White Privilege on Display on YouTube
The nefarious fight for YouTube supremacy you didn’t know about but should be afraid of
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An internet popularity contest is going on these days that has no real importance except for the fact that it’s a struggle for global dominance. The contest is between a YouTuber called PewDiePie and a YouTube channel called T-Series. The former is a Swedish guy in a room making snarky comments. The latter is a channel that shows Bollywood videos. Never heard of it, you’re thinking. So why should you care?
The rivalry between the two is a manifestation of a current phenomenon at play in our society, namely, the ability of the elite to co-opt the very arguments that are used to challenge their power and turn them against their opponents. It’s the bully using anti-bullying policies to intimidate those who dare to stand up to them. It’s male-rights activists who cry about being discriminated against.
The PewDiePie-T-Series rivalry is a contest to see who will have the most subscribers and who will reach 100 million subscribers first. Last Friday, T-Series overtook PewDiePie for a brief few minutes before falling back into second place. At last count, PewDiePie had 17,000 more than T-Series with approximately 87 million in total, making him the most watched channel on the internet. This contest is largely fueled by PewDiePie’s fans who have launched an aggressive campaign to keep their hero in the lead.
“Who will win?” asks one PewDiePie follower. “A rich and powerful Indian business?”(1) This is the crux of the co-opt. PewDiePie’s fans have framed this as a small-guy-vs-corporate-giant-from-India contest, a Swedish Rocky Balboa versus an Indian Ivan Drago.(2)
The reality is very different. PewDiePie — real name Felix Kjellberg — is a a 29-year-old blonde-hair blue-eyed Swede. He started his internet life as a guy who videotaped himself gaming, and evolved from there into an internet personality who comments on anything that strikes his fancy. Although it’s difficult to know the true demographics of any channel’s subscribers, from the comments on his channel we can deduce that his followers are mostly young males, surely younger than the 18–24 age range they claim to be, and mostly from Western countries such as the US and UK.
T-Series is based in Noida, India. It was founded by Gulshan Kumar — the son of a former fruit-juice seller who worked the streets of Delhi.(3) Its subscribers are mostly based in India. It is the most subscribed non-English channel on YouTube and it’s growing exponentially. And that scares the hell out of PewDiePie fans.
The tweets and YouTube commentary from PewDiePie subscribers pit him as a self-made man against a corporate leviathan with its presumably brown-skinned drones. Underlying it all is an implicit fear that the popularity of T-Series is a harbinger for their diminishing influence in the world. They take it for granted that a white European should rule the internet. The sudden popularity of a South Asian cultural sensation from which they’re mostly excluded gives them major FOMO. This is what underpins their hostility to T-Series.
Hence their campaign to boost PewDiePie’s following. While T-Series fans are oblivious to this manufactured rivalry, PewDiePie fans are campaigning fiercely, sometimes resorting to extreme tactics such as buying a $1 million billboard in Times Square and hacking the Wall Street Journal, all to exhort people to subscribe to PewDiePie.(4) Central to the campaign is the strategy of re-framing the conflict so that a channel based in a developing country is portrayed as privileged while a channel by a white European is portrayed as the underdog.
This co-opting of the privilege discourse has become increasingly common. So for example, Trump supporters portray the President’s opponents as part of a Wall Street or Washington elite, while President Trump is portrayed as the common guy despite his great wealth. Similarly, if feminists condemn women such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders for betraying the female population, conservatives quickly attack them as being sexist. The PewDiePie phenomenon is merely the latest manifestation of a strategy by the dominant class to usurp rights-based arguments for their own purposes.
Mattias Lehman in a Medium article points out that PewDiePie’s privilege is apparent in the way he evades accountability for his anti-PC stunts. He’s gotten into trouble for using the n-word, for calling a female internet celebrity THOT (5), for endorsing an alt-right channel, and for having two Sri Lankans hold a sign saying “Death to Jews”.(6) He then apologizes for his offensive behavior and instead of suffering any negative consequences, his popularity continues to rise. Lehman rightly argues: “People like PewDiePie behave with impunity, again and again, because society has shown them they will not face real consequences. At its very root, that is privilege.”(7)
The PewDiePie-T-Series competition is another example of how the dominant class tries to impose a paradigm that casts themselves as victims in order to solidify their own power. This is both sinister and disingenuous. Rocky Balboa may have been a struggling boxer in the first movie, but by the fourth, he was a rich well-established athlete with all the advantages that this bestows. And like Rocky IV, once you see through the false narrative, the competition between PewDiePie and T-Series becomes both mawkish and detestable.
(1) Comment on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dh-RL__uN4 by subscriber identified as Robert Lewandowski.
(2) Rocky IV (1985), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089927/?ref_=nv_sr_1.
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulshan_Kumar
(6) https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/apr/05/whats-up-pewdiepie-the-troubling-content-of-youtubes-biggest-star, and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/23/battle-to-become-2018-youtube-top-channel-pewdiepie-t-series and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/12/pewdiepie-apologises-racial-slur-im-just-an-idiot-youtube.
(7) https://medium.com/@Mattias.Lehman/pewdiepie-is-white-male-privilege-embodied-61b9d16463ec.
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