Kjellberg likely does not want to bear such a burden who would? That should be a cause for concern, to say the very least.
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Sep 30, , pm EDT. Sep 26, , pm EDT. Sep 25, , pm EDT. Sep 24, , pm EDT. Sep 18, , pm EDT. Sep 15, , am EDT. They might have been trying to bait reporters into wrongly blaming PewDiePie for the killings.
Which would make those reporters look gullible and out of touch, thereby proving that PewDiePie was right about the media. They might have just been chaos-loving nihilists. A lot of internet culture exists in this frustrating quantum state — things are either total jokes or total nonjokes, depending on their context and your vantage point. People were accusing him of supporting white nationalism again, and he wanted to explain why they were mistaken.
I flew to Brighton, the seaside town in Britain where Kjellberg has lived since , and we met at an Airbnb near his house. He showed up a few minutes late, popping out his earbuds to greet me. In his YouTube videos, Kjellberg is a spring-loaded ball of manic energy — he screams, he curses, he cracks himself up.
But in person, he was withdrawn and polite, with the stiff body language of a job applicant. He seemed eager to make a good impression, or at least to appear nonthreatening. One crucial thing to understand about YouTube is that there are really two of them.
The first YouTube is the YouTube that everyone knows — the vast reference library filled with sports highlights, music videos and old Comedy Central roasts. It is a self-contained universe with its own values and customs, its own incentive structures and market dynamics and its own fully developed celebrity culture that includes gamers, beauty vloggers, musicians, D.
The biggest of these personalities have millions of subscribers and Oprah-level influence over their fandoms. Many Inner YouTubers never watch TV and develop elaborate parasocial bonds with their favorite creators. For people who frequent Inner YouTube — generally people under 25, along with some older people with abundant free time — the site is not just a video platform but a prism through which all culture and information is refracted. I started hanging out on Inner YouTube in earnest a few years ago, and its scale and insularity was jarring at first.
Imagine a genetic mutation that gave everyone born after the ability to see ultraviolet light. As an old person with normal eyes, you would experience this change as a kind of slow cognitive decline. Every day, as more and more of the world played out in UV, you would struggle to catch glimpses of it. When Kjellberg started his channel in , YouTube culture hardly existed. He was a year-old college student in Gothenburg, Sweden, who liked playing video games in his apartment.
In , he hit a million subscribers. To many Inner YouTubers, he represented the values of the platform — lo-fi, authentic, defiantly weird. Kjellberg unboxed it in his kitchen with his camera rolling and seemed genuinely moved. Years ago, YouTube embarked on a radical experiment in self-governance. In , the company vastly expanded the number of creators it allowed to make money from ads on their channels, provided they stayed within some loose boundaries of taste.
This made YouTube unique among social platforms, in that it was possible for popular creators to earn a full-time living directly from the platform. Then it stepped back, let the machines run and let a thousand media moguls bloom. His videos brought the company lucrative advertising revenue and a steady stream of loyal users at a time when it was fending off competition from Facebook, Netflix and other video platforms.
Gamers with David Duke vocabularies were everywhere, and a nascent group of right-wing reactionaries was beginning to learn that skewering political correctness was a ticket to YouTube virality. But so was a more garden-variety brand of shock humor, carefully calibrated to the sensibilities of teenage boys. Edgelords — people who post offensive things online for attention — had always existed on message boards like 4chan. But YouTube brought them out of the shadows and turned provocation into a viable career path.
And as all kinds of boundary-pushers raced to fill this void, it became harder to tell who had an actual ideology and who was just feeding the machines what they wanted. Kjellberg knew plenty of edgelords — he was a gamer, after all — but he never considered himself one of them. Sure, he cursed and shouted while playing video games, but that was normal behavior.
Of the hundreds of videos he posted every year, most were solidly PG Around , though, he began to take more risks. He continued playing video games, but he started experimenting.
He did viral challenges, made fun of other YouTubers and reviewed meme submissions from his fans. His video titles from that period sound like a jumbled set of X-rated refrigerator-poetry magnets:.
But Kjellberg did know where the limit was, because he had already started breaching it. In his February 16 response video , Kjellberg claimed to be unaware of the fact that he had been praised by neo-Nazi groups for months, and referred to his February 12 Tumblr post to serve as his response.
The YouTube platform plainly incentivizes such attention-grabbing behavior, right up until the point that it becomes a liability to its operators or their other partners — a familiar dilemma in the entertainment world, sure, but one that plays out quite differently on YouTube, which is considerably and deliberately less hands-on with its talent.
Despite numerous examples pointing to an unironic connection between Kjellberg and the beliefs of the alt-right, plenty of his followers have rushed to echo his defense of his humor as satirical. This Pewdiepie controversy just proves how overly sensitive people and the media are these days. Apparently satire is no longer allowed. And the fact that he was able to produce multiple videos that tiptoed this line despite having the largest subscriber base on YouTube illustrates just how effective it is as a tactic.
Open your eyes YouTube!! Even if Kjellberg sincerely rejects alt-right philosophy, his comedy aligns with actual alt-right propaganda.
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