Charity as content: Mr. Beast and the philanthropy-entertainment complex

To state the obvious, on YouTube views equal money. Since the financialization of the platform with advertisements around the late 2000s several genres or types of content have developed that successfully yielded a lot of cash for creators. Among the most depraved and sadistic of these is the philanthropy-entertainment complex, where YouTubers carefully stage a scene wherein they are framed as virtuous Saints helping out the poor and downtrodden, and soak up all the direct cash from the views alongside the much more lucrative cultural and social capital that emanates from it, in the form of personal PR for themselves and their brand which major corporations then jump on to be associated with so they can leech off it as well and get some of the “goodwill” (I much prefer social and cultural capital to “clout”, which is too vague and doesn’t clarify how exactly this is directly transferable to economic capital. For more on these concepts see this technical piece by the sociologist who coined them).

Mr. Beast has perfected this type of content, using it to establish an empire that is worth at least 50 to a 100 million dollars and is associated with prestige corporate brands like Disney. I critiqued him and this type of content in this thread which I recommend you read before continuing with this piece, and you can see how depraved it is by simply looking at Mr. Beast himself:

Yet still his cult fans and some self-proclaimed “leftists” defend this vile depraved sadistic scumbag who comes up with ever more elaborate ways to “experiment”—read torture—people for views, i.e. money. They are typically influenced by their own YouTube daddies that are desperate to ingratiate themselves to Mr. Beast so they can get some of his huge audience, as well as a liberal soc-dem worldview wherein philanthropy is exalted as a virtuous activity instead of what it really is, the primary means by which the ruling class undermines systemic solutions to the pathologies created by capitalism.

What are their arguments? Or to put it more precisely, what are the incoherent, shoddy, contradictory pseudo-arguments they mount to defend their deranged and depraved YouTube daddy? I will list them all and show how facile and pathetic these people are, and more importantly just how effective scumbags like Mr. Beast are in inoculating themselves from criticism merely by giving the thinnest, most superficial pretense of being virtuous and good people when they are in fact the opposite, purely because they have a huge audience and are successful and wield power. It is yet more proof of Marx’s point about the profoundly distorting effects of money. Let’s begin.

I’m sure the people in Mr. Beast’s videos are more than happy to take all that money instead of working a shitty 9 to 5 job for minimum wage. You’re denying their agency!!!!

Ah yes, it’s that concept of agency again, which I thoroughly destroyed in this and this piece, focusing on its use in the context of geopolitics. But I also mention the point about how it serves to obscure structural, systemic factors in how individuals make choices in society. People aren’t just purely free beings who have the entire range of options available to them as everyone else. That’s an absurd abstraction from the reality of how people really live in society, just as the notion of people as purely self-interested greedy calculation machines as I debunked in my last piece. No, people’s options are limited by their material and social being. Mr. Beast won’t lock himself up in a store with blacked out windows for weeks on end for 10K a day because he already has at least 50 million in the bank. He won’t undergo all the deranged shit he did for his real life Squid Games video for the cash prize because he already has that money. He has no reason to. But someone who is desperate and poor, or even just middle class but needs the money for covering healthcare or college costs is likely to consider doing those things, and the more desperate they are, the more extreme they are likely to go in terms of the actions they are willing to do for that money.

This is pure self-preservation, and that sentiment is an actually good and virtuous one, and it’s pretty much universally present. Take a parent whose child is dying from a disease that requires advanced medical care that they can’t afford, and they will do pretty much anything to get that money, which means getting that care for their child. Breaking Bad was based on this scenario.

There is nothing more perverse and depraved than taking advantage of this virtuous aspect of people for your own personal financial benefit, to get views from it because you know others will be likely to want to watch it and derive some sort of gratification from it because it’s such a universal sentiment. By turning it into a commodity, you instantly distort and pervert what is a virtue into a vice.

So the act of commodifying people’s desperation and need for resources is intrinsically unethical and depraved. Everyone knows this instinctively. Say you go to a homeless person on the street, and they are asking you for money to buy some food at the supermarket that’s right there on the corner. Instead of giving them that money, you say: “I will give it to you if I can film you, and you will thank me for it on camera, and then I will film you going into the store and buying the food and eating it, and then I’ll post it on my socials and use your face and name. Only if you agree to that will I give you the money.” Now of course the homeless person is very likely to agree to those terms. But who witnessing that will say that was a good thing to do? You have to have a profoundly warped sense of morals to see that as being perfectly fine and reasonable because hey, at least the homeless person got to eat that day.

No, it is bad, and the reason it’s bad is because you commodified the act of charity for your own explicit gain. Even from a utilitarian calculus perspective, which is deeply problematic especially as related to altruism as I detailed in this piece, you did not produce a net benefit for the world with your act because the homeless person ate a meal that day, because your act was done for your own benefit, and you helped create the conditions that undermines the act of selfless, disinterested charity, which is the basis of altruism and solidarity. The vast majority of people, as noted by Sam Bowles who has done extensive research on it in the clip I added to my human nature piece, do engage in these kinds of selfless altruistic acts in everyday life. They don’t commodify it for their personal gain. And when a YouTuber with tens of millions of subs and hundreds of millions of views per video promotes this kind of act, it contributes to eroding the bases of altruism and solidarity.

