For a generation of Youtube fans, MrBeast has become an almost mythical figure. An ordinary guy creating extraordinary spectacles out of sometimes strangely ordinary topics from counting to 100,000, playing tag, and for eye-watering cash prizes. He’s buried himself, recreated squid games, and given away a desert island. He’s known for handing out big prizes – cash, houses, cars, food – to friends, strangers, and as philanthropy, and he’s built a channel with 90 million subscribers doing so, earning around 54 million a year according to Forbes. He’s started a nationwide burger chain, been on Jimmy Kimmel, Joe Rogan, employs over a hundred people, and been at the forefront of some of the biggest philanthropic campaigns on Youtube.

But MrBeast is part of a larger story. The story of American capitalism, corporate profit, and politics. The story of American mythology. It’s a story that takes some surprising turns. One in which a complacent media has neglected to follow the money. A story with a narrative that has been shaped, manipulated, and twisted by corporations like Coca-Cola, monolith chemical and shipping companies, international meat monopolies and the deep pockets of big oil. It is a shadowy story of injured workers, low wages, shady deals, collusion, pollution, bribery, and even suicides.

What we can see through MrBeast is not speculation, but a perfect postmodern example of how capitalist mythology is manufactured, how it hangs together, and shapes all of our lives.

So before we get to MrBeast’s philanthropy, we have to do some important ground work. To make some progress in unravelling the problem, we have to understand the roots of this much wider trend, maybe the most worrying trend of our time.

Because propaganda, lobbying, advertising, public relations, and the ideological weapons used by big business have become expertly proficient in obfuscation, runs so deeply through back channels to avoid regulation, is so entangled in our culture, with philanthropy, education, with the media, that big business can make perfect use out of an affable, generous, seemingly decent and well-meaning figure like MrBeast.

What’s interesting with prodigious figures like MrBeast is not how they managed to do what they do, but what they tell us about the culture that gave rise to them. What can MrBeast’s success, his approach to business and philanthropy and Youtube and entertainment and sponsorship, tell us about American culture, capitalist culture, western culture by extension, and even more, about ourselves.

Every civilisation has its myths. Rome had Romulus and Remus. Ancient Greece had Zeus and Achilles. India has Brahma and Vishnu. The British Empire had great explorers and ‘civilizers’. And myths all have a function, a purpose, a use in society. They all support a narrative about the culture that created them.

What is America? Well, I want to start with a quick story.

Everyone’s heard of Davy Crockett, the ordinary woodsman, the wild king frontiersman, the self-made hero of the American west. He was known across the country in plays and short stories for his larger-than-life, mythical adventures.

When the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville toured around America in the wake of its revolution to try to understand what was distinctive about American life he noted: ‘Two years ago the inhabitants of the district of which Memphis is the capital sent to the House of Representatives in Congress an individual named David Crockett, who has had no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods. His competitor, a man of wealth and talent, failed’.

In Europe, a rise to notoriety from such humble self-made beginnings was impossible.

Culture turned Crockett into a legend. A popular song described him as ‘half a horse, and half an alligator’.

One man wrote, ‘you have heard of the celebrated Loco Crockett ‘who can whip his weight in wild cats,’ ‘jump up higher, fall down lower and drink more liquors than any man in the state,’ he is returned now a very gentle and respectable man’.

Crockett’s meteoric rise became mythical because it seemed to come from nowhere. But as the historian M.J. Heale has noted, this isn’t strictly true. Crockett’s image was actually carefully crafted by politicians and publishers who believed that his image would be useful to their cause – libertarianism on the frontier.

The idea of a frontiersman out there on his own, independent, self-reliant, with no need for federal assistance or elite rule was important to the image of democracy that Jacksonian democrats were trying to sustain in 19th century America. Jacksonians wanted to expand suffrage to the ordinary man and in Davy Crockett they saw a compelling narrative that would help them win the public image battle.

And while he was of course real, Davy Crockett became a mythical figure for this reason: he was exaggerated, used, crafted, memorialised, manipulated, and proliferated for political, economic, social, and cultural reasons.

Tocqueville noticed this. Crockett fit in with the image of the American out there alone, ‘apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands’.

Heale remarked that ‘realizing the imaginative power of the West, political managers sought to touch responsive chords in the electorate by finding and fashioning political heroes from beyond the Appalachians’.

Davy Crockett was one of the first examples of something we love in democratic societies: underdog stories, adventurers, a self-made man, a man of the people. But stories can be used and misused, appropriated and twisted, reimagined and rewritten in calculative and disingenuous ways.

MrBeast is a likeable guy. He’s the guy next door. He’s the carefree guy having carefree fun with his group of friends. He’s ordinary, but he does extraordinary things. What if I filled my friend’s house with slime? What if anything you place in this circle you can keep? What if we went to the Bermuda Triangle.

He’s also become known as a very generous philanthropist. He’s given homeless people homes, $10,000 in cash, tipped waitresses $30,000, and given away houses to delivery drivers. #Teamtrees has organised Youtubers to fundraise to plant 20 million trees and more recently #teamseas has done the same to remove 14 million kilograms of trash from the ocean. He’s even started a second channel – Beast Philanthropy – where he’s given away 10,000 turkeys at Thanksgiving, helped after a hurricane, and set up his own foodbank.

And before we move on it’s important to say this. This is obviously commendable stuff. This video is not an attack on MrBeast’s personal morals, its not a question of whether he’s a good person or not. I don’t know him, he seems like a nice, generous, hard-working guy whose built a hugely impressive Youtube channel and probably just wants to use his influence to do some good.

