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In the belly of the MrBeast

kevinmunger.substack.com

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Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#261

Post by dom96 »

dmonitor wrote: post #180
eitally wrote: post #2

At the top of the heap (Mr Beast, Nastya, Ryan, etc), this is true: > The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account. > Or more simply, YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations. Audiences, rationalized by the platform, and the vloggers who upload the videos those audie…

Well put. As long as channels like Technology Connections can remain financially viable on the platform and not beaten down by the algorithm, I really don't care how many Mr Beasts are making "slop content".

I do. Slop content is melting the brains of the people watching that content to the detriment of society as a whole.

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#262

Post by Xmd5a »

garte wrote: post #173
pjc50 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who is familiar with Baudrillard goes "simulacrum!" whenever they encounter LLM output. LLM output is after all a pure chain of symbols that is extremely far removed from a connection with ground truth reality.

I'm not sure it's that direct of a connection. There's something to be said about the structuralist part of it: using large amounts of text as a rule set to return a semblance of truth seems to be a structuralist's wet dream. It's like drawing the map for the king: the real is being represented by reducing a huge number of data points to a mixture of randomness and hard rules that pretend to be real. At the very leas…

Indeed this is what I was aiming at, however the concern for (a semblance of) truth seems rooted in a view that locates meaning in what signs refer to. This view feels incomplete when faced with a dyadic model where the relationship between signifier and signified takes precedence over reference. The notion of simulacrum only emerges in a technical culture that has elevated 'reality' to a special status. After all, what is 'reality' in technical systems if not itself a simulacrum? Hilbert's program, symbolic AI, rule systems, ontologies, the semantic web - they all struggled to capture reality as a whole precisely because they tried to grasp it through formal objects claiming universal scope via the machinery of said formalisms.

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#263

Post by stonogo »

bena wrote: post #66
n3storm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and I think "literally" abuse is a sympton of that

Dickens did it. And people have been doing it since the 1700s. Not to mention, if you're using the word "literally" to mean "something that actually happened", you are also using the word wrong. Because it means "relating to or expressed in letters". I also notice people complain about "literally", but they never complain about "really" which also gets used in the same ways even though it means the opposite. And I've…

There have been thousands of years of written language, and the worst thing that ever happened was the invention of the dictionary, which enabled generations of prescriptivists to pretend that word meanings can't change once they're written down, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary. Maybe look up 'hidebound' sometime.

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#264

Post by andrewla »

walthamstow wrote: post #259
andrewla wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I'm in agreement that they present a life where being an "influencer" is a goal in and of itself, but I think it's mostly harmless, like kids wanting to be a rock star or a professional athlete. These are unobtainable for most people but learning some music or sports or video production isn't a bad idea for anyone because you don't know where it will lead. The specific criticism of "flaunting their huge we…

In my opinion, giving away large sums of money, loudly and publicly, is very much flaunting wealth. It’s good too, it’s great, but it’s also flaunting wealth.

I guess what I mean is for a typical "influencer", you want to be that person to both be famous and also be rich and have cool stuff like they have.

But if you want to grow up to be MrBeast, you want to just be famous. Maybe you want to be MrBeast-famous and also buy cool yachts and lambos and private islands for yourself, but that's not the "lifestyle" that he's selling. The lifestyle he's selling is "be famous but still hang out with your loser friends but get to give away and/or destroy awesome things".

This is maybe not the thing we should aspire to, but for kids I think it's fine to imagine that for yourself the way that you imagine being an NFL quarterback or something. Not every kid imagines growing up and being a moderately successful CPA.

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#265

Post by gilleain »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #222
lalalandland wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creators publication frequency is also an important factor. If you don't put out content at least once per week you fall off the recommended and lose a lot of views. Once your content is shallow, simple and without reflection, you are trapped in a hamster wheel of click bait vapidness.

Is this accurate in all cases? Isn't Jenny Nicholson one of the bigger YouTubers, with videos coming out maybe once or twice a year?

There are a few 'long form' creators like Jenny Nicholson (I recommend the one about the failure of the Star Wars Hotel!).

