MrBeast: why the vibes are off

We're amusing ourselves to death

Nov 29, 2023

"Though it may be un-American to say it, not everything is televisible. Or to put it more precisely, what is televised is transformed from what it was to something else, which may or may not preserve its former essence." Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson has had a hard time giving to charity this year. Every time he does it, something seems to go wrong. It happens like this: first he releases a video where he performs an act of charity, then it escapes the YouTube containment field, then this starts a protracted (and unproductive) discourse, then Donaldson weighs in with a tweet. Eventually, it fades away...until the next time it happens.

This has only been happening in the last year, and only when he posts this content on his main channel, rather than the subsidiary "Beast Philanthropy" channel. These are the three videos in question:

These are far from the first occasions he's ever given to people in need or performed charitable acts of some kind. But they are the first that seem to have attracted such an intense level of criticism, defence, and debate after their publication. It’s this reaction that I want to focus on.

Right/wrong/vibes

Donaldson's critics usually take the tack of "he shouldn't use these people or these acts of charity for likes, why doesn't he address why these issues are there in the first place?" Meanwhile, his supporters respond with something along the lines of "he's using his clout for good, who are you to judge, how can you criticise him for doing such good things?" Both lines of argument have their own logic, and both feel weak: the former doesn't seem fundamental enough, and the latter is a naïve and wilfully unidimensional take in a complicated, political world.

In short: it's an argument between people who believe the ends justify the means, and those who don't. But this perennial debate misses an important nuance I believe gets to the core of why these videos cause this reaction in the first place: they leave many people feeling uneasy, specifically in the moment between watching the video and engaging in the wider debate. As one incisive tweet put it, the vibes feel off:

*As one reply says: "i support him doing cool shit but idk."* Source: krrishd on Twitter/X

Ryan Broderick

took a crack at dissecting the vibes, arguing that "if your entire gimmick is going viral, it starts to make people really uncomfortable." And while I think Broderick is partially correct, I think there's more to dig into here.

The thing about this discourse, every time it happens, is that it focuses on the content, not the medium. While there are nuanced explorations of the ethics of "philanthrocapitalism" such as this one by history YouTuber Then & Now, it doesn’t explain the "vibes" a good chunk of people feel before these more involved critiques have time to form. Some love him, some hate him, but many are left in the middle to wonder why this doesn't feel quite right. Why is that?

One explanation can be found in Neil Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. It provides a better explanation of what's going on here than anything I've yet seen online. There are two ideas in it that are helpful to us here: the first is how modern media destroys linear coherence, and the second is how the translation of certain acts to new media can transform and degrade their original essence.

Let's look at each in turn.

Coherence collapse

"Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world—a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense." Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

There is a longstanding school of thought that the production and consumption of content should be linear; B should follow A because it makes sense on the way to C. There should be a theme, or a narrative, or otherwise some kind of connecting tissue binding things together.

Donaldson does not subscribe to this school of thought. Here are the five videos posted on the primary MrBeast channel prior to, and including, his "100 Wells" video on the 4th of November:

The only thing providing any coherent connection between these videos is the syntactic construction of each title: superlative + noun + ! Otherwise, it's a completely incoherent list. What do expensive cars have to do with dangerous traps? What do dangerous traps have to do with expensive houses? Why is someone with a deadly laser maze building wells in Africa?

Of course, they have nothing to do with one another. And why should they? For users, YouTube is a fundamentally incoherent platform. It's an algorithmic jumble putting music videos next to war footage next to productivity tips. If a user wants to focus on a single topic, that's something they'll have to do without help from the platform itself (which will, as well as it can, try to tempt them away from it).

But while YouTube is incoherent for the user, it seems less so for the creator. Creators are often advised to focus on a niche to help them grow their channel. If you can become known for the best videos about a single topic, your subscribers will increase as people interested in that topic engage with your content over time.

Some choose their niche at the start, while others find their way to it through trial and error. Eventually, most YouTubers find something that works well for them, then keep doing more of it. Scrolling back through Donaldson's earliest videos, it looks like he began by doing this. His videos would vary wildly from topic to topic—from "how much does [YouTuber] make" videos, to explainer videos, to channel progress updates. But this wasn't what he was doing at all.

In a video called "How To Think Of Good Video Ideas (Tips)" published way back in 2015, Donaldson explains that niches are important and YouTubers should choose them. But what is his niche? He explains: "my niche, if I'm being honest, is being so random that you don't know what to expect." He follows it up with another tip: "don't dwell on past videos. Once you upload a video, move on to the next one."

