The Britain's Got Talent act with most viewed audition ever and he reached number 2 on the charts
The Britain's Got Talent act with most viewed audition ever and he reached number 2 on the charts
His performance even earned him a golden buzzer from hard-to-please judge Simon Cowell
You may not know that Calum Scott once competed in Britain's Got Talent.
He amassed a massive 399 million views on YouTube on his first BGT audition, and since then things have only gone up for Calum Scott. I know what you are thinking, 'I know that name' and 'doesn't he sing that really famous song'.
If you're thinking of Dancing on My Own, you are right he did cover that song on the talent competition in 2015. Most people wouldn't know that Callum Scott who covered Robyn's critically acclaimed song actually rose to fame singing on BGT.
His performance even earned him a golden buzzer from hard-to-please judge Simon Cowell. For the latest TV and showbiz gossip sign up to our newsletter .
The singer walked on stage after his sister, Jade auditioned and failed to progress to the next stage of the competition. The 26-year-old then sang a slowed down version of the club classic which left the audience crying, before Simon showered the stage in gold confetti.
Simon then said: "I've never, ever, in all the years I've done this show, heard a guy with the talent you've got. Seriously... the version was sensational and that shows to me that actually, you're more than a singer, you're an artist, and that's why you got that (the buzzer)."
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Despite finishing in sixth in the competition to dog tricks duo Jules O'Dwyer & Matisse, this didn't hurt Calum's singing career. After the show, he released his own version of Robyn's hit song and sky rocketed to number two on the UK Singles Chart and became Britain's best-selling single of summer 2016.
He then release his 2018 debut album Only Human, which reached number 4 on the UK Albums Chart. The album featured the single, You Are The Reaso, which has seen over a billion times on YouTube.
Since then, the singer has not only done his own solo tours, but supported acts like Pentatonix, Jason Derulo, The Script, Ed Sheeran and more recently Take That.
More recently, at the beginning of May Calum performed at the BBC event which celebrated VE Day 80 which marked eight decades since 'Victory in Europe Day' with music and memories.
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He was also recently invited as a guest speaker at Buckingham palace, by Prince Edward to celebrate young people who achieved their Gold Duke of Edinburgh awards.
Now, the singer has over 1.4 million followers on Instagram and is releasing a new album this year, titled Avenoir, on September 12. He will then be embarking on his fourth world tour starting in Portugal in October, before performing in Manchester and London in November.
He said that he was, "Blown away by how many tickets have sold for the Avenoir tour!!", after adding more dates to the tour.
Calum added: "Mental!! I cant wait to share these shows with you all, it's going to be the best tour yet!! See you there! X"
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One fan shared their excitement for the tour, saying: "Looking very much forward to hear you live for the first time."
Another added: "SOOOO proud of you!! can't wait to experience 'The Avenoir Tour' it's gonna be so magical!!! i'm so excited"
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Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It's close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast's videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don't have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous. That number is the number of people who have made the volitional move of clicking that subscribe button, to ensure that they will a) not miss his latest videos and b) can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more-or-less guaranteed audience. One last fact, before we move away from numbers and into more nebulous modes of consideration: his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m (£3.7m), the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. Jimmy Donaldson, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, is an incredibly big deal. And that's without even getting into his various subsidiary business interests – the mobile gaming company, the Feastables confectionery brand, the widely derided Lunchly range of ready-made kids' lunches, the MrBeast Burger fast food delivery concern, the cryptocurrency schemes, the financial services, the accredited university courses on YouTube content creation, the streaming TV network, and the various philanthropic operations that bear his imprimatur. A couple of weeks ago, I had a drink with a friend who'd just got back from Alexandria, where he'd gone to get a complicated root canal situation seen to, at presumably a fraction of what it would have cost him at home. I mentioned I was writing about MrBeast, and my friend – whose dental status has since improved – told me he'd heard from a number of Egyptians that the country's tourist trade was currently experiencing a significant upswing, and that that upswing could be accounted for by the release, a few months back, of I Spent 100 Hours Inside the Pyramids! (194m views thus far), in which Donaldson and his boys were granted unprecedented access to the deep interiors of the pyramids of Giza. One obvious question to ask about all of this is why? Another, less obvious, question is: