YouTubes Monster: PewDiePie and His Populist Revolt
YouTube’s Monster: PewDiePie and His Populist Revolt
By JOHN HERRMAN FEB. 16, 2017
Felix Kjellberg, known to his fans as PewDiePie, is by far YouTube’s biggest star. His videos, a mix of video-game narration, humorous rants and commentary, have cumulatively been viewed billions of times, and more than 53 million people subscribe to his channel. He has been called “the king of YouTube” and countless variations thereon, and he has remained unchallenged on that perch for years, making millions of dollars and leveraging his popularity into outside ventures.
But Monday night, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Disney-owned Maker Studios, a longtime partner of Kjellberg’s, would no longer have anything to do with him; later, YouTube announced that it was canceling a show developed with Kjellberg, and removing his channel from its lucrative “Google Preferred” advertising program. At issue was a series of recent comedy videos. In one, he found performers on the freelance site Fiverr willing to dance and hold up a sign of the client’s choosing. He asked them to write “Death to all Jews,” and they did; in his subsequent video, he expressed shock that the request had made it through. “It was a funny meme, and I didn’t think it would work,” he said, mock-begging news outlets not to make too much of his stunt. “I swear, I love Jews,” he said, “I love them,” before playing a few notes on a kazoo.
As he anticipated, plenty of news outlets saw a story in his antics. Others saw something more.
A post on The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site, marveled at Kjellberg’s performances, and wondered in disbelief if they might signal sympathy for its ideology. “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, since the effect is the same,” the post said, “it normalizes Nazism, and marginalizes our enemies.”
“If Pewdiepie wasn’t #AltRight before,” Vox Day, a former video-game designer and an alt-right leader posted on Gab.ai, a private, Twitterlike service popular with the movement, “he is now.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/magazine/youtubes-monster-pewdiepie-and-his-populist-revolt.html
