the rigor mortis of MrBeast

the entire youtube algorithm existing in a smile

Welcome to my little corner of the internet! This letter covers MrBeast as a confluence of philanthropy and individual competition with a digitized and streamlined economy of attention. Every Monday I send out a weekly letter like this one, or this one, which are available to free subscribers for seven hours (until around 2pm CT) before they’re paywalled; and every Thursday I send out a letter for free and paid subscribers, like this one. If you enjoy this piece, or if you’ve enjoyed my work in the past, please feel free to buy me a cup of coffee by upgrading your subscription! And, as usual, if you come across this article paywalled and can’t spare the $5 for a subscription,—shoot me a DM and I can send over a printout.

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The supposed most optimized man alive, the living embodiment of early twenty-first century virality in media, passed away late this past year at the ripe old age of 127. Funeral services for the deceased were held last week in Greenville, North Carolina’s Church of the Latter Day Beast. The church’s predominate influencer, wearing his blue panther insignia proudly on his forehead, made a public announcement earlier in the month that Jimmy Donaldson’s funeral service would be the only funeral service to be held by the branch during this calendar year out of respect for his reverence, MrBeast.

- Newspaper clipping from the Washington Post, February 15th, 2125

“Did he… ask to have that face?”, a third cousin’s granddaughter asked. Here was someone who hadn’t known the deceased all that well but well enough to know well that it had been MrBeast,— and who would want to miss such a man’s funeral? She asked a first cousin, nudging with her elbow, “or is his face just like that?”

The first cousin shrugged, smirked, and said, “seems like something he would do, yeah.” Similar questions were asked all around the ceremony in small whispers between half a hundred old men who hadn’t, in spirit, left their early twenties, — and there were a spattering of women here or there too. The big somber speeches, many modeled after Frank Oz’s eulogy for Jim Henson, were given by Jimmy Donaldson’s rotating cabinet of team members from over the last hundred and fifteen years to a rotating array of twenty-four video cameras arranged around the podium and held by teenagers restlessly moving between their tired feet. One single green blinking light would move between the cameras every thirty seconds or so to signal the ending of another optimal 30 second video bite possible.

“Jimmy was a man of pure optimized generosity, if nothing else. Just pretend you can ignore the videos he made, — if you can hahah, — just think of the amount of money he gave away to people who needed it? How many people in India he gave sight? He has been called the first real Youtuber, that is true, but he has also been called the world’s most optimized philanthropist. This is also true. And like… There have been many prolific philanthropists in this country’s history and, who would have guessed way back in… I don’t know, say 2024… that my friend Jimmy would join the ranks of Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan. It’s like,- hey man, he was my friend too. It’s like I was friends with the Youtube algorithm itself, the Youtube algorithm I grew up with but I loved him as a person outside the content he created. His generous spirit knew no bounds. No bounds. Ever since that first philanthropy video he shot, when he approached that homeless guy standing on the median in North Carolina to give him ten thousand dollars. It was crazy. People weren’t doing that. What a creative risk. And going forward, from the time he gave people $20,000 from the back of an ice cream truck, to the time he let small children use his credit card for four hours, to the time he gave a pair of identical twins a quarter of a million dollars once they had 98 other identical twins, the time he gave his 5 millionth subscriber 5 million kernels of popcorn, — the throughline is perfectly clear, I think: this man is nothing if not a symbol, a message of generosity.” Standing applause.

His 31 page manifesto of ideas which he gives to his team was also read word-by-word at his funeral to massive and unending applause, especially the “no doesn’t mean no” section, detailing getting permissions. Money can get a lot done it turns out. The crowd knew this,—you know this. Applause again.

The birds lined up along a power line overhead to watch all this clapping, and the eclectic fashion being paraded around. The funeral was half a sort of somber Met Gala, and half a convention of sad men in SportsClips haircuts and graphic tees.

Someone, no one knew who, had fashioned up a full bodysuit of puffy silver down filled nylon, and nobody could tell who on Earth it could be since they wouldn’t say a word to anyone. The assumption was they must be hot and bothered underneath all that lining of down feathers, —though there was at the same time an assumption that perhaps this someone was so significant that they couldn’t show their face at the funeral. There were rumors in circulation that it had been Kim Jong Sung II. Had they been close? A mysterious Michelin man indeed.