what does his success say about the culture that gave rise to it? The first question is, in a sense, a fairly straightforward one to answer. MrBeast is successful because his videos are highly entertaining. I can personally vouch for this. I don't imagine, being in my mid-40s (among other limiting demographic and cultural factors), that I'm anywhere close to the MrBeast target viewership, and yet I have consumed more than my fair share of his content, and have been steadily and straightforwardly entertained. Troubled by the general tenor and implications of that state of being entertained, yes, but entertained nonetheless. Donaldson is not by any means one of God's chosen entertainment-industry stars. He's not especially handsome, and neither is he particularly funny-looking. At 6ft 5in, and with the sparse reddish beard he nowadays sports, he has the charmingly awkward aspect of a teen who has recently put on a growth spurt and hasn't quite settled into himself. He's likable, and is possessed of a goofy and anarchic sense of humour, but more in a guy-you-went-to-school-with sense than, say, the Eric André or the Jack Black sense. You definitely wouldn't call him cool, either, and he's certainly not edgy, but neither is he staid or offensively corny. My wife – who has, in passing, taken in a fair measure of MrBeast content over the time I have been working on this essay, consuming them in a manner roughly analogous to passive smoking – described Donaldson and his crew of sidekicks thus: 'They just seem like good kids.' A good deal of his success stems from his ability to balance this quality with the obsessive grandeur of his schemes. He is, simultaneously, a gifted algorithm-charmer, possessed of arcane knowledge as to attention and engagement, and a guy who is just hanging out, amusing himself and his friends (and his hundreds of millions of viewers). His most effective videos exhibit a fanatical clarity of purpose, as though he had taken the form of the YouTube video and squeezed it for its essential oil of entertainment, discarding as so much useless husk everything that cannot immediately be rendered down into pure content. Take, for instance, a recent video called I Survived the 5 Deadliest Places on Earth, in which Donaldson visits – and, self-evidently, survives – the five so-called deadliest places on Earth. (I say so-called here because Donaldson does not visit, say, the Palestinian city of Khan Younis, or the Darfur region of Sudan; it's more that he performs really dangerous actions in an attention-grabbing manner and setting.) Over the course of the video's 13 minutes, we see Donaldson and his team of sidekicks 1) walking around Snake Island, off the coast of Brazil, which is infamous for its teeming population of venomous snakes; 2) scaling a sheer cliff wall of ice; 3) driving a terrifying Bolivian mountain pass known as 'the Death Road'; 4) swimming with sharks; and 5) spending the night in the middle of an African savannah in a cage surrounded by fresh meat for the specific purpose of attracting hungry predators. It's probably worth restating here that this video's duration is 13 minutes. Now, that may seem like a near-eternity in the era of TikTok and YouTube shorts, but we're talking about a video with five distinct narratives, across four different continents. Five different situations the viewer has to understand and get invested in; five different scenarios to start getting entertained by and, crucially, stay entertained by. Needless to say, this does not leave a lot of time for old-timey narrative conventions such as establishing a context, or making the viewer understand or care about why any of this is happening in the first place. It just is happening. That's the thing with MrBeast: everything that happens is always just happening, and if you want a reason for it, it's no more or less than the fact that you yourself are watching. And this is the case with pretty much everything Donaldson does. To watch his videos is to feel your prefrontal cortex practically vibrate, like a fulfilment hub under the extreme pressure of market demand. He is, and always has been, monomaniacally committed to a lethally pure conception of algorithmically determined entertainment. I don't intend to make a case here that you should start appreciatively watching Donaldson's videos. I don't intend to make a case for MrBeast as art – although I reserve the right to talk about it as though it were. I'm not even going to try to convince you that these videos are even necessarily good, whatever that might mean. But I do feel quite strongly that Donaldson is some type of genius – a prodigy of a form that, as degraded as it is, deserves to be taken seriously as one of the signature artefacts of our time. Who is he, then, this figure of bottomless frivolity and maximal impact, this Mozart of the attention economy? Where did he come from, and how was he made? There are biographical particulars that might be brought to bear here, certainly. Child of divorce. Both parents in the military. Money problems. Single mom. There was much moving around after the divorce, owing to his mother's military career, and the family eventually settled in Greenville, North Carolina, where he went to a strict evangelical Christian private school. Between one thing and another – introverted child, Crohn's disease – he spent a lot of time off school, watching YouTube in his room. He was, and I mean this with no disrespect to Sue Parisher, who obviously had a lot going on, raised by the YouTube algorithm. Donaldson's