Three Ivy League Students Fail to be Mr Beast

July 7, 2025

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This is a YouTube video with 80 views. An article on WeChat rolls out, advertising the video, filled with incomprehensible phrases like “contemporary art narrative”, “social installation art”, and “a revolt against youth identity, consumer anxiety, and academic burnout”. The Asian girl in the thumbnail dissociates into oblivion as her face gives up on moving a single muscle. The other girl makes the Mr Beast screaming face but with genuine fear in her eyes. Their hair all wet. They look like they want to kill themselves.

The article on WeChat introduce the two contestants. They study at Columbia University. The cameraperson studies at Yale. This is a Mr Beast video. They want to be Mr Beast.

Okay. I do not want to paint an overly negative picture here. They are trying to make a video, maybe trying to go viral. The WeChat article probably pitches the video to another audience that may prefer a different reading of the content, presumably someone who cares about which university they are studying at, or someone who would like to treat the video as a “social installation art”. There is some vague activism going on here, when the competition is described as “a form of capture, demonstration, and compromise of female bodies in urban spaces”, but as I said, not everything that sounds feminist is feminist. And no, this video is not at all similar to works by Santiago Sierra when he paid people to sit in cardboard boxes.

I do not want to say that making a fun, little, and (not yet) viral video is morally wrong, but I do want you to grasp what they are doing and what they would like to be doing. Why would three Ivy League students try (and fail) to be Mr Beast?

Mr Beast is not a particularly good person. Furthermore, there are certain things associated with him that do not carry nice connotations, like YouTube in general, the manosphere, and influencer bros. The only reason people want to be him is, perhaps, to be famous and be on Joe Rogan podcasts. Their video is not particularly bad or boring, but the thought process they represent troubles me. Some people think that they can be Mr Beast and use their word salad to pretend to be philosophy tube, maybe even be Jordan Peterson and use their word salad to pretend to be Judith Butler. This is horrible, horrible word sorcery. It is even more horrible that word salad gets easier and easier to pull out of thin air over time, thanks to the emergence of machines trained and specialized in salad-making that everyone is forced to used now. I fear that we get used to that someday in the future.

It is not just that Mr Beast is not a particularly good person. It is that Mr Beast represents mass-produced content-for-the-sake-of-content, and people try to be him. It is that Mr Beast represents spectacle that does not care about the spectacle-makers, and people try to be him. It is that Mr Beast pretends to be making a difference, being inspirational, and being educational, and people try to be him. It is that he is popular, and people try to be popular in the exact way he got popular.

So creators, go be your clean girl influencer, go be your sad beige tiktoker, be your internet atheist skeptic, be your true crime storytime fursona! Please, Be anyone you want to be!

Please, do not try to be Mr Beast.

This is a short-short article in a series of short-short opinion pieces. Ideas are of my own except when they are not.