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the_dunk_tank @hexbear.net
Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

Mr. Beast sucks but also apparently lives in a hell of his own making

If viewers don’t really see him having fun, that’s by design. Donaldson has outright said he sees “personality” as a limitation for growth, once noting in a podcast that hinging your content on who you are as a person means risking not being liked. And if someone doesn’t like a creator as a person, they may not give the videos a chance.

McLoughlin’s comments hit at another bleak possibility: Viewers may hardly see MrBeast having fun in his videos because he’s not actually having a good time. In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality”

While his free time seems minuscule, the rare times he does pull away from work are for dates with his girlfriend that center around activities that could enrich his videos, because he considers a single hour of a date to be worth $100K had it been dedicated to work instead.

Absolutely brutal indictment of algorithmic capitalism.

140 comments

  • never gonna feel sympathy for a man who saw "Squid Game" and thought to himself "I can make this real"

    • Sorry hate to go against the flow here but this is always going to be a stupid comparison. People die in the Squid Game, people dont die in Mr Beast and the Netflix RTV show. By taking away the death you take away the thing that makes it actually ghoulish. Game shows are not inherently ghoulish and Squid Game isnt such a sacrosanct piece of art that you have to protect it from this sort of thing. Its just another reality competition. Its a game, with a prize. Thats it. Its no more ethically bankrupt than fucking Wheel of Fortune lol.

      i dont like Mr Beast but even though I bought into this reason for awhile I actually thought about it, realize I've watched other reality competitions for money before, and realized "wow people whinging about the ethics of this are actually really silly!".

      I bought the idea that recreating the Squid Game was Torment Nexus at one point but at some point seeing all the over the top navel gazing and pearl clutching over the Netflix version compared to what I was witnessing in the actual clips of it they were saying this about, where I saw... normal everyday gameshow shit and a bit of human drama added in, I realized the whole thing was overwrought and silly. that one hockey player voice Its only a game why you haf to be mad.

      • Squid Game's conceit of death was meant to throw the perverse incentives and implications of regular game shows into sharp relief by means of exaggeration.

        i'm rather with you for the complaints acting like the show was more important than it was, but it's a correct read to find the 'reality' adaptions as anathema to the themes of the original

      • you're reading entirely too much into my pithy one-liner and probably a little too shallowly into what Squid Game was about. i don't even like the show and couldn't watch it past like two episodes because it was laying it on entirely too thick. if mr beast can't grasp the core message it was trying way too hard to ram down your throat enough to realize the folly of recreating it, with or without lethal consequences, then he's absolutely worthy of my scorn.

        just to make it explicitly clear: using outsized monetary incentives to tempt people into doing demeaning and occasionally dangerous things they normally would refuse for the sake of profit and amusement under a system where basic needs and comfort are not guaranteed and in fact proportional to ones wealth and usually dependent on performing a lifetime of subservient labor for the same class offering those incentives is inherently exploitative and contemptible.

  • Rich people's wealth is wasted on them. They don't know what to do with money other than use it to make even more money. The only rich person I know about who I consider normal is Tom Anderson, the Myspace guy. He made millions then retired and just wanders around the world without any worries. I can relate to that.

    Mr Beast has easily 10x the money of Myspace Tom and yet still keeps going, for what? So he can have even more money he won't spend on anything?

    • Rich people's wealth is wasted on them.

      Many such examples! Musk is another great example. Dude could have fucked off years ago but he had to buy twitter because he couldn't stop posting!

  • rolling over after a passionless 13 minutes, lighting up a cig, "you like that babe? an extra 3 minutes (5000$) just for you"

    she rolls her eyes and thinks about how she'll get him killed in a way that the money goes to her

  • because he considers a single hour of a date to be worth $100K had it been dedicated to work instead.

    for someone i feel like he doesn't really need to worry about missing $100k here and there

  • When your personality is the algorithm.

    You see this with Twitch too, and the recent mockery people have taken to by using twitch lingo outside of twitch "what's up chat" when referring to a group.

    I don't even know how you would go about solving this. If you have gameified content in any way at all people are going to work out how that game works and optimise around it, even more so when it's for money and not just clout.

  • ...But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.

  • Joe Heller

    True story,

    Word of Honor:

    Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead,

    and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.

    I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?”

    And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

    And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

    And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

    Not bad! Rest in peace!”

    — Kurt Vonnegut

  • The way he makes his videos, with regards to how he treats his film crew and editors, is also completely unsustainable and should not be allowed. Big "we're all friends and family" vibes.

  • I wonder how long we've got until one of these Offputting YouTuber that emerged from the aether fully formed with an army of child-to-tween fans type guys kicks off a regional-scale nuclear war

  • McLoughlin’s comments hit at another bleak possibility: Viewers may hardly see MrBeast having fun in his videos because he’s not actually having a good time. In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed,

    i hate to say it but i empathize a bit with this, like i had a real bad mental situation some years ago and i felt this just a constant urge to keep doing stuff because if my brain wasn't fully ocuppied i could not escape my thoughts, but on the other hand YOU ARE SO RICH, LIKE JUST UNTHINKABLY SO, JUST FUCKING DEAL WITH THIS SHIT, GET DRUGS I DON'T KNOW BUD, like there is a bit of atragic side to the fact that he sold his soul to the machine and now everything feels like shit but it kinda balances out by the fact that you did get what you wanted

140 comments