Contrapoints (eg the Twilight one), Big Joel's (recently made a 6hr one!), FoldingIdeas and so on. It's a very different model, and a number of these creators also make videos for Nebula.

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#266

Post by mperham »

dom96 wrote: post #261
dmonitor wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put. As long as channels like Technology Connections can remain financially viable on the platform and not beaten down by the algorithm, I really don't care how many Mr Beasts are making "slop content".

I do. Slop content is melting the brains of the people watching that content to the detriment of society as a whole.

Soap operas, reality TV and evangelists have existed forever in various guises. "Bread and circuses" is thousands of years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#267

Post by Invictus0 »

lanternfish wrote: post #179
Invictus0 wrote: post #101

Breathless navel gazing. It's not that he's wrong, it's just that this article adds nothing new to the conversation other than excessively technical mumbo jumbo. Just read MrBeast's original document.

The actual work underlying the essay - the one published in Cambridge Core - is pretty strong and has a lot of pretty compelling analysis. It's just long.

I disagree that it's strong, I got up to section five and it's written in the same "I am very smart and this is very important" style while saying very little of substance and bouncing around like a rabbit on speed.

The central thesis that demand creates supply is also just very obviously false, no one was searching for "100 identical twins fight for $250k" before Mr beast made that video. People watch Mr beast because they want 20 minutes of whimsical predictably mind numbing colorful emotional fast paced distraction and Mr beast fills that need perfectly with videos of all kinds. He transports viewers to a fantasy land far beyond their real world, where boredom doesn't exist and crazy things are possible. No one knew they wanted an iPod until Steve jobs showed it to them; they just wanted a better CD player. Same thing with YouTube; people just show up and click on something the algorithm puts in their way, there isn't a demand for anything really. No one knew they wanted a Mr beast. The consumer demand is some combination of distraction, entertainment, or education, it's not much deeper than that.

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#268

Post by patcon »

ericmcer wrote: post #119
mhartz wrote: post #5

> The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account. Isn't this sort of one of the themes from The Prestige(2006)? That certain magicians were so dedicated to their craft that they became inseparable from it. The performance never actually stopped

They were dedicated to the craft though, there have been countless people who dedicated themselves to pushing the boundaries of their profession and lost their personal lives in the process. Losing yourself to achieve something new in math, art, science, etc. can be seen as a worthwhile sacrifice. Content creators feels more perverse because they are sacrificing themselves to making metrics go up. The act of creation…

I am very skeptic of the creator economy, but to play devils advocate:

Could it be that "craft" until now has been a high dimensional and abstract conceptual navigation exercise, for which some people had both (1) the compass of intuition and (2) the drive. Replacing craft with metrics means that people without the high dimensional intuition/compass (but with the drive) can still play a part in the game.

So maybe this is just another example of unbundling and specialisation process, that is democratising access to renown (or whatever the wealth of "renown" is, in the sense of network topology)

Of course, if the compass that is replaced with metrics is miscalibrated in the system, the end point can still be a very sick society (even if access to the renown in that sick society is more equitably distributed by some measures)

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#269

Post by jonlucc »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #222
lalalandland wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creators publication frequency is also an important factor. If you don't put out content at least once per week you fall off the recommended and lose a lot of views. Once your content is shallow, simple and without reflection, you are trapped in a hamster wheel of click bait vapidness.

Is this accurate in all cases? Isn't Jenny Nicholson one of the bigger YouTubers, with videos coming out maybe once or twice a year?

I know it's been a while, but I think Jenny Nicholson grew her audience with shorter content. I recall "script meeting" videos about a lot of movies as they came out, and those were shorter and more frequent. Now that she has a dedicated audience, she doesn't rely as much on the algorithm to surface her.

Re: In the belly of the MrBeast

#270

Post by jasonmarks_ »

spiderice wrote: post #260
jasonmarks_ wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the kids will take it at face value all the more reason to not tolerate massive deception. What if his teaching them fraudulent representation pays. All pro athletes cheat a little bit at the highest levels but exceptional cheating is never tolerated.

What evidence do you have of him cheating other than your feelings?

Go read "Spy the lie". Accumulation of discrepancies (His viewers don't watch other similar content?) indicates deceitful behavior.
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