earliest videos are still online, on his channel. His first ever upload, from February 2012, is basically just him playing Minecraft and chattering happily into a mic about the game. His voice hasn't broken, because he's only 13, and he has yet to develop his geeky carnival-barker approach to narration, but it's recognisably Donaldson. It's basically all Minecraft for the first two years or so, though there are a handful of videos – How Much Money Does PewDiePie Make?????, How Much Money Does Captain Sparkles Make????? – that indicate a precocious interest in the monetizability of YouTube content. In a 2013 video, entitled How Much Money Do I Make?????, he revealed that the figure was at that point about $30 a month. Well before he himself was making any money, and well before he established money as both a presiding subject and a central medium of his work, it was already a preoccupation. In 2017, after five years of YouTube obscurity, he had his first viral hit, a video which now seems, weirdly, both completely at odds with the thrust of his subsequent career, and to contain many of its core themes. It's called I Counted to 100,000!, and it's exactly that: a livestreamed ordeal, lasting about 40 hours, in which the young Donaldson sits in his gaming chair, stares into his crappy webcam, and counts from 1 to 100,000. It clearly struck a chord with viewers, even if very few of them made it more than a few minutes in. Its stupidity and pointlessness was – and this, I would argue, is a hallmark of the Beast oeuvre – of such a scale, and pursued with such obsessive doggedness, that you couldn't help but be impressed. It is, of course, very little fun to watch, even in small doses. Literally nothing happens, apart from Donaldson counting to 100,000. In this sense, it is nothing like his later videos, defined as they are by a near-demented commitment to maximum viewer-stimulation. But it centres around a punishing endurance challenge undertaken for the purpose of amassing clicks – a central idea he has pushed to further extremes, and pumped with increasingly massive amounts of cash, throughout his career. Within a couple of days, the video was racking up tens of thousands of views. His channel began to grow pretty steeply from that point, building on the counting video's success. He did one where he watched the video for fellow YouTuber Jake Paul's truly execrable rap song It's Everyday Bro for 10 straight hours. One where he spent 24 hours immersed up to his armpits in slime. One where he put a bunch of people in a circle and awarded $10,000 to the last person to leave. One where he bought every item in a supermarket. As Donaldson's content grew more popular, he began to attract more and more lucrative sponsorship deals. Early sponsors included Quidd – a now defunct app for collecting 'digital brand stickers' – Electronic Arts and Xbox. His content began to visibly improve around 2019; the videos had higher production values, and multi-camera setups – clearly the result of an expanding operation, and a creator who was acquiring skills and resources. His stunts got notably more costly, though by no means less stupid (see, for instance, the awe-inspiringly dumb I Filled My Brother's House With Slime & Bought Him a New One, in which Donaldson fills his brother's house with slime and buys him a new one), and he began to give away ever larger sums of money. By 2021, according to Forbes, he was YouTube's highest earner, bringing in an estimated $54m that year. Some of MrBeast's most successful videos feature Donaldson himself – presumably because they involve situations that would invite legal and/or moral catastrophe if the video involved anyone else. There's one where he spends 50 hours in solitary confinement. (It's called, as you might well have guessed, I Spent 50 Hours in Solitary Confinement.) There's one where he is buried alive, also for 50 hours. (I'm not even checking here, and I can basically guarantee you that it's called I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive.) Then there's a whole other category of endurance challenge videos that involve other people, and in almost all cases these involve the awarding of truly prodigious amounts of money. There's one where contestants compete to win a year, rent free, in a luxury home, by seeing who can keep their hand on the luxury home for the longest, enduring ever more fiendish mental and physical challenges in order to do so. And then there's $10,000 Every Day You Survive in a Grocery Store. If you want to get a sense of what MrBeast is all about – of the sheer scale, and the joyful stupidity, of his whole project – this is a good one to watch. The setup is basically as follows: Donaldson buys an entire Safeway supermarket, one of those grandly comprehensive US establishments that sells everything from inflatable swimming pools to home entertainment systems. He then gives a young man named Alex – introduced as 'this random guy' – 10 grand for every day he spends living in the store, wheeling in a grocery cart full of cash and presenting it to him as long as he doesn't set foot outside the door. The video, like a surprising amount of MrBeast's work, amounts to a kind of postmodernist recreation of Robinson Crusoe. Alex, this random-guy subject of terminal-stage US capitalism, is stranded in a supermarket where all of his basic needs, and no small number of less basic ones, are catered for by the contents of the shelves. His one obligation is that, every day, he must gather $10,000 worth of items from the store – stuff he doesn't