++Her disappearance from public view is getting weirder. +
++Princess Kate, formerly Kate Middleton, one day to become Catherine, Queen Consort of the United Kingdom, has finally reappeared — and this time, she’s live in living color. +
++On March 18, TMZ published a video of Kate, smiling and apparently happy as she walked with Prince William through a grocery store parking lot. Lest anyone think it’s fake, TMZ reports that it has vetted the metadata, and the video was recorded Saturday night in Windsor. It is the least suspicious image of Kate anyone has seen in a good long while. +
++For months, one of the world’s most photographed women, a figure who has lived her life genteelly in public since she was Prince William’s college girlfriend, had apparently vanished from public view. +
++On January 17, Kensington Palace announced that Kate had entered the hospital the day before for planned abdominal surgery. “The Princess of Wales appreciates the interest this statement will generate,” the announcement read. “She hopes that the public will understand her desire to maintain as much normality for her children as possible; and her wish that her personal medical information remains private.” It added that she was “unlikely” to resume her public duties until Easter, which falls this year on March 31. +
++So far, Kate has stuck to the previously announced schedule. Kensington Palace announced on January 29 that she had returned home, on track with her planned 10 to 14 days of hospital recovery. Currently, it is not yet Easter, and she has not yet resumed her duties. Yet the long pause in Kate’s public appearances and the lack of concrete information about her health has created a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories. When Prince William canceled a planned appearance of his own on February 27, citing a “personal matter,” rumors began to fly. +
++Something, some people theorized, had gone terribly wrong with Kate’s health. Perhaps she was in real danger of dying. Perhaps she was in an induced coma. Perhaps her marriage to William was on the rocks, and she was in hiding. Perhaps she’d been killed and would be replaced by a body double. As the story took off, the joke theories began to take up more space: Kate was waiting for bad bangs to grow out, or to recover from plastic surgery; she’d become the villain in the viral Willy Wonka experience. +
++Meanwhile, responses from Kensington Palace have failed to set the public’s mind at ease. At first, all the Palace would say was that Kate “continues to be doing well.” On March 4, she was photographed driving in a car with her mother, Carol Middleton, in a grainy image that the Palace firmly disavowed as unsanctioned. +
++On March 10, Kensington Palace circulated a picture of the Princess of Wales smiling with her children in honor of Mother’s Day in the UK. The picture would have marked the second of only two public appearances by Kate since Christmas Day — but shortly after the picture came out, it was marred by scandal. Multiple major photo agencies, including the AP and Reuters, concluded that the image had been “manipulated” and issued a kill notice for it. +
++The next day, on March 11, the X account for the Prince and Princess of Wales posted an apology reading, “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day.” It was signed “C,” for Catherine. Later that same day, she was reportedly photographed leaving Windsor Castle, according to the Telegraph. The picture shows Prince William in a car next to a brunette woman, with her ear and a bit of cheek visible. +
++In the absence of a clear image of Kate, the rumors roared on. Most of the conspiracy theories are silly, but they were all reacting to a real issue. Kate has long been a reliable pillar of the British family, showing up and smiling at every public event at which she was asked to appear, reacting to the Sturm und Drang of royal drama with an air of determined normalcy. Then she did something decidedly out of the ordinary: She disappeared. +
++Why some people think Kate’s cover story was fishy +
++Officially, Kate was in the hospital for planned abdominal surgery. Still, skeptical onlookers pounced almost immediately on an apparent discrepancy in Kensington Palace’s first statement about her health on January 17. If Kate’s surgery was “planned,” the onlookers demanded to know, then why had the Palace also said that she was “postponing her upcoming engagements?” How far in advance could this surgery really have been planned? +
++Also raising eyebrows was the detail that Kate would be recovering from her surgery for “10 to 14 days.” Some abdominal surgeries can be minor, like an appendectomy, but those procedures don’t come with such lengthy in-patient stays. What kind of surgery was Kate undergoing that she wouldn’t be able to go back home for two weeks afterward? +
++The speculation only increased when Buckingham Palace announced the same day that King Charles would be receiving treatment for an enlarged prostate. For two such high-ranking royals to be undergoing medical procedures at the same time was unusual, almost shocking. Royal watchers speculated that the palace was trying to cover something up. +
++As the weeks went by, Kate’s condition remained mysterious, while Charles was almost pointedly transparent about his own health. In February he announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer, that it had been caught early, that he was doing well, and that he had begun treatment. As for Kate, Kensington Palace would only say tersely that her condition was “not cancerous.” Why, royal watchers demanded, was Kate’s condition so much more mysterious than the king’s was? +