The funeral was a bashful affair. His later career was rather ignored, the topic of the eulogies was mainly towards Donaldson’s earliest years, when he was an upstart in the 2020s and 2030s. Because after the 20s and 30s, the children he had raised across the globe had grown into men and women who hadn’t had any images of miracles outside the occasional squid game recreation or MrBeast restoring peoples’ eyesight; and with this, MrBeast had become something of a secular, digital Christ figure. His career took a rather stark turn in trajectory and cultural significance. And his series of squid games videos hadn’t resulted in the same sort of mass casualties as Keemstar’s later career would. 

In the cities MrBeast’s team frequented to give away money, in the early 2030s, small congregations would gather, electing that his top reply guys and Youtube optimization analysts give them advice on life and when Donaldson began to attend these congregations to make more squid game content, the congregations began to grow to gigantic proportions, — sometimes literally hundreds, — to watch old MrBeast videos played on a big screen, hoping that he would stop through on his video tours, and that they individually would be lucky enough to beat the buzzer and take home a million dollars. Just imagine!

There was mention at the funeral too of how, as the twenty-first century entered its latter half, it became perfectly clear that Jimmy was as evergreen as his grasp on human attention was. He looked as if he was still in his twenties, — he looked even more in his twenties than when he actually was in his twenties. Perhaps there was a slight grey tint to his hair now, but not a whole lot more. Vague rumors circulated that he had had sexual relations with his television but that had only added to his mystique as again, as he perhaps understood twenty-first century desire better than anyone ever had. 

The rigor mortis smile of his thumbnails, that which had been laid on top of him in his casket, had worked so well because it captured the desires of our attention still focused in a primal way on our own eventual deaths, come into contact with the most primal technology we’ve created since fire. The smile is stillness, preservation in the digital. An insect stuck into a corkboard. The smile is for a Youtube thumbnail that has became stuck through the sheer repetition of it. The youtube thumbnails that have emulated the smile of MrBeast are not emulating the smile of anyone real because MrBeast’s smile is not emulating anyone real, rather it’s the hoary smile of the grim reaper itself. Brrr. You feel that breeze?

And once the video begins it becomes clear that this person you saw in the thumbnail sitting in front of a gold Lamborghini, vaguely postured as if he’s your buddy you’re kicking it with, is not miserably in pain at all but rather a very approachable, somewhat aloof guy’s guy. All of western history has led to such a figurehead of contemporary abyss.

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Fathers make the strangest sounds when dealing with small children. One of the parents I encountered when I was working at Goth Target, — the Target in the center of the downtown Chicago loop, — walked around with four small children, talking like a maniacal mad scientist to them all. But it worked, — they were following along with him like ducklings. The father approached me after he saw I was wearing the Target red shirt and he interrupted my stocking thirty different brands of the same water, asking “do you have any of the mister best bar in stock?” in a french accent. 

His four blonde boys looked up at me, blinking expectantly, all four of them having the same futbol player bowl. A lot of pressure.

“Mr. Who?” I said. I was being an ass. I knew very well who he was asking for; I wanted him to explain it to me.

“Oh Mister Beast, he’s a youtuber," the father said, flushing pale slightly. “They’re for my kids you see.” I walked him and his troupe over to the candy and the store was, in fact, out of the MrBeast chocolate bars. They had flown off the shelves. I wonder if Jimmy’s promise to put $1,000,000 into one of them has something to do with it.

I think most people in my generation have been aware of MrBeast against their will for the most part. Maybe I’m being harsh, I don’t know, — I watched two of his videos for this post and found them kind of boring? I will say, however, that maybe I’m just not into people talking loudly; Tiktok never got my brain in its clutches because whenever I download the app out of curiosity I eventually swipe to a video of someone yelling at the camera and so I close out of the app and delete it from my phone. Don’t want that, don’t need that.