need: electronics, nappies, pet food and so forth – and exchange them for the cash. This is both an acute pain in the ass, and the one thing that prevents him from going insane with boredom. He builds a sort of ad hoc dwelling for himself in a corner of the store dedicated to camping supplies, using shelving units as walls, and packages of kitchen roll as a mattress. He finds a large inflatable garden pool in storage, rigs up a hose, fills it with water over a couple of days. But there are deepening extremes of experience to be contended with: boredom, isolation, sadness and guilt about being away from his family. The real turning point comes when Alex accidentally lances the inflatable garden pool with a forklift he's using to gather his daily $10k-worth of exchange items, and floods the entire supermarket with water, which he must then spend his days splashing about in. Eventually, he seems to barely care about the money at all; he seems, by the end, almost to resent it. The video's most interesting moment is one that's given barely any space to breathe. (Nothing, in MrBeast, is ever given space to breathe, because breathing is boring.) It's Alex, 44 days in, half-mad with loneliness and surrounded by the drenched detritus of consumerism, greeting the arrival of his daily 10 grand in a shopping cart – this time piloted into the store not by Donaldson or one of his sidemen, but by a remote-controlled robot – with a dejected 'thanks for the money'. Thanks for the money. A person with a different, less algorithmically determined sensibility might have made of that moment something more central. I kept having some version of this thought, watching MrBeast videos: that their animating ideas, and the content generated by them, could easily provide the material for works of conceptual art. There's a moment, for instance, in the competition show Beast Games that struck me as something close to avant garde. Donaldson lays out a million dollars in cash in a big pile, and instructs each of the 10 remaining contestants to come out of their little houses one by one, and to choose how much money they want to take from the pile. If every player takes $100,000, they all get an equal amount of the money. The first player does exactly this. The second player deviates (though not dramatically) by taking $223,000. The third player, a middle-aged guy named JC, is a whole other story. Despite having established himself as a pretty standup fellow, just seeing that much money piled up in front of him and there for the literal taking makes JC realise that he could pay off all his debt, and significantly improve his children's lives. He decides to take precisely $650,000 – basically the entire pile, aside from the $27,000 pittance he elects to leave for the next contestant. He's not a straightforward villain, though, and the apparent contradiction of his total resolution and his convulsed conscience makes for compelling, and in fact powerfully weird, viewing. The moment I'm primarily thinking of here is the image of JC, sitting on his prison-like bed in his house (really just a bare cell) surrounded by bags of cash cartoonishly bursting with bills, and looking like a man whose life has been destroyed by some unseen demonic force – as perhaps, in a manner of speaking, it has. And that's a thing that is rarely said about Donaldson's whole project. This is a guy who grew up immersed in both evangelical protestantism and the YouTube clickbait economy, and whose earthly works have about them some strange, and I am guessing unconscious, quality of the theological. A man weeping in moral torment over bags of money; another so bored, depressed and isolated that he can barely raise his eyes to yet another shopping cart full of cash. These are the products of what I have come to think of as Donaldson in full Mephistopheles mode. 'Look what these creatures of flesh and blood will do for cash,' he seems constantly on the verge of intoning, as he observes his subjects like so many mazed rats. In the opening episode of Beast Games, Donaldson stands on a tower overlooking the purpose-built Beast City, and watches hundreds of contestants below as they stream into the little world of his creation. They look 'literally like ants', he observes with a kind of childlike glee. And what are we, his viewers, if not ants ourselves, our swarming densities governed by unseen algorithms? That childlike aspect of Donaldson's whole operation turns out to be central. It is simultaneously the thing that makes him most unsettling, and the thing that makes him sort of impossible to dislike. When I say that I think he is some kind of genius, I'm partly talking about this quality of childishness to his work. I'm thinking, that is, of something Baudelaire once wrote: that 'genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will – a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood's capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated'. Donaldson – who is still, let's remember, only 27 years old – has become upsettingly rich and successful by doing this one particular thing that he started doing at the age of 13. He started making YouTube videos as a little boy, and he never wanted to do anything else. 