Barring any more unforeseen circumstances, PewDiePie is about to finally lose his spot as YouTube’s most subscribed content creator. Probably by the end of the weekend. While I’m writing this, Bollywood bigwigs T-Series are less than 30,000 subscribers behind.
This has happened a number of times and Felix has managed to pull off some miracle every time, because people like to root for the little guy. Not that he’s actually a little guy, like “self-made” billionaire Kylie Jenner, PewDiePie was born with every advantage in life, with both his parents being C-Suite executives. He dropped out of the most exclusive university in Sweden to probably do nothing, because he wouldn’t have had to.
Now, he’s obviously good at the thing he does or he wouldn’t be the most popular person on YouTube. I’m not a fan, but I don’t hate him or anything any more than I hate any other annoying bullshit I don’t watch. I’m mostly annoyed by his fans who come here to tell me what a bad journalist I am (please note when you’re writing your comments advising me to kill myself and telling me how biased I am, I am not a journalist, I’m an opinion columnist, which means I’m literally paid to be biased) because they do things like write “Subscribe to PewDiePie” on a World War II monument. I’m not exactly mister “Oh no, get my fainting couch, the war heroes” about this, but it’s really stupid to not realize a lot of people would be mad about it.
What makes this most recent last push by T-series notable is that the Chairman of T-series, Bhushan Kumar, made a personal appeal to Indian patriotism and asked people to subscribe, marking the first time the company has acknowledged the “feud”, which PewDiePie responded to.
Now I don’t know who to root for, they’re both so insufferable. PewDiePie, the son of corporate executives, is playing the “I’m the little guy, I’m the self-made man” thing. T-series is more of a self-made man than PewDiePie, the founder sold fruit juice on the streets of Mumbai who then bought a record shop that he built into India’s largest music label before he was assassinated by mobsters at age 41. That’s the kind of life story people make Oscar-bait movies about, no one is going to see a movie where the plot is “This rich kid gets richer because 12-year-olds think it’s funny when he ‘accidentally’ says the n-word on a live stream.”
I’m not a fan of the appeal to national pride for business, though. A win for T-series is more a win for you and your bank account and less of a win for the country writ large. When Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man, no one was going “Oh my god, I’m so glad to be an American, Bezos had the ingenuity to make his employees piss in garbage cans on the factory floor so he could squeeze a few more pennies of productivity out of them, he’s a real inspiration.” I mean, someone probably did say that. If you told me PewDiePie made it, I wouldn’t be surprised. If not him, I don’t know, that bowtie dipshit on Fox, what’s his name… Tucker Carlson? Yeah, probably him.