But because he’s so influential, because he’s successful enough to be close to some significant organisations – non-profit and for-profit – looking at MrBeast can tell us a lot out about some of the trends he’s part of and, ultimately, benefits from.

So lets look at some of these giveaways and philanthropic efforts.

First, the most obvious thing to note is that MrBeast runs a business. A very, very successful one. Jimmy has openly said the motivation for these giveaways come from two places:

First, its business. They attract views. They make profit. He wants to be the most successful youtuber in the world, and he’s succeeded.

Second, they make him feel good. He likes helping people.

Lets take a quick look at the first motivation before returning to the second later on.

Every MrBeast video that involves a giveaway of some kind – whether to a friend, a stranger, a homeless person – is paid for by a sponsor.

It’s a kind of for-profit philanthropy, or, what economist Matthew Bishop coined in 2006 as ‘philanthrocapitalism’.

He writes that ‘philanthrocapitalism encompasses not just the application of modern business techniques to giving but also the effort by a new generation of entrepreneurial philanthropists and business leaders to drive social and environmental progress by changing how business and government operate’.

Philanthrocapitalism has become something of buzzword over the last few years. It has several features and is broad enough to vary in meaning and scope, but essentially has come to mean:

• Treating philanthropy as a business
• Expecting a return on an investment in some way
• Using traditional business methods for philanthropic projects

The merging of business and philanthropy and the involvement of ‘power individuals’ in philanthropic efforts has become a frequent talking point in recent years with the rise of institutions like the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, and phenomena like ‘fair trade’. Gates has convinced fellow billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett to pledge to donate their fortunes to philanthropic efforts.

MrBeast has become something of a philanthrocapitalist himself, turning giveaways into advertising revenue, food drives into profitable entertainment, and homelessness into a spectacle that pays.

Now, at its best, philanthrocapitalism does important work. Gates himself has spent considerable resources and effort vaccinating, feeding, and helping significant numbers of impoverished people around the world. But as several authors have pointed out, some of the trends not only have a darker side, but could actually be doing more harm than good.

At its worst, as we’ll see, philanthrocapitalism allows sponsors, donors, and big-business to whitewash, greenwash, and conceal or draw attention away from their otherwise questionable business tactics and propagandise positive spin and public relations. This is done to combat disturbing trends that they themselves have created and still perpetuate.

In this way figures like MrBeast can end up spreading corporate messages, believing they’re doing good, and sometimes contributing to even more harm.

MrBeast’s sponsors vary; some, like Skillshare, could be categorised as simple advertisers, exchanging a fee for a short promotional section of a video like this. There’s no claim of philanthropy from the sponsor, and MrBeast uses the money to finance the stunt or giveaway. In others, though, as we’ll see promotion doesn’t seem to be the objective of the sponsor.

But to understand this trend, we need to quickly look at how philanthrocapitalism became a central part of capitalist culture, before exploring some of the ways the trend does harm today. We can then understand how MrBeast has participated in that harm, and how Youtube is becoming fertile ground for a disturbing trend.

The late 19th century was the gilded age of American capitalism, an era known for greed, corruption, exploitation, and the spread of industrialisation and wealth across America. It saw the creation of vast new monopolies in railroads, oil, steel, banking and media by now household names like Andrew Carnegie, J.P Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, figures that came to be labelled the ‘robber barons’ because of their tendency to employ oppressive, harsh business tactics, exploiting their workers and bribing local and national politicians to amass vast fortunes never before seen in America.

The robber barons have a mixed legacy. As Historian Richard White writes, they’ve had a contradictory reputation, at first ‘standing for a Gilded Age of corruption, monopoly, and rampant individualism. Their corporations were the Octopus, devouring all in its path’.

Later though, ‘they became entrepreneurs, necessary business revolutionaries, ruthlessly changing existing practices and demonstrating the protean nature of American capitalism’.

But I want to focus quickly on a particular trend the robber barons have become known for: their philanthropy.

Take Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American industrialist who built a vast steel and railroad empire across America.

He gave most of his vast half a billion dollar fortune to charity over the course of his later life, and at the time of his death was left with around $30 million.

Carnegie was the forerunner to the new capitalist philanthropist model, writing an article, The Gospel of Wealth, to urge capitalists to use their new found fortunes for good.

Carnegie wrote that ‘the millionaire will be but a trustee of the poor, entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself’.

The wealthy paternalist could dispense their wealth in a responsible way, building libraries while discouraging ‘the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy’.

And while Carnegie was building libraries, donating to churches and universities, on the one hand, he was ruthlessly expanding, paying politicians bribes, and subjecting his employees to grim conditions and paying them just enough to stay above the poverty line.

One worker said, ‘you don’t notice any old men here. The long hours, the strain, and the sudden changes of temperature use a man up’. Sociologist John A. Fitch said the conditions led to ‘old age at forty’.

Workers worked 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, with just one holiday – 4th July.

And Carnegie’s philanthropic turn came after one of the most brutal labour disputes in American history.

In 1892 workers were striking at Homestead in Pittsburgh in response to a pay cut. A battle broke out between Carnegie’s men and the striking workers, and eventually 8000 National Guardsmen were sent in to quell the strike. At least 10 men were killed in the fighting.

Afterwards, Carnegie was sent a telegram by his chairman Henry Frick: ‘Victory!’

Carnegie replied: ‘Cables received. First happy morning since July. Congratulate all around’.

And Frick responded: ‘Our victory is now complete and most gratifying. Do not think we will ever have any serious labor trouble again’.

But Homestead had turned the public against Carnegie and later, in a letter, he complained that ‘the mass of Public Sentiment is not with us about Homestead on the direct issue of re-adjustment of the [wage] scale – people did not understand it, but I observed that Opinion was greatly impressed by the few acts of kindness’.

