“One of the reasons I make art is because it’s one of the more efficient ways to make a point,” says Morry Kolman, a New York-based artist whose recent video project Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts Of Money was created under the banner of the Bay Area-based “techno-optimist” organization Reboot. (In the interest of transparency, a short story of mine is featured in the group’s fifth issue of its magazine Kernel.)
“It’s easy to read words and understand them,” Kolman continues. “It’s completely different to experience a piece and really integrate that with the rest of your psyche.”
In the case of MBSILAOM, which screened at Gray Area on March 26, I’m not sure that I have integrated it with my psyche. The video is exactly what it sounds like: a compilation of clips of the massively popular Youtuber MrBeast saying dollar amounts, organized in ascending numerical order.
MrBeast is best known for toggling between acts of flamboyant philanthropy (like paying for cataract surgeries for 1,000 people) and acts of flagrant, excessive consumption (like eating a gold-leaf covered pizza valued at $70,000), and his videos have only grown more absurd and expensive over time. So Kolman’s hour-long piece feels both shamefully decadent and completely detached in its articulation of money as the structuring force of MrBeast’s output; its repetitive nature makes the concept of money itself feel alien.
When we spoke the day after the Gray Area event via Zoom, Kolman said that this was intentional.
“I knew it would have this effect of derealization,” he explains. “In the same way that you say any word over and over, it loses its meaning. So I knew it would have the effect of money losing its meaning.”
Watching the segment in which MrBeast repeats “$10,000” for minutes on end—his inflection stressing the same syllables in the same way, like a glitched-out game show host—certainly bore this out.
But Kolman wasn’t prepared for the video’s precise articulation of what money means in the MrBeast universe. “Money is a prop to him,” he says. “Having that repeated over and over takes away the value of it and bashes you over the head with, ‘This is just his tool to advance the plot.’ That was an emergent thing that I wasn’t really expecting.”
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While other participants who appeared in the clips would occasionally indicate their understanding of the value of the money on display—one person joking that the money she’s being offered still wouldn’t cover her college tuition, another’s voice dripping with disgust as he utters the phrase “$100,000 ice cream sundae”—MrBeast himself doesn’t reveal a relationship with money that feels grounded in any sort of reality. His mask of bland enthusiasm never slips.
In a making-of presentation before the screening, Kolman said that he’s held other screenings in New York prior to the one at Gray Area. I wondered if the process of making and viewing the video led him to any new observations or ideas about capitalism and the internet.
Rather than revealing new ideas, Kolman says it illuminated the thoughts he already had.
“There’s something off about the way that money interacts with attention online,” he elaborates. “Money is just being changed hands. That itself is alluring to the average viewer, and then they give the attention that can be turned into value for advertisers. I think it’s a laid-bare version of the attention economy content matrix.”
He links this kind of material with the commercial incentives powering Youtube itself: “In a platform where you are trying to get views, and Youtube is trying to maximize views [to] maximize money, what kind of content maximizes views? And either ironically or unsurprisingly, it is content about money.”
In this sense, MrBeast’s videos, and the relationship to money that they depict, could be seen as a symptom of the broader commercialization of the internet—or perhaps, its existence within an already commercialized world. The cost of living is higher than ever, with no relief in sight; MrBeast offers viewers the vicarious fantasy of having so much money that you can buy a new car for your loved ones and then spend twice that amount on gold leaf-covered junk food.
But as long as viewers tune in, that money continues to flow through him, not elsewhere; the fantasy remains vicarious. I ultimately found MBSILAOM sad for this reason. It articulates the problem in such a way that I wondered if there was any hope for the internet.
When I put this question to Kolman, though, he pushed back. “To think that there is no hope for the internet—what do you do with that?” he asked. “The internet is still going to be the way that millions of people [interact]. To think it’s a hopeless wasteland is admitting defeat.”
He connected the project to Reboot’s overall mission of “techno-optimism,” not through its specific argument, but through the formal structure it uses to present that argument: “I think it is constructive in the sense that it gives a different elucidation to an argument that seems to elude people, or a feeling that is hard to convey through words, by conveying it through video.”
I certainly can’t say that it was unsuccessful. MBSILAOM is numbing and nauseating, funny and stupid and depressing; it recreates and condenses the feeling of spending too much time online. From there, perhaps viewers can think about other possibilities. “I think there are plenty of ways to use the internet that are not as brainrot-y as this video in particular,” Kolman says. “Make the internet you want to see in the world.”
In case you missed it above, you can watch Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts Of Money on YouTube here.
