brik] is willing to try and make things right. He just might not know how at this time in his life.”
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OBRIK SAYS WITTEK’S ACCIDENT was the first time that he considered the “power dynamics” at the heart of his content. In discussing the incident with Vlog Squad member Todd Smith, Dobrik says, Smith confessed that he’d actually been jealous of Wittek, because his own wakeboarding stunt that day had been less extreme. “You want to be able to put on a bigger show, and it can get really dangerous because you get lost in it,” Dobrik says. “It was just like, ‘How can I make this bigger and better than the last thing?’ ” Dobrik frequently uses the term “power dynamics” to describe the culture he’s built — specifically, whether the nature of his brand or his audience has led people to doing things they would otherwise not feel comfortable doing. He says that when he started his career, he was uncomfortable asking people to appear in his videos. Then he saw it was the other way around: “People wanted to be in them, and they would do anything they could to be in them, and almost lose their sense of what’s right in front of the camera. Their eyes would glaze over, and they’d be like, ‘I’m down for whatever.’ And I didn’t realize that. The power dynamic is really real, and it sucks that I realized it this way, and I wish I’d learned about it in a different way.” He stares off into the distance. “I don’t know,” he says. “It could’ve been so avoided.” The absence of regulation or accountability is an issue that does not apply to Dobrik alone, but to the creator ecosystem in general. It is a large and sprawling industry with few safeguards and little oversight, dominated primarily by very young people whose livelihoods depend on their ability to monetize their increasingly outrageous behavior. “I’ve represented hundreds of influencers, and the public expects them to have a more advanced moral compass, but the reality is a lot of these guys are still learning,” says Viral Nation’s Gagliese. “It troubles me that sometimes they get into situations where they [could] use advice from someone who’s been through it and understands having that power, and a lot of times that’s not available. Everything they say, they get a yes to, because everyone benefits from their social media or wants to be their friend because they’re famous.” In the aftermath of these controversies, Dobrik intends to implement a system to ensure no one gets hurt doing his vlogs. He will start having people sign consent forms and appearance releases, which his mother told me she’d been begging him to do all along. He’ll also hire something akin to an HR department, so people can go to them with complaints if they are uncomfortable with something they are asked to do. Of his channel, he says, “it was just like a backyard production that got really serious and really big pretty quickly. And [then] it was no longer a backyard production, and had the eyeballs of the network show without the network backup.” Now, he hopes to institute that backup. During his hiatus, Dobrik says, he has also reached out to Zeglaitis’ alleged victims, including Hardesty, who says Dobrik apologized to her in person in April for continuing to publicly support Zeglaitis after she made her video. She says his apology seemed sincere. “I told him he has more power than he realizes, and the things he does people look up to him for,” she says. “I do think this has been a huge lesson for him.” Going forward, Dobrik plans to lean away from the pranks and stunts (with an excep-
tion, apparently, reserved for ROLLING STONE reporters). He says he wants to come back, though he understands why many people may not want him to. “I’d want me to go away too if I knew I was a bad person,” he says. “But I do think I’m a good person who’s made mistakes.” But all the HR systems and appearance releases in the world will not solve the central problem of Dobrik and others like him making money off a platform that rewards those who are motivated by the central question of how to make something bigger and better than the last thing. Giving away Teslas, blasting flamethrowers, staging fivesomes for your horny friend — these are all, thematically, very different types of videos, but they are essentially multiple sides of the same Rubik’s cube, all bombastic gestures intended to capture the attention of an increasingly distractible online audience. And not even the cancellation of David Dobrik can change the fact that his brand of content — the pranks, the stunts, the thrill of knowing someone is going to be genuinely surprised, or the schadenfreude that comes with knowing someone is genuinely uncomfortable — is one of the motors that keeps YouTube up and running. “It’s this weird scenario where us, the audience, thrives on that type of content,” Gagliese says. “Which is an interesting dynamic because [we]as an audience shouldn’t be interested in that type of content. But it’s what makes people watch. . . . [YouTubers’ lives have] been consumed by creating these opportunities to film content, and the prank culture on social puts people in a bad position. So as long as there’s demand, even if David Dobrik doesn’t do it, there’ll be 20 other YouTubers lined up to do that stuff right after.”
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N THE WAY HOME from Dobrik’s old house, we pass a young girl standing in the road, maybe about nine or 10, panhandling to raise money for her cancer treatment. For a split second, it occurs to me that, in light of the elderly lady prank, Dobrik may have planted this girl in order to give her a Tesla or an iPad or an offer to pay for her treatment. But this turns out not to be the case. Dobrik drives off, and no one comments on it. Later, by Dobrik’s infinity pool, I ask if he saw the girl. “I wanted to give that person money, but I didn’t want to do it in front of you,” he says. “It’s so easy for me to give somebody cash, so easy, so easy. [So] whenever I can, I do that. . . . I did that thing with you, that was supposed to be cheesy and goofy,” he says, referring to the old lady stunt, “but I didn’t want to look like I was putting on some kind of a performance.” I tell him that it’s incredibly disorienting to view everything someone does as performance, and offer that it must be exhausting to have that calculus factor into all of your decisions. “That’s the entire internet,” he says. “Every move now is like, ‘I don’t want people to think I’m doing this for this.’ You’ll never, ever get people to believe that your intentions are 100 percent pure. You never, never will. And they can be 100 percent pure, and you’ll make fucking mistakes, and maybe it’ll look like they weren’t pure. But you’ll never convince anybody of that.” “Everyone likes to look at a car crash,” he says later. “That’s just like a guilty pleasure that everyone has. You drive by. You’re like, ‘Is that fucking person dead? What’s going on?’ That’s what the internet is. People love to see chaos. And it’s all fun and games till you’re in the car crash.” Then he tears up. And I have no idea whether or not to believe him.
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