Carnegie knew that there was more than one way to tip the balance of public opinion, and he knew how important public opinion was for doing business.

So while his philanthropic efforts ramped up in the following years, it did so at the expense of his some 40,000 workers. While the values of Carnegie’s business empire more than than doubled over the years following the strike, his wages were cut by 67%.

Carnegie discovered that when it came to profits, public opinion was as important as bribery and wage cuts.

And he’s probably the most notable example of a trend that became widespread.

Around the same time the oil baron John D. Rockefeller was also giving away large sums while simultaneously crushing worker strikes.

In 1914, strikers in Ludlow were gunned down by the National Guard. At least 25 died, including women and children.

Rockefeller congratulated the National Guard for ‘fighting the good fight, which is not only in the interests of your own company but of other companies in Colorado and the business interests of the entire country and labouring classes quite as much’.

He threatened his competitors and chaired secret meetings to monopolise the market and drive up prices.

Companies like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel became so powerful that in 1890, Congress passed an antitrust act to weaken the robber barons and breakup their monopolies, prohibiting anti-competitive practices including artificially raising prices. Senator John Sherman, who the act was named after, proclaimed: ‘if we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life’.

Lawyer Frank Walsh said in an inquiry that, ‘it has been stated many times, that it might be better for people controlling very large industries, instead of devoting the excess profits to the dispensation of money along philanthropic lines, that they should organize some system by which they could distribute it in wages first, or give to the workers a greater share of the productivity of industry in the first place’.

In 1911 the Supreme Court split Rockefeller’s Standard Oil into 36 smaller companies including Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron.

Today, we all know that PR and image is as important as reality. The most savvy public figures curate a kind of mythic figure around themselves And we can see the phenomenon everywhere.

Dominoes, for example, recently donated £100,000 to small business in a ‘support local’ campaign, but then spent $50 million on a marketing campaign making sure everyone knew about it.

And recently, Volkswagen championed their philanthropic donations to a variety of causes including beach preservation efforts while simultaneously designing ‘low-emission’ vehicles that were rigged to cheat emissions tests.

This phenomenon is so widespread that it’s difficult to choose which examples to pick, and, even more worryingly, many of these ‘philanthropic’ contributions end up running through foundations like the Gates Foundation, which, as scholars like sociologist Lindsey McGooey and professor of law Garry Jenkins have argued, have a host of problems that are caught up in this logic of charity in exchange for influence and good PR.

McGooey argues that the Gates Foundation is paternalistic, ignores grantees’ concerns about their approach, focuses too much on vanity projects, and is often in favour of loosening regulations in developing countries.

Furthermore, McGooey writes that: ‘study after study has proven that only a small percentage of charitable donations from wealthy donors reach poor individuals. Most of it tends to go to alma maters or cultural institutions frequented by the wealthy. The rich also give less of their incomes, proportionately, than the poor do’.

In fact, the number of private charitable foundations have skyrocketed in recent years – about 5000 are set up every year – despite charitable giving in the US being steady at about 2% of GDP.

What explains this? As inequality increases and wages stagnate and billionaires amass pools of wealth so vast it would make Carnegie and Rockerfeller’s eyes water, what better way to spend that money than on PR and influence that avoids regulation, is not as crass and transparent as traditional advertising, and comes with tax breaks?

In this context, of course whitewashing, greenwashing, and pinkwashing are everywhere.

Take this startling fact. One study in 2012 found that just 7% of donations reached causes that could be defined as a benefit to the average in-need person. Another study found that 55% of grants went to large organisations with budgets over $5 million already.

In other words, most donations went to religious or cultural institutions like churches and art galleries, which are much more likely to be frequented by the wealthy associates of the wealthy, and, lets face it, whiter donors who might get a shiny plaque under some modern art piece but are a bit less likely to help individuals who probably just need a few decent meals and better wages.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the participation in this kind of thing the accumulation of ‘symbolic capital’ – good deeds, connections, and support for institutions that buy you public prestige, power, and influence.

And this trend over the last few decades has coincided with the loosening of regulation, the rolling back of labour laws, the decline of average salaries, and an increase in inequality across the world.

As Carl Rhodes and Peter Bloom write in the Guardian, ‘what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class’.

All of this begs an important question: where’s the line between philanthropy and self-interest? Between doing good and looking good? What happens when philanthropy becomes a spectacle for distraction?

Much of MrBeast’s reputation centres around his philanthropy. Media outlets like the AP, Looper and the Independent praise MrBeast uncritically, reporting that he’s ‘rethinking old notions of philanthropy’, and describing him as Youtube’s biggest philanthropist. Scan a few comments, listen to a few podcasts, watch a few interviews, and you’ll get the impression that MrBeast is seen as a generous, selfless, heroic philanthropist.

And again, this is certainly not to take a way from all the good MrBeast does, the effort he puts in, and his intentions. I think he genuinely cares, he has fun, and he has a huge audience that he’s hopefully inspiring to go out and do some good in the world.

I want to draw attention to something else: a wider trend, the problems that arise from this format, the money behind it, and the motivations of some of the people that support the content.

Let’s start here. In November 2021, MrBeast and the team spent the day giving away 10,000 turkeys at a food drive in Greenville, North Carolina. The video has almost 6 million views.

The 10,000 turkeys, worth $250,000, were donated by Jennie-O who get credited throughout the video and in the description.

Of course, while a $250,000 donation sounds like a lot of money, its a small figure for a company whose parent company – the food conglomerate Hormel Foods – is worth $27 billion.

$250,000 is around the same price a company like this might pay for a television commercial that would be shorter, more direct, less-likely to go viral, and soon disappear into the ether of forgotten adverts. And of course, this video does not come across like an advert. It appears to be a simple philanthropic act from a socially responsible company.

