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MrBeast Does An International Incident
Plus YouTube tortures me with gaming videos
Gamer Countdown
I really want to play Baldur’s Gate 3. The PC version of it dropped the other week, but the Mac and PS5 versions won’t be out until September, and the timing on it coming to Xbox is just “this year.” I like playing games on my main laptop (the Macbook my old employer let me keep when they laid me off) or my Xbox. So I wait. Starfield, the new space opera RPG from Bethesda (maker of Fallout and Elder Scrolls), also comes out at the same time in September. So I wait. Wait and watch YouTube videos about character builds and lore details. Thanks to YouTube’s aggressive algorithm, after seeking out a couple of videos, ALL of my YouTube recommendations are about these two games. So I wait.
Is anyone else already playing or excited about Baldur’s Gate or Starfield?
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MrBeast Olympics
The internet’s most popular AI prototype, MrBeast, recently published a video titled “Every Country on Earth Fights for $250,000!” in which he has “one person from every country on Earth” compete in Squid-Games-looking obstacle courses. If you’ve ever taken an international affairs course (or lived with someone with a degree in it), you might see how this will be a problem. Turns out not everyone agrees on how many countries there are in the world. Or what their borders are. Or who gets to decide these things.
In addition to MrBeasts trademark way-too-much-teeth-video-thumbnail and why-are-we-shouting-intro, he also manages to wade into a surprising number of geopolitical conflicts with his choice of countries to include and depictions of their borders and flags. Taiwan isn’t included. Crimea is part of Russia. Canada owns parts of Norway. Palestine is included, but only the West Bank. The nation of Georgia is represented by the Georgia state flag (which is its own can of worms). Afghanistan is represented by the flag of the Taliban government, which is not officially recognized by the US. This is an incomplete list, by the way; I’m just recapping the highlights I’ve read about. The video is like shouting fire in a crowded freshman International Affairs 101 lecture hall.
There’s a cynical reading of this: that MrBeast, being a student of internet virality, intentionally included these controversial choices, knowing people would feel compelled to argue about them. I don’t not believe that this could be the case. I just find it equally plausible that a young independent media organization doesn’t have a mature legal or standards and practices department yet to catch these sorts of issues before they get released. Scaling a creative business is hard, and as popular as MrBeast has become, we’re seeing what those growing pains look like.
Take the legal issues between MrBeast and the company that runs his ghost kitchens. Expanding into the restaurant space sounds great, but needing to rely on a third-party vendor to execute everything seems to have made it difficult to maintain quality. Outside of MrBeastLand you see other creators struggling to scale. Look at everything happening with Linus Tech Tips right now or The Try Guys last year. Both cases of young media companies needing more robust ethics standards and HR functions to protect their employees and the businesses themselves.
Turning a passion project into a sustainable business is the dream of the creator economy, but creators often get very little advice or support with the business part of that equation. That means learning about the importance of fact-checkers, HR policies, or ethics guidelines the hard way sometimes.
While I get a certain amount of Schadenfreude from MrBeast’s stumbles (in part because of my own contrarian response to his popularity and in part because I’m tired of seeing so much of that man’s teeth), I do wish there were better social, cultural, and financial resources available to help artists become sustainable small businesses. Who knows what Jimmy Donaldson would have done with his video production talents if he didn’t need to focus so heavily on YouTube algorithmic virality to become financially successful that it transformed him into MrBeast. Who knows how many amazing artists you’d love you’ll never encounter because they’re not interested in platform optimization strategy?
Kinda Brief is also a creator economy passion project, and while I’m not trying to turn it into a full-time job/business, I would like for it to keep growing. You can help by sharing this post.
In Case Others Are Over Their X
The Verge published a useful article with info on different services that help you bulk delete Tweets. Also, I didn’t really have another place to put it, but Ronan Farrow’s latest piece on Elon Musk is worth checking out. He also did a good interview with Fresh Air this week about the piece/Elon.