'When I was 11,' as he put it during a recent interview, 'I just said, 'I'm going to be a YouTuber or I'm going to die trying.'' In the years since, he has done nothing but pursue that 11-year-old's dream, with insanely lucrative results. His entire career – by which I mean not just the YouTube videos and TV shows, but also the chocolate bars and the energy drinks and the hamburgers and the ready-made kids' lunches and even the philanthropic endeavours – amounts to an integrated multi-platform work of content, a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk as conceived by a preteen boy. Just as to count to 100,000 is to pursue a supremely childish impulse with a demented determination, the more elaborately and expensively produced content Donaldson has made in recent years arises out of a similarly childish curiosity. What would it be like to be buried alive? How weird would it be to eat the world's largest pizza slice? What would happen if you put a Lamborghini in a gigantic hydraulic press? Would you sit in a bathtub full of snakes if I gave your mom $10,000? What if I filled my brother's house with slime? What if I got a cereal bowl the size of a Jacuzzi and filled it with Fruit Loops and milk? Would you rather be trapped in the world's coldest room or the world's hottest room? If you have ever spent any time in the company of an 11-year-old boy, you will recognise the cast of mind that continually throws up such questions. At the level of form, he is no great innovator: he simply understands what works, and repeats it more and more successfully and expensively. Beast Games, for instance, is a revisiting of, and expansion of, his wildly successful video $456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!, which is itself so thoroughly 'inspired' by the wildly successful Korean Netflix show of that title as to flirt with copyright infringement. Squid Game itself is hardly original, drawing heavily as it does on Battle Royale and The Hunger Games. And all of the above, of course, are outcroppings of reality TV, perhaps the most significant mass-entertainment form of the last 30 years, a form that birthed not just YouTubers like MrBeast, but also the US president and therefore, arguably, the present global political order. Last year, a 36-page onboarding document entitled How to Succeed at MrBeast Production was leaked by one of the company's employees, who now number in the hundreds, and who are mostly based in its 63,000 sq ft HQ in Greenville, NC. The document is written in the sloppily demotic mode of the videos' narration, and is clearly the work of Donaldson himself. He is keen to get across that virality is not some freak occurrence, but a craft that can be mastered, and taught. 'I spent five years of my life locked in a room studying virality on YouTube,' he writes. 'And the result of those probably 20,000 to 30,000 hours of studying is I'd say I have a good grasp on what makes YouTube videos do well.' Which is not to say that the MrBeast formula is easy to replicate. There are numerous off-brand MrBeasts out there on YouTube. You've got the Dangie Bros, Matthew Beem, the Stokes Twins, Eric 'Airrack' Decker, and Morgan 'Morgs' Hudson, along with countless purveyors of the sort of elaborate and expensive stunts – turning houses into fish tanks, building theme parks inside houses, and so on and so forth – known in the biz as 'junklord' content. But they all conspicuously lack both Donaldson's peculiar charm and his intricate mastery of form. When you watch a MrBeast video, you are watching the result of a deep and meticulous engagement with YouTube's audience-retention data. 'The cool thing about YouTube,' as Donaldson writes in the memo, 'is they give us super-detailed graphs for every video that show the exact second we lose a viewer.' The first minute is typically where the majority of viewer loss happens, and this is why, in the opening seconds of a MrBeast video, you feel as though someone has filled your skull with popping candy and is beating you about the head and face with a foam bat. The first minute, in other words, is all about hype, the point of which is to ensure that the viewer makes it through that statistically perilous stretch of the clip. There are no slow builds. Everything you see in a MrBeast video is about preventing you from clicking away. His work reflects and intensifies what the internet has done to culture more generally, and to our brains. If boredom, as Walter Benjamin wrote, is 'the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience' – if boredom is a crucial spur to activity, to the capacity to surprise oneself with one's thoughts and impulses – then one consequence of the last decade or so of technological and cultural change has been the total destruction of that dream bird's natural habitat, cleared for the strip-mining of the dopamine that drives the attention economy. Donaldson's forays into philanthropy – or philanthropy-themed YouTube content – have, in recent years, caused sporadic outbreaks of public controversy. The earliest of these was called Giving a Random Homeless Man $10,000: a simple video, featuring none of the hallmark hyperactive editing or blaring narration. Donaldson just walks up to a homeless man in Greenville, and gives him an envelope containing $10,000. The video was not a massive success by MrBeast standards, but it got a strong enough positive reaction to suggest that using the channel's earnings to give away large sums of money was a way of both doing something positive and producing more – and more lucrative – content. There followed a series of videos in which Donaldson enacted vaguely absurdist forms of philanthropy – picking up an Uber customer in a brand new Lamborghini, say, and then just giving it to him. Despite the slightly troubling way in which they made a spectacle of entirely arbitrary largesse – of Donaldson