Jennie-O’s vice president of marketing Nicole Behne told the Associate Press, ‘he’s entertaining and he makes giving back and these philanthropic tie-ins really cool to be part of’, and told WINT, ‘what a great way for Jennie-O to partner with somebody that we can really tell the story about making sure everybody has a Thanksgiving turkey on their table for that special holiday’.

She continues, ‘no matter what their gathering size is Jennie-O is going to be helping provide turkeys for families and then they just have to bring the sides! And really enjoy Thanksgiving all together’.

Comments and articles like these have been syndicated across the web by outlets like the Independent, Yahoo News, and US News.

Other than the obvious publicity, what motivation could Jennie-O have for publicly giving away free turkeys every year?

Hormel Foods is a huge conglomerate which owns over 40 brands including Jennie-O, Spam, Applegate, and Skippy peanut butter.

Conglomerates like Hormel, Nestle, Pepsico, and, as we’ll see, Smithfield, dominate the market in the US and much of the rest of the world.

In 2021, Hormel and Smithfield – who MrBeast also worked with in this ‘Feeding America’ video – were accused of being involved in an illegal price-fixing scheme to inflate the prices of pork and increase their profits.

These 2 companies – Hormel and Smithfield – along with two others – Tyson and JBS, control 80% of the meat market in the United States.

The lawsuit accused the suppliers of trying to ‘to fix, raise, stabilize, and maintain artificially inflated prices for pork sold in the United States’, since 2009.

In 2021 Smithfield – whose Chinese owner, WH Group, is the world’s largest supplier of pork – settled, paying $83 million in fines.

And, there’s been an increase in the discovery of similar price-fixing schemes in Big Meat in recent years.

In 2021, Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride were fined $221 million and $108 million respectively for doing the same in the poultry industry.

And seafood giant, Bumble Bee Foods’ CEO Chris Lischewski was sentenced to 40 months in prison in 2020 for price fixing in the tuna industry.

Is it a coincidence that the same people that are effected by price-fixing schemes that satisfy CEOs and shareholders but drive up the price of everyday essentials are the same people who need to come to a food drive to get handouts at thanksgiving?

In 2021, the Guardian investigated the effect these huge food monopolies have on our economies and societies.

Nina Lakhani, Aliya Uteuova and Alvin Chang write that, ‘a handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans’.

These conglomerates have been growing in power since the 80s as regulation has been weakened, mergers and acquisitions have been encouraged to cut costs, and lobbying of politicians has increased.

At the same time, half of the least well-paid jobs are in the food industry.

One study in 2013 found that 42% of poultry workers had some evidence of carpal tunnel.

One former worker of Chick-n-quick said that ‘there are so many injustices there. Sometimes you get really dizzy from how fast the line speed went, but we are not allowed to say, ‘We’re not going to work at this speed.’ They’re not asking you, they’re telling you you have to do it’.

And in 2019, these workers at Jennie-O went on strike after a worker claimed she wasn’t offered medical attention and was fired after her hand got stuck in a machine she was never trained to be on.

Debbie Berkowitz of the National Employment Law Project said that ‘the meatpacking industry is much more dangerous now than in the 1990s, and the biggest factors are consolidation and cutting corners of worker safety’.

Amanda Starbuck, a policy analyst at Food & Water Watch told the Guardian, ‘it’s a system designed to funnel money into the hands of corporate shareholders and executives while exploiting farmers and workers and deceiving consumers about choice, abundance and efficiency’.

Remember, Jennie-O spent $250,000 in this video with MrBeast. The previous year, during the 2020 election cycle, the food industry spent $175 million on lobbying and political contributions. Two thirds went to Republicans who want to roll back regulation even further.

To understand how much of an effect this has, it’s worth nothing that this figure was only $29 million in 1992.

These conglomerates dominate our shelves and our politics while driving out competition and inflating prices.

Jennie-O’s parent Hormel Food’s profits have skyrocketed in recent years, while the price farmers get paid for meat has declined.

Across the world, while food conglomerates do well, farmers are struggling financially, getting into debt, and facing a  mental health crisis.

The same report in the Guardian writes, ‘advocates say that a toxic mix of financial woes, climate chaos and trade wars have contributed to a mental health crisis among farmers’.

Farmers are one of the most likely groups to take their own lives in countries including the US, Australia, the UK, and India.

In the Midwest alone, 450 farmers committed suicide between just 2014 and 2018. In the UK one farmer a week takes their life, and in India 270,000 farmers have died by suicide since 1995.

The president of Family Farm Action Joe Maxwell told the Guardian, ‘the economic power of these corporations enables them to wield huge political influence, so we have a system in which farmers are on a treadmill just trying to stay afloat. Basically there’s a handful of individuals in the world, mostly white men, who make money by dictating who farms, what gets farmed and who gets to eat. Consumer choice is an illusion; the transnationals control everything in this extractive agricultural model’.

Furthermore, farming in the US relies on an influx of some 2.5 million undocumented migrants. These are workers who have no recourse, no rights, and likely no healthcare.

Hormel Foods’ share price has skyrocketed over recent years. So as long as Jennie-O can improve their image by throwing $250,000 to partner with a fun youtuber that probably isn’t going to ask many questions, and has more influence than any farmer, worker, or migrant, then they probably don’t have much to worry about.

And we can see something similar happening under the surface of MrBeast’s #teamseas campaign.