But nonetheless he was likely the most internet worthy man to ever walk the earth. 

Many of you who read this newsletter regularly are practitioners in the craft of writing, something that’s as otherworldy a career as painting or filmmaking, or making youtube videos, all of which, through daily repetition, daily sittings with words, brings out the threads of our lives and of our thoughts over the course of a lifetime of practice, these threads coming in and out like the oscillations of various pitches wave in and out of an elaborate crashing sound wave, each thread like a complete individual object for you yourself, created from yourself from that space between your stomach and your heart where your soul lives.

Making videos is a practice and embarks on something similar. MrBeast’s soul is in everything he makes, even if it’s clouded by the optimization tendencies which similarly make up the stuff of his soul. Through the streamlining of his videos, his soul comes through because of that sheer repetition of his practice, and interestingly, over time and over years of feedback, his soul has become the algorithm of youtube itself. This, I think, is the main reason for the otherworldliness of his online persona and why it’s so uncomfortable for those who haven’t grown up with his consistent presence in their lives. This goes for all viral content creators too, the repetition of their craft and the feedback accumulated over time shapes their project into what it is destined to become (because we live out our destinies) and without anything outside the echo chamber of craft and feedback, they themselves become the algorithm that they work within. God I hope that made sense. The medium is the message and the message of MrBeast is the Youtube algorithm itself, distilled further and further with each and every video.

There is a whole genre of video on the platform devoted to not just Jimmy’s work but to his success and how to emulate it; and of course this is a symptom of his work’s mapping out the framework of this online new online era on what is perhaps the fastest growing platform in internet history, Youtube being one of the few online spaces where a person can make a living. When children say in schools that they want to be a Youtuber when they grow up they’re being serious because the younger generations understand well the capitalist hellscape we live, at least enough to know that all a person needs to succeed is 1,000 people who will pay them $5 a month or enough viewers to warrant brands paying them exorbitant amounts of money for small 30 second shoutouts. Everyone’s an entrepreneur now, it’s all we’re trained to be in American public schools.

And this hellscape applies all the more readily to the countries in the world where the united states has forced its framework through economic might. For those places in Africa and Asia and south America where a dollar goes much further than it does here, a mastery of virality on these international platforms goes much much further. The world is emulating MrBeast. He’s become a patron saint of Youtube in a way, and he’s only going to become more wealthy, but he’s also a patron saint of american neoliberalism in the way that poor children in america who watch his videos see winning one of his games videos as one of their few paths for economic stability in their adult lives, a shortcut to generational wealth. All of this makes the fact of his making squid games into a real cultural phenomenon all the more stark in its earnestness to the American system, it’s in support of the whole of neoliberal capitalism as decreed by the wielders of international american hegemony. Like every other faucet of American culture, the “youtuber” has been absorbed by the military-industrial complex because of its reinforcement to its adages.

In a strange sort of way the channel had become the algorithm itself, as its most optimized node mirrored endlessly into itself until it became smoothed down and frictionless. But the algorithm was based on the forced neoliberalism of the internet through Web2.0 platforms, and so its virality must pertain to that as well.

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Months after the funeral, MrBeast’s grave was robbed by a now half dozen of MrBeast’s former lawyers who were out of a job, drinking from brown paper bags, and looking for things to get up to. They dug down with spades and pulled out the coffin and pried it open and discovered there was no body.

Sirens went off. The half dozen lawyers clutched their heads and looked at one another in panic. Wait, — No! Those weren’t sirens. They were air horns. Confetti fell from overhead. Three nineteen year olds wielding video cameras jumped out from between the grave and the surrounding graveyard; three people from the MrBeast team ran in beckoning to one of the cameras, saying finally, to the besuited grave robbers, “you opened the grave! Oh my god you opened it!”

One of the lawyers began stuttering, “um I need to speak with my,-”

But before they could continue, one of the MrBeast crew members explained hastily that they had been the first people to try digging up the body, “congratulations man, — you’ve won 35 million dollars.” And before the half dozen lawyers could think of anything else to say, MrBeast himself stepped out from behind a grave and gave jazz hands to one of the cameras.