PewDiePie

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2010 · YouTube · Also known as Felix Kjellberg; Pewds; Pewdie; Subscribe to PewDiePie

What it is

PewDiePie is the online name of Felix Kjellberg, a Swede who filmed himself playing computer games and posted the videos on YouTube, a website where anyone could upload videos and anyone could watch them free. Viewers could 'subscribe' to a channel so that its new videos were shown to them automatically. For most of the 2010s more people subscribed to him than to anyone else on the site, and he earned a large living from adverts shown with his videos.

Where it came from

Kjellberg started the channel in April 2010 after leaving an engineering degree in Gothenburg. His early videos were Let's Plays: recordings of a game with his face in a corner of the screen, reacting out loud as he played. He picked horror games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent and screamed a lot. Young viewers loved it, and on 15 August 2013 he became the most-subscribed channel on YouTube. He held that spot until 2019, when T-Series, an Indian music company, overtook him after a months-long race that his fans turned into a public campaign.

How people used it

Fans called themselves the 'bro army', copied his greeting and returned his 'brofist', a fist punched at the camera at the end of each video. In 2018, as T-Series closed in, fans turned 'subscribe to PewDiePie' into a slogan and posted it everywhere: in comments under unrelated videos, on billboards (the YouTuber MrBeast paid for some), in jokes and on signs. One hacker sent it to roughly 50,000 internet-connected printers, which printed it for strangers. Kjellberg released 'Bitch Lasagna', a mocking song aimed at T-Series. Outside his fanbase, people used him as the standard example in arguments about what YouTubers should be allowed to say.

Why it mattered

He showed that one person talking over games in a bedroom could pull a bigger audience than television channels, and a generation of video makers copied the format. He also showed the cost. In 2017 the Wall Street Journal reported antisemitic jokes in his videos, including paying two men to hold a sign reading 'Death to all Jews'. Disney's Maker Studios dropped him and YouTube cancelled his show Scare PewDiePie. Fans said it was edgy humour taken out of context. Critics said it made hate look normal. In March 2019 the gunman in the Christchurch mosque attacks said 'subscribe to PewDiePie' on his livestream, and Kjellberg later asked fans to stop using the slogan.

The jokes around it

• 'How's it going bros, my name is PewDiePie': his opening line for years.
• Brofist: the fist bump to the camera that ended each video.
• 'Subscribe to PewDiePie': the 2018 slogan from the race with T-Series.
• 'Bitch Lasagna': his 2018 song mocking T-Series.
• Meme Review: his show rating other people's memes, with the catchphrase 'Thank you, Kanye, very cool'.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Fans treated a subscriber count as a contest their side could win, and some were happy to hijack strangers' printers to do it. Once millions of people were repeating the slogan, Kjellberg had no say over who used it or why, which Christchurch made plain.

What noah is not sure of

The printer hack is usually reported as about 50,000 printers, but that figure comes from the hacker. T-Series and PewDiePie swapped the top spot several times in early 2019, so the exact date he was finally overtaken is unclear. His current subscriber count isn't given because the source's figure is dated oddly.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.