In the video, ‘I Cleaned the World’s Dirtiest Beach’, MrBeast and friends commendably organise to clean up trash from Bajos de Haina in the Dominican Republic. The storyline is class MrBeast, as they realise how long something is taking, how insurmountable the task is, the stunt escalates as they bring in more volunteers and admit that ‘obviously the beach is going to get dirty again’. Eventually this Ocean Cleanup device – a trash eating robot – is introduced and they tell the viewer that for every $1 you donate 1 pound of trash can be removed from the ocean. Half of the money will go towards paying volunteers to clean beaches while the other half goes to Ocean Cleanup.

Many have already questioned the premise. Science youtuber Simon Clarke has pointed out that the project is ‘problematic’ and could end up doing more harm than good.

There’s up to 150 million tonnes of plastic in the ocean, much of which is small microplastic which cannot easily be removed. And we add another 8 million tonnes each year, a figure that continues to increase. Teamseas goal to remove 13,600 tonnes is a drop in the ocean. As Clarke points out, TeamSeas will remove in 3 years what’s added in 15 hours.

Many marine biologists have also questioned the premise, pointing out that the problem is much more systemic.

But I want to ask a different question. Why is the project so popular? Any why are we focusing on this trash eating robot in the first place? Why have solutions like this attracted the attention of so many youtubers? Clarke calls it the ‘misdirection of attention’. Why is our attention drawn to this but not other solutions?

While machines like this look pretty cool and taking your mates to clean up really dirty beaches might make for exciting content, much more engaging than lobbying the government and plastic industry for change, we can also follow the money and find out who is funding the promotion of devices like this.

Ocean Cleanup lists its partners on its website. They include Safalio – the worlds second largest manufacturer of plastic sunglasses – AkzoNobel – an $8.5 billion multinational manufacturing paint and chemicals – and, right at the top, under ‘our most generous partners’ Coca-Cola, who are, quote ‘the world’s worst plastic polluter for the fourth year in a row in 2021′, according to the  NGO Break Free From Plastic.

So let’s talk quickly about why the world’s best known supplier of gut-rotting sugar in ocean-rotting plastic would want to spend so much money funding such a philanthropic shiny garbage-eater. Coca-Cola obviously have a huge budget. They spend around $4 billion a year on advertising and $1 billion on philanthropic grants, which, as I hope I’ve convinced you by now, should be included as a type of advertising, and often as direct lobbying.

In 2005, for example, Coca-Cola donated a million dollars to the American Association of Paediatric Dentistry.

And like clockwork, this study found that there was a ‘shift in tone’ on the subject of sugary drinks from the AAPD, transitioning ‘from describing soft drinks as “a significant factor” in tooth decay, to describing the scientific evidence of the relationship as “unclear”’.

Another ‘philanthropic’ donation in 2013 from Coca-Cola and PespsiCo went to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation.

Afterwards both groups joined Coca-Cola and Pepsi in a protest against a proposed New York ban on large surgery drinks arguing that the move would disproportionately effect minorities.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo funded 95 public health organisations between 2011-2015, and sometimes the influence the donations have on the organisations is explicit.

The Associated Press discovered leaked Coca-Cola emails that were directly involved in shaping policy at anti-obesity group GEBN after they received a $1.5 million donation. Coca-Cola’s chief health and science officer was involved in advising on content for the website, editing the mission statement, and even choosing senior staff. The emphasis of the advise was in shifting the blame from sugar being responsible for obesity to other factors like a lack of exercise.

The BMJ writes: ‘an analysis of thousands of emails has shown the extent to which Coca-Cola sought to obscure its relationship with scientists, minimise perception of its role, and use researchers to promote industry friendly messaging. The findings represented a “low point in the history of public health,” said one of the authors’.

Another study has found Save the Children received $5 million from Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in 2009 and their campaign for a tax on sugary sodas soon mysteriously disappeared.

So of course Coca-Cola have interest in promoting a ‘philanthropic’ cause that supports the appearance that millions of tonnes of plastic waste can simply be cleaned up afterwards. That we can all continue using plastic and go on like we are rather than focusing on real change that will effect their bottom line.

And instead of relying on bad-taste advertising and lobbying that might affect their public image, corporations like Jennie-O and Coca-Cola have discovered a much more ‘behind the scenes’ and ambiguous strategy that looks something like this:

• Invest heavily in philanthropic efforts that align with profits
• These efforts become the most well-funded
• Which then effect popularity, clout, and talking points around the topics
• While simultaneously being able to plaster the causes’ websites and operations in corporate logos for free advertising
• And also enjoying the positive press coverage

Take another ‘top supporter’ of Ocean Cleanup, A.P. Møller – Mærsk, the largest shipping company in the world, with arms in oil drilling, oil tankers, and air freight, and who have been accused of being responsible for abusive conditions and harsh labour practices across the world.

Maersk are making a commendable effort to decarbonise, but why?

Shipping accounts for 3% of the globe’s carbon emissions, burning 300m metric tonnes of fossil fuels every year, and the industry is nowhere near meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goals that most agree are needed to keep the rise of global temperatures below 2%. Rather than decreasing, shipping emissions actually rose by 10% between 2012 and 2018. Regulators are beginning to realise that tougher restrictions are needed.

By 2026, for example, shipping companies in the EU will have to pay a tax on carbon emissions.

Like Coca-Cola, Maersk has a clear vested interested in supporting the clean-up of pollution after it’s been used to generate profits, rather than supporting causes that might actually make a difference.

The corporate funnelling of resources into philanthropy means that the media are more likely to listen to the non-profits, like Ocean Cleanup, uncritically. Corporations get what they want, without the crassness of advertising, or risking the bad press from lobbying politicians directly.

