They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube and reported the following:
On page 99 of The Influencer Factory we see a screenshot from MrBeast’s popular video “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!” We describe how this video cost more, minute-to-minute, than the actual Netflix show it recreates. MrBeast’s videos, and their ever-increasing scale and cost, we argue, “almost seem to enact a contemporary form of potlatch,” a competitive system of giving and waste described by the Anthropologist Marcel Mauss. Potlatch, for Mauss, was a kind of mutual squandering of resources between equals. What differentiates MrBeast’s spectacular giving is that he mostly seems to be competing with himself. MrBeast’s stunts grow larger and larger while the cash squandered must perpetually increase—pressure that comes from his need to attract and maintain his massive global audience.Visit Grant Bollmer's website and Katherine Guinness's website.
Page 99 gives the reader a good sense of The Influencer Factory as a whole. The theme of waste and excess is central to many of our arguments about the “elite” influencers we discuss in the book—not only MrBeast, who is mentioned throughout, but people like Jeffree Star and Emma Chamberlain, both of whom regularly engage in feats of wasteful spending and other excessive stunts. This page also provides a good sense of the approach we take in our book. We look closely at the content of specific videos made by these influencers, branching out into an analysis of their backgrounds, their production, their broader historical and conceptual contexts. In doing so, The Influencer Factory reframes how we understand YouTube, capital, and the class politics of influencer culture. The specific image on page 99 is captioned “I could remake this.” This is also a theme that follows many of the other image captions in the book, many of which also begin “I could,” examining some of the aspirational forms of wastage that can be seen in many influencer videos. Waste gets attention, and foregrounding waste reveals a different way of understanding luxury and excess, in which the literal production of trash can be understood as a performance of class mobility.
MrBeast’s excessive spending, we argue elsewhere in The Influencer Factory, points towards a context in which individual human beings and vertically integrated conglomerations converge. Each MrBeast video is also an advertisement for some other industry into which MrBeast has some ownership stake—chocolate bars, apps, a burger chain. The individual person that is MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is indistinguishable from the corporate enterprise that is MrBeast. We term this moment the Corpocene, a moment in which individual body and corporate body converge, in which individuals like MrBeast become images of “success” to be emulated by countless others who are seeking to make it as an influencer or content creator. Influencer culture, we ultimately conclude, represents a point in time in which one desires to become capital personified—a kind of individual represented by MrBeast—and how class mobility on YouTube should be understood as motivated by a desire to literally become capital, to transform oneself into a vertically integrated corporation.
--Marshal Zeringue
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