I’d be surprised if you don’t know who Mr Beast is, but I’ll humor you anyways. Mr Beast; Stephen Donaldson is an American YouTuber who successfully popularized a content genre that mixes charity with extravagance, and extreme challenges. This hybrid manages to satiate the viewer’s sense of goodwill (I use this quite loosely), while providing extreme excitement. 

So yay, we are helping people and having fun! 

But if it were that simple this opinion-piece would not exist. Well you see, Mr Beast has been accused of profiteering off vulnerable persons, and systemic issues. The popular response to this online is that Mr Beast should not be criticized because he is doing good and helping real people. I believe that the truth exists in a shadowy grey area. This conversation requires a lot of nuance, and as i navigate these complexities I must first admit that I might not be totally right but I’ll try anyways.

The very nature of capitalism is one that inextricably tied to commodification, and in turn consumerism. It is commonplace to hold conversations like; why have an hobby if you can have a side hustle? This way, the exaltation of the free market just means that everything and anything is available for sale. You see the advocates of a pure unfettered free market system like to believe that the free market can self regulate, but in actuality consumers often have perverse palates which producers have the economic incentive to satiate. In some situations, producers(Content Creators) can flood the market with perverse commodities that consumers(Content Consumers) will ultimately develop an acquired taste for. These way, actors can either come together to create value, or act collectively as “two Gba twins” (If you don’t know what that means, I’m sorry but I will not be translating). 

The creator economy is an offshoot this, with market competition at various levels. Social media applications compete with each other for user retention, creators compete with each other for clicks, views, likes, followers, tweets, reposts or whatever app standard that quantifies support from real life people, and advertisers seek out the social media applications and creators that eventually win these competitions. From top to bottom, we are trading ourselves, our time, and our attention.

So sometime ago, I watched a video where a man described the euphoric feeling of hitting the crack pipe, and chasing that high. What does this conversation have to do with drugs you may ask ? You see, that tolerance buildup that makes hardened drug users crave higher and higher drug doses also applies to content. As people watch more content, the harder to please they become. It is not just enough to be interesting, the relevant content creator has to be brazen, and bring up more and more and more extreme satisfaction. The commodity must satisfy the consumer to be fit for purpose. 

What I have shown you is a clear incentive structure for extreme commodification to meet the needs of the consumer, well let’s go on to the acquired taste aspect of this conversation.  I’ll give an analogy to better explain, and it is the ✨Banger Boys and Girls✨ epidemic. Sugar daddy Elon Musk decided that he would pay Twitter blue creators who reach a certain amount of impressions for tweeting and it has been hell on that app. While banger boys and girls existed before this, the move empowered that community in real-time. If you didn’t know, a banger boy or girl is someone who would tweet anything no matter how untrue, scandalous or harmful to gain impressions; retweets, quotes, likes etc. The taste and appetite that the ordinary social media users have for “vayolence” continues to increase as creators tweet the most absurd things. 

Back to our charity discourse, I won’t  definitively say if it is good or bad to use vulnerable persons and their situations to make money off the internet, if they are getting a share of that money, I can but I am just choosing not to. What I can say definitively is that when vulnerable people often consent to this, and it makes a lot of economic sense. A person dealing with extreme starvation and homelessness would rather not have a camera in their face in that state, but the terrible thing about poverty is that it deprives one of choice. 

I must admit the effort of some creators to innovate themselves out of these issues. A certain creator on TikTok whose name I do not remember, even after various google searches of TikTok food distribution lady’ creates content around feeding the homeless and makes the focus of the content the food itself, and the sheer size of the food she makes, and the interesting way she creates that content makes it worth the watch. 

We must remember that poor or not, vulnerable or not; all human beings are complete beings deserving of human dignity. The fact that people need the things that we can offer them is not a justification to violate them before they get access to it. When we offer people charity on the condition that we use their humanity, their pain, and personhood as content, it morphs from charity into an uneven buisness relationship. 

NOTE: This was not written to condemn Mr Beast.