In other words, Donaldson realised early on that there's little point in anything linking his content together. By its nature, a niche reduces options. Incoherence, though, would have greater value because of the options it would give him and the production scale he could achieve. These are the implicit rules of YouTube-as-medium and the rules he plays by to this day. In doing so he is an unparalleled creator, sitting at the apex of the platform.

It's not too hard to imagine that many of Donaldson's supporters defend him because they are subscribed to and working within those same rules. They admire his ability to play and win on those terms ("This is just how things are," in other words). On the other hand, I suspect that one of the things that unsettles his detractors are those very same rules that the outside observer can see so vividly in his videos, more obviously than with other YouTube content. If you like your content linear and coherent, MrBeast is going to seem weird to you.

That's why this debate is probably best viewed as a clash of the linear versus the nonlinear. If you don't value coherence, it doesn't matter what he posts—it's all content in the end. If you do value coherence, it's hard to understand how or why MrBeast has arrived at this point. Why is the guy who crashes trains into giant pits building wells in Africa? Does he want to crash trains into them? Incoherence makes exposition impossible, which makes the people expecting exposition begin to wonder: what's motivating him?

His motivation, I'd argue, is pure entertainment.

Philanthrotainment and the transformation of experience through media

The core of Postman's thesis in Amusing Ourselves to Death is that television "has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience." But not every experience "can be converted from one medium to another," he argues. "It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value."

The philosopher Michael J. Sandel makes a similar point with stronger emphasis in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, an exploration of how market values have crept into our lives. "We corrupt a good, an activity, or a social practice," Sandel argues, "whenever we treat it according to a lower norm than is appropriate to it." Well-meaning or not, this is more or less what Donaldson is doing in these videos by turning everything into entertainment.

Take the "1,000 Blind People" video as an example: Donaldson takes eye surgery and translates it from the medium of the operating theatre to the new medium of YouTube. In doing this he transforms it from healthcare to entertainment. But if we value privacy as an important part of healthcare, the notion of people trading their privacy to access healthcare will feel unpleasant.

Nobody in their right mind objects to these people being healed (although this is a popular straw man favoured by many). What people are more likely to object to is those people being healed as a form of entertainment. It doesn't matter if MrBeast then uses the success of the video to do even more good deeds, what matters is that these videos degrade the privacy of their subjects. An "ends justify the means" argument overlooks this. They're all healed! So what? Well, if we can imagine a patient who chose not to sacrifice their privacy to get this surgery, we can imagine someone who is still blind.

The same argument works for charity as it does with healthcare. The Sermon on the Mount, likely one of the most influential historical texts in the West, is unequivocal on the topic: "beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them." Regardless of your religious belief or familiarity with the Bible, it's a sentiment deeply woven into the social mores of Western culture.

And for the sceptic unsure that Donaldson is trying to entertain in his charitable videos we need only know that, according to this CBC article, "the head of Beast Philanthropy, Darren Margolias, explicitly calls what they do "'philanthro-tainment."

Everything is entertainment now

MrBeast makes pure entertainment without context, coherence, or exposition, and he is a master of the art. I watched hours of his videos while writing this essay and I'm not above admitting that they're entertaining. Jimmy and his friends look like they’re having a whale of time and are good at what they do. I maybe can't stomach more than one of their videos a day—they can fry your brain after a while, and I'll be going cold turkey after I publish this piece—but they're nothing if not compelling.

But the difference between enjoying a few entertaining videos and the dominant technological medium that they're published within is how that medium can change the way we think and interact as a society. While MrBeast and other content creators like him operate on the frontier of that medium, it's important to be able to understand what effect this has: on us, on other creators, and on our wider discourse.

Instead, all we get is often just a cacophony of hot takes, gotchas, sensational short-form video, and a raft of bad-faith interpretations from all sides of the political spectrum who delight in using his videos as a form of proxy war. The internet is a terrible place to discuss the internet, as Neil Postman would likely not have been surprised by, but what else are we going to do?

"You’re not mad at him," replied one user to the "vibes are off" tweet. "You’re [mad] at the masses who consume his content. Mr Beast videos are a societal mirror." Donaldson the person, Jimmy the character, MrBeast the brand—all of it feels like a distorted reflection. If we feel uncomfortable when we watch these videos, it might be because we see glimpses of ourselves, and the systems of belief we live within, writ large and unambiguous in each video we watch. Everything is entertainment now, whether we like it or not, and there's no going back.

Thanks

Some wonderful folks read through this post before I published it. My thanks to

Ellie Kime

, Dave Cornish, Annie Maddison, Amy Lesko and, of course, Luisa.

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