If you are in any way connected to Internet culture, you have probably heard of the massive subscriber race for the number one spot on YouTube between PewDiePie and T-Series that has been going on for the last few months. It's even got its own Wikipedia page and was featured on ESPN at the latest Super Bowl.
If you have no clue what's going on, the short version is this: T-Series, an Indian record company/ media conglomerate, was predicted to pass PewDiePie, a comic Swedish expat named Felix Kjelberg, in subscriber count in the fall of 2018, which spurred a massive call-to-arms to keep PewDiePie the most subscribed channel on YouTube. Since then, there has been a massive push for subscribers from a variety of people on and off YouTube to keep PewDiePie on top, while T-Series' numbers have grown commensurately. At the time of this writing, the official counts put the sub counts of each channel at over 1% of the world's population.
In the grand scheme of things, this is largely pointless. India, where T-series is based, is a BRIC country with an emerging market with more people coming online every day, looking for their favorite music videos. They will eventually surpass PewDiePie, whose mostly first-world English speaking audience is pretty much saturated, especially after the latest massive subscriber push.
At the same time, it isn't pointless. At the surface, this conflict provides entertainment to millions of people on both sides. Is it manufactured beef? Maybe, but the burger still tastes good. Also, millions of eyeballs equals big advertising dollars through pop-up ads, merch, and sponsorships.
Going deeper, choosing a side and fighting for it gives some people a much needed sense of belonging. It gives people a common goal to fight for. There have been and will continue to be thousands of spin-off creations based on this conflict. At r/PewDiePieSubmissions, a common language of memes and quotes has emerged, linking people from all over the world towards the goal of increasing that sub gap. Outside of the main goal, it provides a platform for people to help people.
At its heart, this is a battle for the soul of the Internet. While PewDiePie has been called everything from a Nazi to the Clown Prince of YouTube to Emperor of the Internet, he is the personification of what the human beings on YouTube want YouTube to be - one guy making cool stuff that could never have a chance on network television.* T-Series, on the other hand, is representative of the many corporate entities who use YouTube only to re-upload stuff they already sold somewhere else for a little extra ad revenue.
YouTube is one of the last bastions of the independent creator. Instagram is dominated by models, Twitter and Snapchat by celebrities, Reddit and Facebook by advertisers. The point of this pointless battle is to prove that ordinary people still have agency and power in the Internet sphere, that the Web is still for the people, by the people, and of the people, rather than in service to either our lord and savior Google or the smattering of other massive legacy media companies that continue to encroach on online spaces. These large companies are slowly realizing that billions of eyeballs are interested in short-form multimedia and, like a mold consuming an orange, are visibly encroaching on what most people still want to see as a user-controlled platform.
What PewDiePie represents is an experience minus the levels of abstraction that come from media produced by larger companies**. It's been proven over the years that, while people enjoy highly scripted, choreographed programs, what people really want is reality. What YouTube promises is that a dude with a camera can share his life with millions without passing through the filters of producers, executives, censors, special effects artists, hair and makeup people, a studio audience, and a legal team.
It comes down to this: I want the Internet to be for human beings at both the creator and the consumer end. I'm already being manipulated by thousands of advertisements and hundreds of algorithms every day, and I want to know that at at least one point in the process, a human being did something with an intention that was not to sell me something.
So join the Nine-year-old Army. Become a Bro. Subscribe to PewDiePie. And push back the tsunami of de facto corporatocracy for a little longer. Because it doesn't really matter - but the principle of the thing does.
*While the channel started as just one guy, at this point, there are at least 5 people that I know of working on the channel on a consistent basis - Felix, his girlfriend, two editors, and an agent/manager.
**This lack of abstraction is part of what leads to individual creators (on podcasts, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube) getting some of the highest ad rates per thousand eyeballs (CPM) and some of the highest sale conversion rates as compared to "traditional" media.