++The more time went by without so much as a single blurry telephoto lens shot of Kate, the more the rumors built. William was photographed visiting the hospital, but no one saw Kate make her way out of the hospital and back to her own home in Windsor Home Park. +
++Under normal circumstances, the lack of photos of a woman recovering from a medical procedure would be recognized as a reasonable respect for someone’s privacy. However, the life of a future queen of England is not normal circumstances. In a country with a notoriously ruthless tabloid press, royals are considered to be fair game as much as anyone. +
++Royals are expected to keep the public informed on their well-being, to play the game with the media. The royal women, particularly, are expected to meet nearly impossible expectations: to be always beautifully groomed, always pleasant, always available to their public, no matter the circumstances. Kate has traditionally done so with reliable goodwill. After the birth of each of her three children, Kate appeared dutifully in front of the hospital in full hair and makeup for a photo op for the paparazzi within 24 hours, and she did it with a cheerful smile each time to boot. What made this particular procedure different? What had kept Kate from wanting to show her face, and kept the press from demanding to show it anyway? Why did the palace eventually feel driven to release an apparently manipulated photo of her? +
++“You’re telling me that Kate Middleton—the same woman who posed outside the hospital like a freaking supermodel mere hours after giving birth—suddenly requires months of recovery before showing her face?” posted one onlooker on X, summing up the skepticism. “And the British press now magically respects privacy? This feels…sinister.” +
++“Kensington Palace made it clear in January the timelines of the princess’ recovery and we’d only be providing significant updates. That guidance stands,” palace representatives said in February. +
++A brief history of Princess Kate’s reliability +
++Kate’s disappearance seems to strike people as odd because it is so counter to her brand. For as long as she has been in the public eye, Kate has been dependable, reliable, and always there. Constancy is so clearly central to Kate’s public image that the press has made it at various points her most heroic trait and her only liability. +
++Even early in her relationship with Prince William, during which the press granted her the humiliating nickname of “Waity Katie,” Kate was polite to the paparazzi. She didn’t cultivate a chummy relationship with them, as the late Princess Diana did at certain parts of her career, but she also didn’t try to outmaneuver them. She knew what they wanted and she was matter-of-fact about it. In The Palace Papers, royal journalist Tina Brown describes how the paparazzi would show up outside the midmarket fashion line where Kate worked while she and William were dating. Her boss would ask if she wanted to sneak out the back, but Kate would reply, “To be honest, they’re going to hound us until they’ve got the picture. So why don’t I just go, get the picture done, and then they’ll leave us alone.” She was right. +
++After Kate and William married in 2011, Kate enjoyed a brief honeymoon period as one of the most popular members of the royal family. With her famously shiny hair and demurely polished wardrobe, she had, like Diana before her, a dash of the kind of glamor that could make the dowdy Windsor brand feel new again. At the same time, she was so sensible, so straightforward, so clearly walking into her fate with open eyes and a cool head. She was not the kind of woman who would be destroyed by the pressures of royal life. She would be, as Brown writes in The Palace Papers, “unlike the child-bride Diana, road tested in resilience as well as royal life.” +
++When Prince Harry married Meghan Markle in 2018, Kate and Meghan became each other’s foils in the press, and once again, Kate’s constancy was her defining feature. When Meghan was popular, Kate was the drab and conservative duchess of yesterday compared to Meghan’s exciting progressivism. When Meghan was unpopular, or the British press was feeling particularly racist, Kate was the steadfast maternal icon who could be counted on to lead the British in times of trouble, whereas Meghan was troublingly mercurial and far too trendy to be trusted. +
++The royal family has contracted over the past few years, with the older generation dying off and members of the younger generation drawing back or becoming mired in scandal. Yet as her press coverage fluctuates, Kate has continued performing her duties, almost always with her signature public smile: cheerful, reliable, the face of a woman pleased to be doing what’s right. She is a star player for the royal family in a dangerous time of transition. She is always where she should be. +
++“The inescapable truth is that in the unlikely event that the Cambridge marriage [between William and Kate] ever becomes troubled, the whole Windsor house of cards could come tumbling down,” writes Brown in The Palace Papers. “Kate has become a cherished national icon of flawless motherhood.” +
++Under these circumstances, Kate’s disappearance goes from benign oddity to near scandal: something totally out of the norm for a very public and very reliable figure. Even now that she’s begun to reemerge, it’s unlikely that waiting watchers will learn more about what she’s been up to than they can glean from a silent phone camera video. If there’s one thing Princess Kate knows how to do as well as smile, it’s how to keep her mouth shut. +