Instead, they end up financing and using ‘useful idiots’, a term I don’t really like but goes some way in capturing the logic – naive entertainers and uncritical journalists who end up on their side without ever really knowing why.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, convincing the world he didn’t exist, disappearing into the shadowy margins using slights of hand and misdirection.

Oceanic Society writes about the best ways to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean. Beaches are there, but the top two are to reduce the use of plastics in the first place and ‘support legislation to curb plastic production and waste’.

By supporting specific causes, companies like Jennie-O, Coca-cola, and Mearsk are essentially saying ‘don’t worry about this huge mess we’re all making guys, we can just tidy it up tomorrow!’

Katie Matthews, chief scientist at advocacy group Oceana told Vox that ‘it’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on. We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution’.

But once they magically become well-funded, Ocean Cleanup becomes the topic of conversation, a trend, a talking point, placed on a pedestal to divert attention away from the real problem.

They get turned into a spectacle, exciting new content-worthy tech, massaged into a flashy youtuber-supported positive image, supplanting the rather dull, laborious, and costly task of actually changing our attitudes, reducing use, and affecting real change.

And it’s worth noting quickly that this, of course, is everywhere.

In leaked documents describing the agrochemical giant Monsanto’s funding of grantees that would happen to disagree with banning of its controversial pesticide, Roundup, a Monsanto executive states that ‘the key will be keeping Monsanto in the background so as not to harm the credibility of the information’.

In another study, during a merger between telecommunications giants Comcast and NBCU, its author Susan Crawford found that ‘the company encouraged letters to the FCC from more than one thousand non-profits… including community centers, rehabilitation centers, civil rights groups, community colleges, sports programs, and senior citizen groups’.

What these groups know about telecommunications mergers is unclear.

Another leaked document from the oil giant Mobil describes how donations should have a ‘benefit to Mobil’.

And in this study of donations, authors Marianne Bertrand, Matilde Bombardini, Raymond Fisman, Brad Hackinen, and Francesco Trebbi describe corporate philanthropy as a hall of mirrors.

They write that their research ‘robustly’ shows ‘that non-profits are more likely to comment on the same regulation as their donors, and that this “co-commentary” is most strongly associated with donations in the year immediately preceding the comments’.

In short, a donation leads to a 76% chance of a shift in commentary.

And sometimes the influence is even more direct. We can see this trend illustrated most clearly through one of its worst examples: The Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The non-profit, which has raised around $2 billion, has been plagued with accusations of conflicts of interest, cash for favours, and a lack of transparency. One employee claimed he could point to over 500 conflicts of interest at the foundation.

The foundation’s annual event is described as a place for ‘showcasing opportunities’, a place where a member can publicise their philanthropy to the ‘nearly 1,000 members of the media [who] are on-site at the Annual Meeting each year to report on the accomplishments of CGI members’.

To attend this event you have to pay a $20,000 membership fee.

McGoey writes, ‘it’s an annual extravaganza permitting donors to announce vast donations secure in the knowledge that a promise is not exactly a binding commitment. There is no global cabal of philanthropic bounty hunters, making sure CGI attendees make good on their pledges’.

And some of the motivations of the foundation’s donors are crystal clear.

Mining magnate Frank Guistra travelled with Clinton around developing nations on a philanthropic mission. Clinton brought the contacts and Guistra brought the MD-87 private jet. In Kazakhstan – which holds 20% the worlds oil reserves – Clinton and Guistra happened to dine with the then president, Nursultan Nazabayev. And they happened to discuss Guistra’s mining interests. Three days later a $450 million deal was announced which ‘stunned the mining industry’.

Later Clinton and Gustra met the president of Columbia, Alvaro Uribe. Soon after a $250 million oil venture deal was struck with a shell company that had links to Guistra.

If this is philanthropy it is extremely rewarding, and I imagine most people don’t dream of securing multi-million dollar contracts while they’re volunteering to feed homeless people.

More and more corporations are cutting out the middle man and starting their own foundations so that they can ‘philanthropise’ directly. Which accounts for that rise in private foundations we talked about earlier.

One of the worst offenders is Walmart. Its ‘foundation’ lobbies against higher taxes, contributes to political candidates and think tanks and supports the privatisation of education. It’s has been accused of illegally lobbying in areas it wants Walmart to expand into.

So when it comes to Coca-Cola, Jennie-O, big food, Walmart, oil ventures, mining interests, and global chemical companies, let’s call a spade a spade and call it what it is. It’s not philanthropy, it’s lobbying. Often indirect lobbying, but lobbying all the same.

In fact, an old 1946 lobbying act describes a lobbyist as: ‘any person who shall engage himself for pay or for any consideration for the purpose of attempting to influence the passage or defeat of any legislation by the Congress of the United States’.

What corporations have discovered is that influence is much more influential and much more hidden when they take their cash a bit more upstream, away from Congress and into the court of public opinion.

I want to turn now to how the narratives financed by corporate cash function to support the status quo, resist change, and boost profits.

The narratives hang together with the help of a couple of threads we can see running through MrBeast’s videos:

• First, the narrative tends to feel good to people, has a feel-good factor
• Second, the narrative tends to give the impression that the current way of doing business is fine and that they – the elites – have got this covered

Take a look at this campaign from Dominoes Pizza – paving for pizza. It went viral in 2018, when dominoes committed to filling pot holes around America, telling its customers that the holes ruin your delicious pizza en-route. The campaign got picked up by endless websites and news outlets who eagerly displayed the images of trucks with the Dominoes logo, filling holes again with the Dominoes logo, next to signs with the Dominoes logo.

As Bernie Sanders complained at the time, coverage usually happened to sidestep or ignore the question of why there were so many potholes in the first place.

