Shocking: MrBeast turns out to be the worst

Well, you’re going to want to sit down for this one. It turns out that MrBeast, a 26-year-old man named Jimmy Donaldson who happens to be the biggest YouTube star in the world, might just be the worst. Shocking, I know! A YouTuber whose clickbait-like gimmicks people pay to live only in supermarkets for his entertainment as a bad person??? Impossible!

On Tuesday, Variety reported that MrBeast’s upcoming reality show is facing a class action lawsuit with Amazon over allegations of sexual harassment and “chronic abuse.” The reality show itself sounds like a perfect recipe for exploitation, abuse, and severe trauma, with some Rolling Stone is summarized as “overly challenging challenges, such as staying in a nuclear bunker for 100 days or surviving prison, that test the courage of the participants.” Beast Gamesas the terrifying name goes, pits over 1,000 contestants against each other for a single cash prize of $5 million; all were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The first round of the show was filmed in Las Vegas in July, and the second was filmed last month in Toronto.

Per VarietyThe lawsuit, filed by five anonymous participants, alleges that Amazon and MrBeast’s production company “failed to pay minimum wage and overtime,” “failed to prevent sexual harassment,” “failed to provide participants with uninterrupted meal or rest breaks,” and subjected participants to “hazardous conditions and circumstances as a condition of their employment.” The participants also allege that producers failed to provide “adequate on-site medical personnel” and even forced them to go without sleep and “participate in games that unreasonably risked physical and mental harm.” The plaintiffs are asking Amazon and MrBeast to pay alleged unpaid wages, as well as unspecified punitive damages.

Without going into extensive detail, attorneys representing the candidates said their lawsuit seeks to “establish a pattern of sexual harassment,” which is particularly ominous. The lawsuit offers an example of this, pointing to Beast Games‘ “How to Succeed in MrBeast Production” employee handbook, which states: “If talent wants to draw a dick on the whiteboard in the video or do something stupid, let them… Do absolutely everything you can to empower the guys during filming and help them create content. Help them be idiots.” (Please join me in a collective, exasperated, “Oh, brother.”) One of the female plaintiffs shared that “as one of the women, I can say that it absolutely felt like a hostile environment for us. We honestly couldn’t have been respected less — as people, let alone as employees — if they had tried.”

Unfortunately, this lawsuit is about as shocking to me as a fork found in a kitchen. MrBeast’s whole saga as a YouTuber ranges from philanthropic stunts like to claim to give 20,000 South African children their first pair of shoes to wave money over people’s heads to make them perform inhumane tricks for him, and it’s always been insulting to some degree. His content is often a disturbing permutation of exploiting people’s economic situation to torture them in some way, and then filming and making even more profit off of the torture. So I’m pretty inclined to believe that any reality show he runs is bad.

As I wrote last year, MrBeast represents the most annoying and aggressive aspects of influencer capitalism:

The lives, struggles, and poverty of other people appear to be a playground for him, a means to a profitable end, all the while raising his profile as a supposed social benefactor. Yes, he’s “helping” people, but at his core he’s profiting from systemic inequalities, making a viral spectacle of the suffering of others for the consumption of his followers, and doing so for his own enrichment. … The entire genre of YouTube “philanthropic stunts” can only exist in the context of an American wasteland of economic suffering; there’s no reason for MrBeast to meaningfully engage with or address inequality when his business depends on it to function.

All of which is to say that the lawsuit and the various allegations against MrBeast’s production company feel inevitable. “It’s a Fyre Fest kind of feeling,” a crew member told Rolling Stone“There’s a reason this level of production hasn’t been attempted before, and it certainly should never have been attempted without people who know what they’re doing.”