++Update, March 18, 5:15 pm: This story was originally published on March 1 and has been updated multiple times, most recently to include mention of TMZ’s publication of a video reported to be Kate. +
++The Supreme Court’s center right appears increasingly frustrated with the judiciary’s far right. +
++There are several recent signs that the federal judiciary’s center right is losing patience with its far right. +
++Last week, a policymaking body within the judiciary announced new steps to combat “judge shopping,” a practice that has allowed Republican litigants to choose to have their cases heard by partisan judges who are well to the right of even the median Trump appointee. The Supreme Court has also heard several cases in its current term where it appears likely to reverse rulings made by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a MAGA stronghold that frequently hands down decisions that appear designed to sabotage the Biden administration. +
++On Monday, the Supreme Court held oral arguments in one of these Fifth Circuit cases, known as Murthy v. Missouri, where the lower court handed down a sweeping injunction forbidding much of the federal government from having any communications at all with social media companies. A majority of the justices appeared very unlikely to sustain that injunction on Monday, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly noting that the Fifth Circuit’s approach would prevent the most routine interactions between government officials and the media. +
++Murthy was one of two cases heard by the justices on Monday involving so-called “jawboning” — cases where the government tried to pressure private companies into taking certain actions, without necessarily using its coercive power to do so. The other case, known as National Rifle Association v. Vullo, involves a fairly egregious violation of the First Amendment. Based on Monday’s argument, as many as all nine of the justices may side with the NRA in that case. (You can read our coverage of the NRA case here.) +
++Most of the justices, in other words, appeared eager to resolve both cases without significantly altering their Court’s First Amendment doctrines, and without disrupting the government’s ability to function. That’s good news for the NRA, but also good news for the Biden administration. +
++So what is the Murthy case about? +
++The general rule in First Amendment cases is that the federal government may not coerce a media company into changing which content it publishes, but it can ask a platform or outlet to remove or alter its content. Indeed, as Kavanaugh pointed out a few times during the oral argument, if the government were not allowed to do so, White House press aides and the like wouldn’t be allowed to speak to reporters to try to shape their coverage. +
++In Murthy, various officials throughout the federal government had many communications with major social media platforms, where the officials either asked the platforms to remove certain content or provided them with information that convinced the platforms to do so. +
++These communications concerned many topics. The FBI, for example, frequently contacts social media platforms to warn them about criminal or terroristic activity that is occurring online. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) flags social media content for the platforms that contains election-related disinformation, such as false statements about when an election will take place. The White House sometimes asks social media companies to remove accounts that falsely impersonate a member of the president’s family. +
++Many of these communications also involved government requests that the platforms pull down information that contains false and harmful health information, including misinformation about Covid-19. And these communications were center stage during the Murthy oral argument — the Murthy plaintiffs include several individuals who are upset that their content was removed because the platforms determined that it was Covid misinformation. +
++These plaintiffs were able to identify several examples where government officials were curt, bossy, or otherwise rude to representatives from the social media companies when those companies refused to pull down content that the government asked them to remove. Notably, however, neither these plaintiffs nor the Fifth Circuit identified a single example where a government official threatened some kind of consequence if a platform did not comply with the government’s requests. +
++Instead, the Fifth Circuit appeared to complain about the fact that the government has so many communications with social media companies. It claimed that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment because government officials “entangled themselves in the platforms’ decision-making processes,” and ordered the government to stop having “consistent and consequential” communications with social media platforms. +
++It’s unclear what that decision even means — how many times, exactly, may the government talk to a social media company before it violates the Fifth Circuit’s order? — and at least six of the justices appeared frustrated by the Fifth Circuit’s ham-handed approach to this case. +
++The two justices who’ve worked in senior White House jobs appeared especially dismissive of the Fifth Circuit’s position +