Author Anand Giridharadas told Fast Company that roads should be ‘a pretty open and shut case for government. We don’t need pizza companies to build roads. We need pizza companies to pay their workers enough, and pay their taxes’.

He continued, ‘they use the do-gooding to undermine the idea of solving these problems together. It’s not just like subsidizing a road. At some point, on some panel somewhere, [their road paving] will then be used to say it’s better to keep taxes low: ‘It’s better to have government not do a lot, that the private sector can step up.”

Giridharadas makes an incisive point. The basic premise of supplying public goods is that, unfortunately, it is work. Coming together, paying taxes, solving problems comes at a cost in time and resources that, as an investment, pays dividends for a community later on.

The community chips in taxes and everyone reaps the benefits equally.

Of course, when this is left to private individuals it leaves a massive question mark as to whether these services will be supplied to everyone equally, rather than just for the roads that dominoes happen to need for profit.

MrBeast’s sponsorship rely on the same logic. They have to be entertaining, have a feel-good factor, they have to get views. When in reality, difficult problems like global warming, labour rights, not needing a handout at thanksgiving – is not always fun, and can’t always be fun-washed and turned into entertaining spectacle.

It often leaves commentors like this one feeling like they’ve contributed to solving a problem just by clicking like and sitting through an advert.

And it gives the impression that problems can be solved on a win-win basis, a positive sum game, where we can use the market to exchange our way out of all difficulties and all make a profit, where I will only give change to a homeless person if I get something in return, where I must be entertained to do philanthropy, where I only donate in return for sponsorship deals, and I only support causes that align with my interests.

Economist Fred Hirsch called this the ‘commercialization effect’, when the introduction of commercial mechanisms into an idea or an object or a relationship changes the nature of that thing.

Philosopher Michael Sandel points to examples like hiring friends for the day, paying for best man speeches, auctioning off college admissions, and selling adverting on police cars and ambulances. Commercialising certain things that are meant to be based on such old-fashioned stuff like values, fairness, and meaning twists and changes that thing beyond recognition. You can’t buy a friend – a friend means something deeper.

Economist Fred Hirsch, who coined the term, said that the commercialization effect was ‘the effect on the characteristics of a product or activity of supplying it exclusively or predominantly on commercial terms rather than on some other basis—such as informal exchange, mutual obligation, altruism or love, or feelings of service or obligation’.

When philanthropy is commercialised in this way it has to drain it of important questions, conceal any unfavourable elements, and draw out the feel-good factor. Should these things really make us feel good? Or should they make us feel guilty? Lazy? Spur us into action? Rather than escapism? What happens when a story that needs the limelight is not a feel-good story? What happens if it’s depressing? Violent? Difficult?

When corporations are motivated by profit to support philanthropic causes that only align with their motives, and then partner with the media in a way that anaesthetises the problem to make everyone feel good, then of course the more difficult, boring, academic, less well-funded solutions get crowded out. Who wants to read about plastic pollution when they can watch a MrBeast video? Which leads to the second phenomenon that ties the narrative together. What I’ll call the ‘Big Man’ effect.

The new philanthrocapitalists – from Carnegie and Rockefeller to Clinton, MrBeast, Coca-Cola and Jennie-O – lead us to an important question: where’s the line between altruism and self-interest? And does it matter?

In the 1960s anthropologists studying tribes in Papa New Guinea discovered a phrase the tribespeople had: the ‘big man’.

They found that the tribe leaders had become well-known and respected for one skill in particular: giving gifts.

This giving created a unique type of economy: one where who gave gifts to whom and when acted as a type of exchange for reputation and power.

‘The aim of the “big man”’, the anthropologist Chris Gregory reported, ‘is to acquire a large body of people (gift-debtors) who are obligated to him’.

Another anthropologist Marcel Mauss looked at these studies in his influential essay ‘the gift’. He argued that giving gifts was a type of power: it increased the gift-giver’s prestige.

The absolutist ruler of France King Louis XIV, known for his extravagant palace and spending, was also a generous supporter of the arts.

One of his contemporaries wrote of Louis that ‘let him who wants, or rather who will be able to do so in a worthy fashion, speak of the wisdom of this great King who provided the life of grace to so many souls by this holy zeal, his patience, his gentleness, his gifts, by laws as salutary as they are just’.

Louis created a cult of personality, becoming known as the Sun King, the centre of France’s universe. He commissioned busts and portraits of himself and supported ballet, theatre, and music that functioned as royal propaganda.

Louis knew that in the eyes of the public, more than anything, it was more important how one looked.

His gifts, like the leaders of tribes in Papa New Guinea, established prestige.

His people were his children, look after by a benevolent benefactor.

Oscar Wilde wrote a famous essay critiquing charity that was really about prestige.

He complained about how the so-called benevolence of wealthy Victorian industrialists was a means to compensate for their harsh labour practices. He wrote that ‘the best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious. They are quite right to be so … Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it’.

The French poet Baudelaire saw through this two. In a short story about a man giving a counterfeit coin to a beggar he wrote that his ‘aim had been to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal; to earn forty cents and the heart of God; to win paradise economically; in short to pick up gratis the certificate of a charitable man’.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida also saw that gifts were full of double meanings. They can be remedies, selfless, self-interested, calculated, even poisonous and double-edged.

Does this mean we should look at MrBeast videos like this cynically, as always motivated by self-interest? Not necessarily. As Derrida saw, we have multiple overlapping, sometimes contradictory motivations. But we should always try and demystify what those motivations are. MrBeast is not solving a homeless problem. Homelessness will never be solved this way. In fact, wha’ts commercialised in videos like this is our fascination with just how unlikely this is to happen. Of course we can’t help clicking on a video like this, of course we’re curious, because it’s such a singular event, such a one-off, so astronomically improbable that we just have to see the reaction.