himself as part gameshow host, part trickster god, indulging in a little light wealth redistribution for the folks at home – the videos were hard to dislike. They were hard to dislike for the same reason Donaldson himself is hard to dislike: they were driven by a childlike, ungainly benevolence. In 2023, this run of philanthropic content culminated in a video entitled 1,000 Blind People See for the First Time, in which Donaldson paid for 1,000 people to be given a very straightforward medical treatment curing them of severe visual impairment. The video wasn't controversial because Donaldson paid no attention to the structural injustice of these people not having been provided with this basic procedure by their government (the video makes clear that blind people from all over the world were cured, though it focuses pretty much exclusively on Americans). The controversy centred almost entirely around the way in which the curing of 1,000 blind people was approached as raw material for light entertainment. The thing I personally find most troubling about the video is the jarring opposition of its style and content. The whole thing is characterised by a manic, attention-hustling showmanship, and a refusal to grant viewers a moment's respite in which we might contemplate the experience of the cured or the wider social implications. As with something like I Survived the 5 Deadliest Places on Earth, it bypasses any kind of narrative setup and goes straight for the emotional payoff. We learn almost nothing about any of the people whose blindness is cured, other than that they once were blind but now they see. We can be confident that they are poor – why else would their condition have remained untreated? – but we are left to intuit this. In most cases, we are not even given their names. Of course, there are only so many formerly blind people you can watch being given the gift of sight before it starts getting a little samey. But Donaldson has, of course, anticipated this problem, and the video keeps your dopamine transmitters operating at full capacity. Moments after the bandages have been removed from one woman's face, the first sight she is met with is Donaldson standing before her in surgical scrubs, presenting her with an open briefcase containing $10,000. Another patient, who we learn had to leave his job as a cashier because he couldn't see the money he was handling, has his bandages removed, and is told to read an eye chart; it says 'YOU JUST WON $10,000'. At the bottom of the screen, there is a counter that flips upward with the rising number of cured. It is, essentially, a score counter, as though Donaldson were keeping track of the points he's racking up in a video game. And this seems to me to gesture towards what is troubling about the 1,000 Blind People video in particular, and Donaldson's project more generally: the way in which his content treats people – contestants in his competitions, beneficiaries of his philanthropy – as mere elements in a larger game he is playing, the object of which is maximum viewer-stimulation, maximum attention, maximum numbers. 'At their core, the premise of most MrBeast videos is that numbers with lots of zeros are impressive,' as the US writer Max Read put it in an excellent essay exploring the controversy around the blindness video. 'One blind person seeing for the first time isn't cool. You know what's cool? One thousand blind people seeing for the first time.' Donaldson's acts of charity are bestowed, randomly, upon people who are themselves explicitly presented as 'random'; their lurid arbitrariness illuminates the arbitrariness of charity per se. (Just £1 could cure this child of this condition; but why this child, in this place, and why this condition?) As far as he's come from posting Minecraft playthroughs, consuming his work still feels, in some sense, like watching a guy play video games. Even the videos in which he himself is not a central protagonist, where huge numbers of people compete against each other for even huger amounts of money, it's as though Donaldson is designing and playing some kind of strategy game. He constructs a world, and a set of rules to govern it; he populates it with semi-autonomous people – mostly anonymous and interchangeable – and watches the unfolding consequences of their moral and strategic choices. Donaldson is not himself a political figure. He doesn't tend to weigh in on party-political questions, or express much interest in them. But there is a politics to his content. It reflects a world in which people are isolated and helpless, subjects of vast and inhuman economic mechanisms. People spending months alone in supermarkets; standing in large circles for as long as they can endure it; competing for private islands, houses, deliverance from their personal financial torments. People in states of gruelling seclusion; people in vast and impersonal crowds, pitted against one another in a Hobbesian gameshow of all against all. Loneliness, survival, isolation, and the divine intervention of an unimaginably wealthy and famous man: there is a politics to all this, all right, and it is the politics of our time. In its themes and preoccupations, its insistent motifs of financial precarity and arbitrary deliverance – its Lamborghinis and its private islands and its vast pyramids of cash – the oeuvre of MrBeast is like nothing so much as the dream of an entire culture. Donaldson might not be the genius we need, or the genius we want, but he may be the genius we deserve. Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