++Justices Elena Kagan and Kavanaugh seemed especially frustrated with the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to shut down communication between the government and the platforms, and for the same reason. Both Kagan and Kavanaugh worked in high-level White House jobs — Kagan as deputy domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, and Kavanaugh as staff secretary to President George W. Bush — and both recoiled at the suggestion that the White House can’t try to persuade the media to change what it publishes. +
++Kavanaugh, a Republican appointed by Donald Trump, even rose to the government’s defense after Justice Samuel Alito attacked Biden administration officials who, Alito claimed, were too demanding toward the platforms. +
++After Alito ranted about what he called “constant pestering” by White House officials who would sometimes “curse” at corporate officials or treat them like “subordinates,” Kavanaugh said that, in his experience, White House press aides often call up members of the media and “berate” them if they don’t like the press’s coverage. +
++Similarly, Kagan admitted that “like Justice Kavanaugh, I’ve had experience encouraging people to suppress their own speech” after a journalist published a bad editorial or a piece with a factual error. But this sort of routine back-and-forth between White House officials and reporters is not a First Amendment violation unless there is some kind of threat or coercion. Why should the rule be any different for social media companies? +
++So Benjamin Aguiñaga, the lawyer trying to defend the Fifth Circuit’s order, arrived at the Court this morning facing an already skeptical bench. And his disastrous response to a hypothetical from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson only dug him deeper into a hole. +
++Jackson imagined a scenario where various people online challenged teenagers to jump out of windows and that there actually was an epidemic of teens seriously injuring themselves by doing so. Could the government, she asked, encourage the platforms to pull down content urging young people to defenestrate themselves? +
++Aguiñaga’s answer was “no” — an answer that provoked an incredulous Chief Justice John Roberts to restate the question and ask Aguiñaga to answer it again. And yet the lawyer still clung to his view that the government cannot encourage Twitter or Facebook to remove content urging people to hurl themselves out of windows. +
++It is likely, for what it’s worth, that at least two justices will dissent. Last October, the Court temporarily blocked the Fifth Circuit’s Murthy decision while this case was being litigated before the justices, but it did so over objections by three justices: Alito, plus Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. +
++On Monday, Gorsuch did ask a few questions suggesting that he may have reconsidered his previous position because he now views the Fifth Circuit’s injunction as too broad, but Thomas and Alito appeared determined to back their fellow members of the judiciary’s far right. +
++So, while an alliance between the Court’s center left and its center right appears likely to hold in the Murthy case, that could change rapidly if former President Donald Trump is returned to office and gets to replace some of the current justices with members of the Fifth Circuit (or with other judges who share Thomas and Alito’s MAGA-infused approach to judging). +
++But for the time being, at least, most of the justices appear to recognize that the government needs to function. And that means that the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to cut off communications between the Biden administration and the platforms is likely to fail. +
++The most popular YouTuber in the world is going Hollywood. +
++A helicopter drops Mr. Beast and his friends onto the roof of an abandoned hotel, resting on the water’s edge of a Mediterranean resort town. They’re about to spend the next seven days there, trying not to die, all in service of a recent YouTube video called “I Survived 7 Days in an Abandoned City.” +
++“This once beautiful city was bombed and abandoned because of war,” Mr. Beast’s voiceover explains. Which city? What war? It’s not yet clear, and at no point in the rest of the 17-minute video does MrBeast (as it’s styled on his channel) — age 25, real name Jimmy Donaldson — explain where he is. Outside of a half-second appearance of a postcard with the town’s name (Kupari), the location and its history as a casualty of the Croatian War of Independence in the early 1990s goes unacknowledged. +
++Why he’s there, however, is obvious to anyone familiar with his oeuvre. Mr. Beast is a YouTube creator whose approach to video production is far less interested in what is on screen than in what will make the numbers in the bottom left corner go up. What matters is more views, longer watch times, and more subscribers, and nothing in a Mr. Beast video is not in service of this goal: not the creepily airbrushed thumbnails, not the titles with an ever-increasing number of zeros (“Last to Leave Circle Wins $500,000,” “If You Can Carry $1,000,000 You Keep It!,” “$1 vs $100,000,000 House!”), not the watch time (usually around 20 minutes, or roughly the length of a meal), not the total lack of politics, current events, or extraneous details like, say, the complex aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. +
++Since starting his YouTube channel in 2012 at age 13, Donaldson has been a devoted student of virality, shirking basically everything else in his life in service to the YouTube algorithm. It worked; at 244 million subscribers, his is currently the second most popular channel in the world, second only to T-Series, an Indian record label. (Cocomelon, the beloved of iPad babies, is third.) His enormous fanbase, largely made up of children and teenagers, doesn’t mind that he is, as the New York Times magazine put it, “not particularly funny or well spoken or physically striking,” nor that he’s a socially awkward introvert who is “not really good at keeping friends.” +
