If viewers don’t really see him having fun, that’s by design. Donaldson has outright said he sees “personality” as a limitation for growth, once noting in a podcast that hinging your content on who you are as a person means risking not being liked. And if someone doesn’t like a creator as a person, they may not give the videos a chance.
McLoughlin’s comments hit at another bleak possibility: Viewers may hardly see MrBeast having fun in his videos because he’s not actually having a good time. In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality”
While his free time seems minuscule, the rare times he does pull away from work are for dates with his girlfriend that center around activities that could enrich his videos, because he considers a single hour of a date to be worth $100K had it been dedicated to work instead.
Absolutely brutal indictment of algorithmic capitalism.
i think the structural financial incentives designed to attract people who wouldn't otherwise consent to have cameras stuffed up their gills overrides the fact some of the people that find their way onto RTV are the performer sort that'd like to do it without the financial incentive.
I think youre making big assumptions! The current casting pool of Survivor is 100% superfans who are passionate about the show and want to be there. Thats the 'new era,'s whole deal.
You so rarely see "this was a bad experiance for me" in interviews (and ive read a lot of interviews) let alone "i wouldnt have done this if not for the money". I think ur just taking your own mindset and applying it to others inappropriately. I can count the number of people who have negative things to say about their survivor experiance on like maybe two hands, possibly just one. And a lot of those are people who did morally reprenesible things on or off the show and got exposed for that and dont like that fact!
Survivor had to rely on financial incentives before it had superfans, no?
but this is kind of moving the goalposts on what Squid Game set out to do. the text is explicit that it's condemning financial incentives for desperate people. this does apply to a lot of RTV in the present and past, but i can't imagine they were trying to condemn similar show formats that lack the financial coercion. Taskmaster seems totally irrelevant to Squid Game's thesis, despite superficial similarities in format.