Spooking The Beast
MrBeast spent his teenage years figuring out the master formula for algorithmic attention extraction and commodification in this age we might as well call goldfish swimming in a digital idiocracy bowl.
This won’t be another tired moan about a guy who uses his money to do good things, and films it, so he can make more money in order to give more of it away, even if his videos of hyper cuts for ADHD sufferers induce greater ADHD and are all about worshipping material things and money, and all the trappings of being a half-witted consooomer in a late stage empire.
We don’t have time to waste on anything like that.
Besides, Jimmy seems like a good kid.
He cracked the code.
The game show-ification of pranks with strangers who express their eternal gratitude for Jimmy’s generosity.
He’s generous for sure. So were Bob Barker’s bosses at CBS, but games shows are so 1970s.
Jimmy took The Price Is Right, and inseminated it with Fear Factor and Jackass, except he took out the edge, the risk, and even any effort.
Random strangers win money and things while cameras are rolling.
It makes him feel good to see others feel gratitude. People like watching it.
Good on him.
Human behavior is a peculiar thing in late-stage collapsing empires, where medical bills can bankrupt 70% of the empire’s debt slaves overnight, and where there are certain incomparable excesses to any other period in human history that need wasting: time, attention, and funny money backed by nothing.
That’s actually a lie. So was that! There were really two lies before.
There are no excesses of time, only choices on how to occasion its passing.
There are no excesses of attention, only choices on where to focus it.
The economy of attention is not the same thing as the attention economy but people just don’t have the time to pay attention to any of that.
They hardly know why they pay attention to what they do.
They rarely stop and ask.
They don’t seem to place much value on time anymore.
Perhaps they never did.
Rome never had algorithmic curation, dancing nurses during a fake pandemic, or nanographene-laced injectables to turn newly arrived slaves from Gaul into shackled transmitters and receivers if not victims of SADS.
But Rome did have the philosopher Seneca, one of th
Article from LewRockwell