++They care about him because Donaldson has figured out what makes a perfect YouTube video, how to capture young people’s dwindling attention spans by giving them nonstop visual stimulation with just enough real human drama and glimpses of the American dream that they can feel good about watching it. Now, with a just-announced deal — rumored to be worth as much as $100 million — to host an Amazon reality competition show with the biggest single prize in TV history ($5 million), he’s coming for Hollywood, too. +
++The Mr. Beast origin story, as recounted in profiles in Time, Rolling Stone, Bloomberg, and the New York Times, goes like this: After a Crohn’s disease diagnosis halted his baseball career in his sophomore year of high school, he turned his focus to his YouTube page, where he already had a presence making gaming content. Over time, his channel filled up with the standard fare of a teenage boy experimenting to see what sticks: There are bait-y headlines about “HOW TO UNLOCK ANY IPHONE,” Bee Movie memes, silly stunts (he counts to 10,000 and later 100,000 in one sitting, then watches fellow YouTuber Jake Paul’s terrible music video, “It’s Everyday Bro” for 10 hours straight), and letters to his future self (naturally, they are all about how many subscribers he hopes to have). +
++After dropping out of community college midway through his first semester, his mother kicked him out of the house. Luckily, he’d also just scored his first brand deal and used the money in a video called “Giving A Random Homeless Man $10,000” in which he does just that. Its success was the beginning of a cycle in which the more money he’d give away, the more attention it got, the more money he’d make from sponsorships, and the more money he’d be able to give away next time. +
++It’s a cycle that’s continued to this day, where a typical Mr. Beast video might pit a hundred people against each other to win $500,000 (the last to leave a certain designated area wins the money; at one point the contestants were forced to stand still for 24 hours straight and the last 10 remained in the circle for a full 12 days), or, in his most popular video ever, create a real-life version of the dystopian Korean Netflix series Squid Game. On his charity-focused channel, Beast Philanthropy, Donaldson films himself and his team rebuilding a school in Cameroon, paying for kids’ cleft palate surgeries, and giving away $30 million worth of food. +
++If your first thought is that this sounds a little icky, you’ve probably aged out of the Mr. Beast demographic, who have grown up less on traditional film and television created by adults and more on videos created by influencers not much older than themselves. Last year, when Donaldson advertised his video “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time,” the lawyer and popular TikToker Alex Clavering tweeted, “There is something so demonic about this and I can’t even articulate what it is.” 81,000 people liked the tweet, drawing the stark differences between the kind of people who watch Mr. Beast videos and (presumably older) people who use Twitter. While many have criticized Donaldson for white saviorism, poverty profiteering, and exploitation, Clavering made clear that it wasn’t Donaldson’s individual acts of philanthropy that felt off, it’s the implication that “a single rich guy paid for life-changing surgery for us, and it’s easy to do this.” +
++In response to such criticisms, Donaldson has tweeted, “I already know I’m gonna get canceled because I uploaded a video helping people, and to be 100% clear, I don’t care.” As with any celebrity as famous as Mr. Beast, with every bit of criticism, the comments and replies are filled with his defenders. +
++In part, this is because Mr. Beast’s viewers, like any fans, feel as though they know him, even if it’s mediated through a screen. His videos almost always feature his clique: employees-slash-friends Karl Jacobs, Chandler Hallow, Tareq Salameh, Nolan Hansen, and Kris Tyson, the latter of whom came out as transgender last year. In the face of fans’ harassment, Donaldson defended Tyson in a tweet, writing “All this transphobia is starting to piss me off.” +
++Donaldson has admitted he isn’t good at keeping friends and that “all my friends revolve around work.” In recounting his first meeting with his now-girlfriend, South African esports caster Thea Booysen, Donaldson said on a podcast that he had to pepper her with specific questions before dating because “I don’t really get along with women if they don’t love learning, they’re not obsessive, they don’t have a hobby.” His perfect idea of a date, he said, is the two of them taking an IQ test and then studying to see if they can beat their scores. +
++Donaldson currently employs 500 people, 300 on his production team and 200 at his snack company, Feastables, which reportedly accounts for about 70 percent of his total revenue. They’re based in Greenville, North Carolina, where he’s transformed the town into a creator economy paradise, complete with a five-home cul-de-sac locals call “Beastville” where he and his crew live and work. He’s now a citywide hero, acting as something between Santa Claus and Willy Wonka: Kids reportedly crowd around wherever he goes, dreaming of being in one of his videos. +
