Over the years, that audience has developed an oddly codependent relationship with YouTube. According to Google’s research, the platform is especially popular for young people seeking to de-stress; some 69 percent of Gen Z say they often return to “comfort” channels that they find soothing. The Try Guys, like everyone making a living online, were inevitably shaped by their audience’s desires: They and their fans all had their hands on the Ouija board, and together they conjured a nontoxic brand of masculinity — until Fulmer flicked the lights on, exposing the fantasy.
Seen this way, the video feels more mercenary: Its severe mood was, in part, a performance, meant to reassure a world-historically anxious and distrustful audience that they had not been led astray for the last eight years. This message was far more explicit on the group’s podcast. “You feel like there was a level of trust you had with us, as your favorite hashtag nontoxic boys,” Kornfeld said on a recent episode. “People have called us their comfort channel. Now you have all these questions of: Was it always a lie?”
Maybe that’s why the whole thing felt a bit like a hostage video, as if there were people just offscreen with rifles and high expectations. There sort of were; they just weren’t in the same room. They were on the other side of a camera and miles of fiber-optic cable, scattered across the planet, watching through millions of one-way mirrors, seeking something more than entertainment. And the Try Guys had found themselves in a position where, however shocked and betrayed their audience felt, their own livelihoods depended on appearing equally distressed.
It is often reported that some astonishing share of American children would like to become YouTubers. It’s not hard to imagine kids peering into their screens and seeing something like freedom — the dream of getting paid just for being yourself. Yet the bizarre tone of the Try Guys’ video suggests a more disturbing dynamic: that as young people congregate, separately and alone, seeking comfort from strangers, they are in fact constructing a prison for their idols, one fashioned out of eyeballs, anxiety and BetterHelp ads. Maybe fame has always been this way. But fans’ emotions are no longer filtered through ticket or album sales; they’re heard directly, constantly, at all hours, on all the platforms people visit to generate and extinguish bad feelings in a never-ending cycle. You can imagine Ned Fulmer watching the video, seeing his former friends solemnly tamping down the freshly laid dirt, all in an effort to mollify an audience of strangers, and realizing that however badly he may have messed up, he was also finally free.
Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTube.
Willy Staley is a story editor for the magazine. He last wrote about billionaires.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
