being a performance, only without the possibility or will to imagine backstages, to have non-externalized thoughts. What they “think” doesn’t show up in the statistics — interiority is not a cheat code. Characters in games are never not being tracked, but that is what it means to be playing.