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Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for MrBeast Burger
++The more immediate issue with producing the world’s most-viewed YouTube videos is what it takes to make them: Not only are they expensive (the Squid Game video reportedly cost $3.5 million), but former employees have accused the Mr. Beast company of fostering dangerous and exploitative conditions. One editor said that Donaldson berated him almost every day, called him offensive names, and described a workplace of favoritism and toxic perfectionism. Another former employee said that he believed he was let go because he was the only one campaigning for better safety protocols; in response, a Mr. Beast spokesperson told Time that “the company has high standards for performance and not everyone is best suited for this work.” Because of Donaldson’s reputation for giving money away to subscribers, scammers have used his likeness to promote AI giveaways and referral schemes (Donaldson has also been accused of misleading his followers by promoting a cryptocurrency that tanked in 2021). +
++Despite pulling in around $600 million to $700 million per year, according to his own estimate, Donaldson’s production company does not make a profit and does not expect to be profitable this year. Instead, he reinvests the money into his charity channel and his other videos, or his numerous other business ventures. Primary among them is Feastables, the snack brand that once included a chocolate bar called “Deez Nuts” (they’re no longer allowed to use the name after a company called Dee’s Nuts won a lawsuit against it). He’s currently planning Mr. Beast-branded games and apps, and has a deal with the collectible toy company Moose Toys. Though he briefly ran a ghost kitchen burger chain, last year Donaldson sued the operating company, calling the burgers “disgusting” and “inedible”; they then countersued. +
++There’s a solid chance that, if you’re reading this, you find Mr. Beast’s whole thing rather distasteful and/or a grim signifier of the state of children’s entertainment: uninterested in quality and only making bigger, louder, more attention-grabbing and easier-to-consume content for kids to get addicted to and form misguided parasocial relationships with. These interpretations may be true, but what’s at least a little bit interesting about Mr. Beast is that the man behind it doesn’t appear to be enjoying himself. +
++Watch enough of his videos and you’ll have seen Donaldson spend 50 hours buried alive (and later a whole week), 50 hours in Antarctica, 24 hours trapped in ice, 30 days without food, seven days alone in a white padded room (a video that made me feel deranged by the end of it), and a full week on a small raft in the middle of the ocean. (Which ocean? C’mon, we’ve been through this.) He has paid assassins, bounty hunters, the FBI, and US military members to try and hunt him and lost money in the process. +
++After consuming enough Mr. Beast content, it’s hard not to wonder who’s actually having fun here and to think how much you’d rather watch a behind-the-scenes documentary about the grunt work that goes into each video. “The more I suffer, the more you guys watch,” he says on day four of being trapped at sea. Later, as a storm approaches and he and his crew attempt to build a waterproof structure that will last the night, he delivers an upbeat scripted ad for Shopify. (The structure does not hold and they all have to sleep under soaked-through towels; one of his crew members describes it as “the worst experience I’ve ever had in my entire life.”) +
++Some of his former employees have spoken out against these kinds of stunts and brainless stimulation for clicks; one director of a Mr. Beast video told Time, “These algorithms are poisonous to humanity. They prioritize addictive, isolated experiences over ethical social design, all just for ads. It’s not MrBeast I have a problem with. It’s platforms which encourage someone like me to study a retention graph so I can make the next video more addicting. At Beast I did that on steroids.” By exploiting YouTube’s algorithm, Mr. Beast has created a modern-day arena for influencer-gladiators to torture each other and where average Joes can compete for a piece of the spoils. It’s Jackass if the Jackass dudes read self-help books and idolized Elon Musk. +
++This is a strategy that legacy entertainment companies are looking to mimic. With his Amazon competition show, Donaldson is the latest in a long list of digital native influencers who’ve attempted to go Hollywood, usually with floundering success. That’s because famous influencers are in large part one-person shows who deeply understand their followers, and studio executives and traditional film and television producers have different goals and different audiences to attract. It hasn’t stopped them from trying to harness the popularity of influencers, of course, but the pivot doesn’t always land. +
++What’s easier to imagine than Mr. Beast becoming, say, a late-night talk show host or TV presenter is the entertainment industry continuing its current race to the bottom of what’s profitable in the attention economy. By leaning harder into algorithmically generated recommendations and lowest-common-denominator programming, they’re mirroring the Mr. Beast philosophy of creating content totally devoid of complexity and point of view in the hope that it’s addicting enough that people will pay $10 a month for it. Unfortunately for the Netflixes and NBCs of the world, however, they’re up against a guy who says he wants to give all his money away — just as long as you “like” and subscribe. +