But when it comes to widespread, structural, social issues like pollution, homelessness, poverty, and hunger, philanthropy like this doesn’t cut it. The gifts, when caught up in a web of PR, misdirection, and whitewashing, have the same effect as placing a little band aid over – just enough to mask it, just enough to boost image, to make everyone involved look good, without ever addressing the underlying problem.

In The German Ideology, Marx wrote that ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas’.

Of course corporations with deep pockets want to be associated with fun youtubers who won’t ask too many questions, of course they want to look like they’re solving problems and acting benevolently in everyone’s interest. Capitalist mythology creates a kind of modern priestly figure – a feel-good entertainer, a generous big man, crafted by profit, image, PR, and spectacle – someone that ‘gets stuff done’, that doesn’t need the government or the community and could do it all for clicks, views, and likes. The new philanthrocapitalism creates the impression that the elite, their flashy robots and technology, have everything under control.

In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes comments on the French priest Abbe Pierre, who became a famous household media figure in France in the post-war period.

Barthes wrote that he was interested in the enormous consumption of media about him by the public.

He said the public ‘no longer having access to the real experience of apostleship except through the bric-a-brac associated with it, and getting used to acquiring a clear conscience by merely looking at the shop-window of saintliness; and I get worried about a society which consumes with such avidity the display of charity that it forgets to ask itself questions about its consequences, its uses and its limits. And I then start to wonder whether the fine and touching iconography of the Abbé Pierre is not the alibi which a sizeable part of the nation uses in order, once more, to substitute with impunity the signs of charity for the reality of justice’.

Michael Edwards, a former executive of the Ford Foundation, has become a critic of the new philanthrocapitalist mentality. He argues that, amongst other things, it’s eroding support for government spending on public services. And it’s simply never going to replace us coming together to solve problems democratically.

In 2020, the Gates Foundation – of course, the biggest of them all – spent $5 billion. The US government budget is almost $7 trillion.

In fact, there are 1.4 million registered non-profits in America. Most of them – about 73% – have budgets under $500,000.

McGooey writes that Edwards and other outspoken critics ‘point out that private philanthropy is no substitution for hard-fought battles over labour laws and social security, in part because philanthropy can be retracted on a whim, while elected officials, at least in theory, have citizens to answer to’.

On the one hand, wealthy PR departments support entertaining videos, ad campaigns and spend a fortune on lobbying, while on the other they precise over an economy that by many measures is getting worse. Today, the share of young people running their own business has fallen by two thirds since the 1980s. Low wage work has declined. And the income of the bottom half has stayed exactly the same while the rich have gotten immeasurably richer. Health outcomes for many groups are declining, mental health problems are becoming an epidemic, and there’s a stark divide between wealthier cities and left-behind rural areas.

Angel Gurría from the OECD wrote that elite figures like to focus on convenient issues that side line ‘rising inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities; the growing disconnect between finance and the real economy; mounting divergence in productivity levels between workers, firms and regions; winner-take-most dynamics in many markets; limited progressivity of our tax systems; corruption and capture of politics and institutions by vested interests; lack of transparency and participation by ordinary citizens in decision-making; the soundness of the education and of the values we transmit to future generations’.

He says that they’ve found a variety of ways to ‘change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all’.

Giridharads writes in his book Winners Take All that the elite charade that they’re changing the world ‘improves the image of the winners. With its private and voluntary half-measures, it crowds out public solutions that would solve problems for everyone, and do so with or without the elite’s blessing’.

And money loves a man-of-the-people-image, a self-made man, that through grit and hard work can make it in the same system they’ve made it in. You can see the same logic playout on Fox News, which has styled itself as the defender of the working class.

To be associated the authenticity of MrBeast, his everyday Davy Crockett appeal, is, for corporations, priceless. Add to that the feel-good factor and viewers come away with the impression that they’ve helped enact change, that in helping others we can have our cake and eat it too.

Political theorist Jodi Dean has talked about how many types of online ‘participation’ like petitions, likes, surveys and social comments become depoliticizing because they create a fantasy of participation and change. She writes that ‘weirdly, then, the circulation of communication is depoliticising, not because people don’t care or don’t want to be involved, but because we do! Or put more precisely, it is depoliticizing because the form of our involvement ultimately empowers those it is supposed to resist’. As Michael Sandel puts it, other values, other solutions, other forms of organisation, get ‘crowded out’.

But the ethics of helping others, the difficult work of addressing hard problems, and the dry deliberation and research of politics, cannot be reduced to an exchange for entertainment. Morality does not arise from a positive sum exchange. I don’t give a homeless man a penny and expect a little jig. Philanthropy is difficult, it usually comes at a cost, in time, effort, money, and if everything gets turned into a marketable exchange, a commercial venture, motivated by profit and material reward, what happens to the issues, areas, people, and ideas that aren’t polished and content worthy? When we uncritically leave philanthropy in the hands of big tech moguls, Youtube personalities, oil barons, and Clintons, we get shiny robots and a few planted seeds, we get distraction and halls of mirrors, we get spectacle and entertainment, we get empty libraries and more foodbanks and lower wages, we get whitewashing, greenwashing, pinkwashing, funwashing, and youtubewashing.

 

Sources

David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Linsey McGoey, No Such Thing As A Free Gift

Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of the Market

Heale, M. J., The Role of the Frontier in Jacksonian Politics: David Crockett and the Myth of the Self-Made Man

Sharon Kettering, Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France

Stasja Koot & Robert Fletcher, Popular Philanthrocapitalism? The Potential and Pitfalls of Online Empowerment in “Free” Nature 2.0 Initiatives

Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All

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