Creative Work in an Age of Digital Production

On machine formalism.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

“After the first minute of content you will have what we call minutes 1 thru 3.”
—MrBeast, “How to Succeed in MrBeast Production”

A couple of years ago, I watched a MrBeast YouTube video on my phone. References to MrBeast were everywhere at the time—he had recently become the most popular YouTuber ever—and I felt that, to be culturally current, I should acquaint myself with his oeuvre.

My memory of the video is fuzzy, but the premise went something like this: Two strangers, a nondescript young woman and a nondescript young man, get locked together in a big windowless room. If they’re able to stay put for a hundred days, they’ll win a substantial amount of money—a million dollars, I think it was. I remember that, to emphasize the stakes, MrBeast (also a nondescript young man, though with a slightly odd affect) wheeled in a pallet on which was piled a million dollars in bundles of bills. What impressed me most about the show was its length. It seemed to go on forever, as if the hundred days were unfolding in real time. When it ended, I thought I should be given the million dollars.

MrBeast has been in the news again, as the new season of his popular Amazon Prime extravaganza, Beast Games, debuted earlier this year. The New York Times ran two lengthy articles about him in December. He has, according to one of the articles, “explod[ed] the media industry’s understanding of the term ‘creator.’” I have no idea what that means, but it sounds like MrBeast must be doing something important. The Wall Street Journal seems to think so, too. In January, it ran a long, largely glowing profile of him, noting that he is known as “the man who cracked the secret of going viral.”

What exactly is that secret? What is it that MrBeast, as a “creator,” is “creating”? The obvious answer would be “content.” Content, after all, is what we talk about when we talk about digital media. It’s certainly what MrBeast talks about. But the more I think about online programming, the more I’m convinced that content isn’t what matters. What matters is form. Digital media aspires to, and often achieves, a state of contentlessness. Spend some time on MrBeast’s channel, or scroll down your Instagram feed or your X feed or your Apple News feed, or swipe through your For You page on TikTok. What you’re seeing is the repetition of a pattern, a pattern that has been statistically determined to have the highest odds of holding your attention. What fills the pattern at any given instant—what we call content—is fungible and disposable. It’s not important. It’s the pattern, the form the content fits and replicates, that’s important.

Popular culture has always been formulaic. Every hit pop song, or situation comedy, or detective novel spawns scores of copies. A lot of crap results. But good stuff does, too, sometimes. When the Rolling Stones were pressured by their producer and record company to come up with a quick followup to their 1964 smash “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” they delivered a knockoff: “Get Off My Cloud.” The knockoff, if not quite in the same league as the original, was itself a great single. The Stones were savvy and skilled enough to make the knockoff fun and memorable in its own right, and by including in the lyrics a sarcastic swipe at advertising and consumerism — “he says I’ve won five pounds if I have his kind of detergent pack” — they gave a wink to their fans. The Stones knew the fans knew and the fans knew the Stones knew what the Stones were up to. The knockoff ended up being better for being a knockoff.

Such welcome things happen when talented people work in an established form, even a very narrow one, even one shaped by commercial interests. You get more than the reproduction of a pattern. You get something that’s both familiar and new. To go back a bit further in time, think of the sonnet. I don’t know who first wrote a poem in the fourteen-line form that came to be known as the sonnet—it was popularized by Petrarch in the fourteenth century—but for ages thereafter poets found ways to make that apparently rigid form their own. (Sonnets, wrote John Donne, are “pretty rooms” that you furnish to your own taste.) A good artist works both within and against a form. Art emerges from a struggle between what T. S. Eliot termed “tradition” (i.e., established forms) and “individual talent.”

Something very different happens when machines begin to establish and fill the patterns. The creative tension between form and individual talent gets resolved in form’s favor. Thanks to the algorithmic tracking of demand and the algorithmic delivery of supply, digital media has for the last twenty years promoted an ideal of perfect form—not a Platonic ideal but a consumerist one. Machines evaluate form microscopically, precisely measuring the effects of tiny variations in pixels or words or musical notes in order to determine the optimal pattern for each consumer. They then construct personalized feeds by repeatedly populating the optimal pattern with new stuff.

The speed of computers and computer networks makes the repetition of patterns instantaneous. Because the supply of messages is essentially unlimited—billions of people are churning new ones out every moment, and many of those people are themselves “creators” who are highly conscious of optimal patterns and aim to match them—the feed algorithm can replicate the form over and over again with no delay and no end. For both algorithm and creator, precision in form-matching takes precedence over individual inspiration and creativity. It didn’t matter which MrBeast production I watched, just as it doesn’t matter what the next item in my Instagram feed is. They’re all the same.

It’s easy to understand why automated media would concentrate on replicating forms. Evaluating works of art, or any creative products of skill and imagination, requires a mind, which the machines of media automation lack. Identifying a pattern requires only a statistical procedure, which is what the machines have. Indeed, it’s all they have. People like MrBeast didn’t crack the code of virality. Machines did. MrBeast’s great strength as a contemporary creator is that he has no ambition beyond repeating a pattern. He’s a machine-listener. He attends to the machine, and he does what it tells him to do. Here’s how he puts it in a recently leaked staff memo, “How to Succeed in MrBeast Production”:

I spent basically 5 years of my life locked in a room studying virality on Youtube. Some days me and some other nerds would spend 20 hours straight studying the most minor thing: like is there a correlation between better lighting at the start of the video and less viewer drop off (there is, have good lighting at the start of the video haha) or other tiny things like that. 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. The three metrics you guys need to care about is Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP).

And yet, however mechanical he may be, MrBeast is still a human being and as such will always fall short of machine levels of efficiency in pattern repetition. To the machines, or at least to their owners and operators, human creators have always been necessary evils, inefficient cogs needed only because the machines were incapable of generating content out of their own resources. The companies needed machine-listeners (the creators) to follow the machine’s instructions (the metrics) as slavishly as possible in order to produce chunks of content to feed back into the machine for distribution.¹

With AI, at last, the machines can take over the creator’s role. AI-generated slop marks the triumph of machine formalism. The machine establishes the pattern, and the machine fills the pattern with its own creation. The automated media system is relieved of human inefficiency, not to mention human sensibility. The same thing happens in the automation of factories and warehouses. People are kept on hand to perform tasks that robots aren’t good at doing—boxing up orders, say, or feeding parts into the machine—until the robots get good at doing them.

In automated systems, human beings are placeholders for future machines. Until recently, we assumed that creative types who produce content for media systems were exceptions to that rule. We’re now going to test that assumption. Is MrBeast necessary? Am I?

1. When I publish this post, Substack will offer to run an A/B test on its title, measuring how different, AI-generated titles affect various measures of readership. I assume that Substack will soon offer to do such tests on AI rewrites of the entire text. Why leave anything to chance, or to taste, if you don’t have to?