Now the most absurd part of that pseudo-argument in defense of Mr. Beast: People have shitty jobs, ergo Mr. Beast taking advantage of them by virtue of that is intrinsically good because they ended up financially benefiting from it. Congratulations, you just made an argument for slavery. In fact, you made the very argument for slavery that slave-owners themselves made at the time. Improvement in people’s living standards, whether it’s on a societal level or an individual one, does not justify infringing on their basic human dignity. Taking a person who works a 9 to 5 minimum wage job and giving them the option to become a slave while only having to work several hours a day and being able to live in a much improved house and with much better resources at their disposal does not make the enslavement good. Or to use a less extreme case in the context of online content, paying homeless people to fight each other on camera is not good because they ended up with a better financial situation afterwards. “Ah ok yes, but that causes physical harm, Mr. Beast doesn’t do that!” Ok how about paying homeless people to be locked in a room for two days? For one day? For 5 hours? How about paying them to run a mile. To run 100 meters even. No, it’s al grotesque, because you are using their desperation to make them do something for your own personal financial benefit and gratification.

What adds an additional layer of depravity to it is that you then package and sell it as an act of purely disinterested charity and altruism, when it is the exact opposite of that.

Let’s move on the next pseudo-argument I’ve seen from Mr. Beast cult freaks:

So you’re saying all charity is intrinsically bad and only the state should do it?

Ideally the state would ensure that the material conditions of everyone is such that they are not subject to precarity, desperation and exploitation, and as I have detailed in a prior piece, the aim of socialism is to get ever close to this ideal. But if you read my prior answer, my position isn’t that all acts of altruism are intrinsically bad. In fact the opposite, I have noted in the human nature piece that I linked earlier that altruism is the norm in society, and the ideal is to expand that from the private family sphere to the public societal sphere. The point is that Mr. Beast and the charity-as-entertainment complex is intrinsically corrosive to those ends and undermines it, rather than helping cultivate and expand it.

This is why I noted in the thread on Mr. Beast that if he actually genuinely cared about these various issues that he has devoted videos on, he wouldn’t just commodify it for content, he would actively work against the commodifying tendency by highlighting the essential importance of systemic changes to address these pathologies of capitalism on a mass scale. I don’t expect him to be a Marxist, though ideally he would be, but he won’t even do the milquetoast soc dem AOC-Bernie version of raising awareness of the fundamentally systemic nature of these pathologies and how to address them.

By not including that as a core part of his content, only the commodifying aspect of it remains in place, and that promotes the mythology that undermines any kind of politics that seeks to genuinely address these issues, instead promoting the neoliberal capitalist myth of philanthropy as the solution.

If only we had more Mr. Beast’s, we would have resolved the problem of treatable blindness already. Look, he did it for 1000 people for this video! Let’s make thousands of more Mr. Beasts! Ignore the fact that Cuba and Venezuela, with their scarce resources comparative to nations like the US, have already treated over 4 million of the world’s poorest people and recovered their eyesight. Action by states, by universal healthcare systems, by the collective organized efforts of millions of people, from the medical staff down to the average workers who pay taxes, have accomplished that feat, and they and only they have the ability to fundamentally address it so that we no longer need a deranged and depraved YouTuber to do it for 1000 people so he can get views and accrue the economic, social and cultural capital from it.

The fact that Mr. Beast is totally uninterested in any realistic, viable project to actually address any of these issues he makes these videos about is proof that he doesn’t actually care about them, and that it’s purely a grift.

Instead of helping him deflect criticism by deploying the most pathetic kind of pseudo-progressive rhetoric like “Omg you’re so privileged for daring criticize the YouTube God for giving money to desperate and poor people” (one deranged cult fan of his literally replied that to me), if you actually care about these issues you would do what I am doing, and criticize and expose him for his commodification of altruism and point out how corrosive and depraved it is, and show what he could do otherwise, to counteract that aspect of his output. But you don’t do that, because you’re a pathetic cultist who is drawn to money and fame like a moth to a flame. You want to nibble on a bit of his social and cultural capital as well. You want him to throw you a crumb too. “I’m the radical leftist libertarian socialist YouTuber who defended Mr. Beast, please come to me, I allow you to push away those icky feelings you have when you watch one of his videos, now also watch mine and throw in some cash via the super chats and also btw I have a patreon if you haven’t noticed.”

You are a scumbag of the same order as he is. And I have no interest in indulging any of it. Go cry about it.

A final response, the most pathetic, that I have received from the cult fans:

Show me what good you have done in the world like my YouTube daddy Mr. Beast has?

You unbelievable buffoon, this would be a performative contradiction. I just made an elaborate case for why commodifying altruism is inherently depraved and corrosive to the act itself, I can’t then turn around and do that myself to prove that I am a good person to some random deranged cult fan of a YouTuber who has at least 50 million dollars in the bank.

Even if I did, that has no bearing at all on the argument. If I have never done any altruistic act in my entire life, it would not make the commodification of altruism for content so as to profit off it and thereby corroding it automatically good and virtuous. Either these are actually 12 year olds who just love to watch their fav YouTube daddy do epic based “experiments” torturing people and will grasp at any straw to make themselves feel good about it—in which case it is understandable given their age—or they’re genuinely deranged adults of the kind I described above.

Addendum:

I saw this in my replies and think it is very interesting and illustrative of the point I made about our basic moral intuitions regarding altruism, and how commodifying it intrinsically nullifies it and turns it into its opposite, from a supreme virtue into a vice. This is a basic moral principle contained in Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and I’m sure other religious traditions as well. From the philosophical perspective of normative ethics, all the major schools, from virtue ethics to deontology and utilitarianism, yield the same principle. And yet still people defend it as a virtue when their fav content creator does it. Again, this is the distortive power of money, and Marx put it beautifully:

Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.

He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.

Note how Marx concludes with virtues only being definable and practicable as such in the absence of commodification, that is, in the absence of the distorting power of money. That is the ideal we all should strive toward, and the philanthropy-as-entertainment complex as represented by Mr. Beast actively works against it and therefore must be exposed, critiqued and dismantled.