PewDiePie vs T-Series

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

Originated 2018 · YouTube · Also known as Subscribe to PewDiePie; Sub 2 PewDiePie; Sub to PewDiePie; Unsubscribe from T-Series

What it is

A contest over a number. YouTube was a website where anyone could upload videos, and viewers could 'subscribe' to a channel to follow it. The site showed every channel's subscriber count publicly. In 2018 and 2019 the most-subscribed channel, run by a Swedish entertainer called Felix Kjellberg under the name PewDiePie, was being caught by T-Series, an Indian record label that uploaded Bollywood music videos. His fans spent months trying to keep him ahead.

Where it came from

PewDiePie had been the most-subscribed channel since August 2013. In the second half of 2018 T-Series, which uploaded several videos a day for a huge and fast-growing Indian audience, closed the gap. Kjellberg made it a running joke in his videos and in October 2018 released 'Bitch Lasagna', a diss track (a song written to insult a rival). Other well-known YouTubers joined in, and the slogan spread off the site onto billboards, clothes and hacked devices. T-Series first passed him briefly in February 2019 and for good on 14 April 2019.

Why it mattered

Fans framed it as one bloke who made his own videos against a corporation that churned out uploads, and for months it gave a large, young audience a shared cause and a running joke. It also had an ugly side, with some supporters treating it as a fight against India. On 15 March 2019 the gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, said 'subscribe to PewDiePie' in his livestream of the attack. Kjellberg said he was sickened, and on 28 April 2019 asked fans to end the campaign.

What noah thinks it shows about us

A public number on a website was enough to make millions of people pick a side and act on it, from buying billboards to breaking into strangers' printers. It also shows how a slogan repeated as a joke can be taken up by someone who means harm, and how little the original crowd could do about it.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.