There’s a larger trend that is stripping the internet of its soul, and the canary in the coal mine was MrBeast.
People like MrBeast didn’t crack the code of virality. Machines did. MrBeast’s great strength as a contemporary creator is that he has no ambition beyond repeating a pattern. He’s a machine-listener. He attends to the machine, and he does what it tells him to do
I remember working on what felt like a much more hopeful version of the web back in 2010. It felt like we were still riding a wave of organic optimism spurred on by Web 2.0. If there’s a one day encapsulation of that spirit it’s probably the dress and the runaway llamas. I worked in marketing departments at the time where the whole goal was to remain “authentic”, while capturing as much vitality in a bottle as possible at the same time.
In retrospect, we were probably just paving the cowpaths for the next wave of creators like MrBeast. People who would ditch any sort of pretext and simply just become the algorithm. We are reaching the logical end of that trajectory. I hope something better comes next: