The Aesthetics of Commodities
Description:
MrBeast gives away millions – and earns even more. Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s book *Critique of Commodity Aesthetics* provides the theory behind it: appearance trumps reality, even when the commodity is a human being.
What MrBeast has to do with commodity aesthetics – and why Wolfgang Fritz Haug predicted it
Commodity aesthetics is not some dusty Marxist concept from the lecture hall. It is a theory that explains why billions of people watch a man give away money, whilst being the product themselves.
Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, is the world’s most-subscribed YouTuber. Over 450 million subscribers, an estimated fortune of 2.6 billion dollars, an empire of chocolate bars, reality shows, fast-food chains and, soon, possibly banking services. And yet: what exactly is he selling? What are his viewers buying? And why does it work so alarmingly well – particularly with young people?
The Berlin philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug provided an answer in his book *Critique of Commodity Aesthetics* (1971), long before YouTube existed. His theory describes how capitalism exploits the sensory surface of commodities – thereby generating desire that has little to do with their actual utility value. MrBeast is the most consistent expression of this principle in the digital age: a person who has turned himself into a commodity.
What is commodity aesthetics? An introduction to Haug’s theory
The fundamental problem: appearance trumps reality
Haug begins with a simple observation from Marx’s Capital: every commodity has a use value (what it is used for) and an exchange value (what it costs). In a capitalist market society, use-value increasingly takes a back seat – what counts is the sale. And what is sold is not what a commodity is, but how it appears.
Haug puts it succinctly: “Appearance becomes as important – and in fact more important – than reality for the completion of the act of purchase.” What looks, smells, sounds or feels good is bought. What is actually good but does not look the part remains on the shelf. This shift from reality to appearance – that is the core of commodity aesthetics.
That sounds trite. We know that advertising lies. But Haug goes deeper: it is not just about lies. It is about a systematic restructuring of sensory perception. The aesthetics of the commodity – its visual, haptic, and emotional surface – becomes a means of production in its own right. The design, the packaging, the advertising: all of this is not mere trappings, but the core of the capitalist process.
The role of advertising
In Haug’s analysis, advertising is not merely information. It is the instrument through which exchange value takes control of sensory appearance. Advertising stages a use-value that does not necessarily exist – it promises it. The buyer buys the promise, not the product.
Haug spoke of ‘courting’: advertising seduces, entices, and reflects to the consumer an image of themselves that they like. The product appears as a solution to needs that the advertising itself has first awakened—a self-perpetuating cycle.
Wolfgang Fritz Haug was familiar with this mechanism from the world of Fordist mass consumption: cars, cigarettes, washing powder. What he did not know – because it did not yet exist – was the digital attention economy, in which the commodity is no longer a product, but a person.
Commodity Aesthetics in High-Tech Capitalism
In 2009, Haug expanded his book with a second part: Commodity Aesthetics in High-Tech Capitalism. In it, he analyses how globalised brands and digital platforms have radicalised the original mechanism. Companies such as Google or Facebook – still in their infancy at the time – were, for him, examples of a new logic of circulation: it is no longer the physical product that takes centre stage, but the infrastructure of attention itself.
What Haug was not yet able to describe was that the influencer economy takes this process to the extreme by turning the person themselves into an aestheticised commodity.
MrBeast as a case study: the commodification of the self
From YouTuber to brand
Jimmy Donaldson began making YouTube videos at the age of 13. His rise to global phenomenon is no coincidence, but the result of a radically data-driven process. His team analyses millions of videos, scientifically measures success factors, and anticipates trends. The legendary Squid Game video – 500 million views – appeared six weeks after the launch of the Netflix series. Not instinct, but precision.
But what does MrBeast actually sell? At first glance: entertainment. People receive money, houses, and medical procedures. The viewer gets caught up in the excitement, rejoices, and shares. Yet on closer inspection, the product isn’t the giving away of money. The product is MrBeast himself – his generosity, his charisma, his name. And that is precisely commodity aesthetics in its purest digital form.
The appearance of generosity
Haug described how advertising stages a promise that the product is supposed to fulfil. In MrBeast’s case, the promise is: generosity, authenticity, community. A billionaire who gives rather than takes—a star who is there for his fans.
Yet behind the aesthetic façade of this generosity lies a cycle of capital. Every giveaway video generates views; views generate advertising revenue; advertising revenue funds the next, more spectacular stunt, the next brand, the next deal. The school lunch box (Lunchly, criticised by nutritionists as ‘abhorrent marketing’) follows the same logic as Haug’s analysis of the commodity gift: the gift appears selfless, but is an instrument of brand loyalty.
MrBeast himself has laid bare the maths: a video costs $3–4 million to produce, perhaps bringing in $1.25 million in direct YouTube revenue. The deficit is worth it – if, afterwards, just 1% of the 250 million viewers buy a $3 chocolate bar. The appearance of extravagance is the world’s most efficient sales tool.
Personality as an aesthetic monopoly on utility
Haug has described the concept of the brand as an ‘aesthetic monopoly on utility’: the brand monopolises a specific sensory quality, making it unmistakable. MrBeast is the perfect example. The name stands for an aesthetic experience – wonder, escalation, emotional overwhelm – that no other channel can reproduce, because it is inextricably linked to the body, the voice and the face of Jimmy Donaldson.
This persona is not ‘authentic’ in the naive sense. It is optimised. The speaker, who articulates with a touch of drama to create shock value (linguists analyse this ‘influencer accent’ as a deliberate manipulation of attention), uses the thumbnails with the gaping mouth – a visually ingrained signal of excitement. The– all of this is commodity aesthetics: the careful crafting of a human appearance for exchange value.
What young people really consume
This is particularly significant for young people, who are MrBeast’s primary target audience. In his lecture in Hamburg, Haug asked: “How does someone change who constantly receives what they desire – but receives it, above all, as an illusion?” Today, this question strikes at the very heart of a generation that has grown up with algorithmic feeds.
Young people do not consume MrBeast merely for entertainment. They consume a model of success, generosity and masculinity. A model whose aesthetic surface is deliberately designed to feel like friendship, like community, like something genuine. What is actually being conveyed: brand loyalty, willingness to buy, and – in the case of Lunchly or crypto promotions – direct financial exploitation of a predominantly teenage fanbase.
Attention as a commodity: Zuboff, Han and the logic of platform capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism
The connection between Haug’s commodity aesthetics and the digital present becomes clearer when one draws on Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism. For Zuboff, it is users’ behavioural data – their clicks, their dwell time, their scrolling – that has become the actual raw commodity. The platform is the instrument of extraction.
From this perspective, MrBeast is not a creator using a platform. He is the most efficient extractor within this system. His videos are precisely optimised to generate maximum attention – and thus maximum data. “In an attention economy, the person who attracts the most attention can write their own rules,” is how those close to him put it. That is no exaggeration. It is a sober description of the power structure of platform capitalism.
Byung-Chul Han’s Society of Fatigue
Byung-Chul Han describes a society that exploits itself: the subject of the meritocracy is his own entrepreneur, his own slave-driver. MrBeast embodies this logic in its most extreme form – he has turned it into a business model. The obsessive self-optimisation that Han describes is not a symptom in Donaldson’s case, but a strategy. And the audience consumes this spectacle as inspiration.
This is the true psychological function of the MrBeast aesthetic: it does not merely sell products. It sells a worldview in which radical capitalism and radical generosity form a natural unity. In which exploitation and philanthropy are not a contradiction. This is commodity aesthetics at the level of ideology.
Bernays’ legacy: advertising as psychological infrastructure
Edward Bernays, the founder of modern PR, understood advertising as the psychological infrastructure of capitalist society. It is not arguments, but images and emotions that shape desire. MrBeast has digitised and personalised this principle: he is the advertisement, the product, and the infrastructure. The separation between content and advertising has been completely dissolved.
The blind spots of the critique – and what Haug has overlooked
Not every criticism of Haug is wrong. The art historian Wolfgang Ullrich has objected that Haug portrays consumers as passive victims of commodity aesthetics, without considering the possibility of conscious appropriation. Indeed, there are MrBeast viewers who see through his calculations—and enjoy it all the same—irony as a distancing mechanism.
Yet this criticism falls short in the digital context. The algorithm cannot be compared to the conscious consumer of 1971. Anyone who watches a YouTube video for a second longer has already signalled their interest. Anyone who clicks on a thumbnail has already contributed. The commodity aesthetics of the 21st century operate below the threshold of consciousness – in reflexes that precede judgement.
What Haug actually failed to see: the possibility that the person themselves could become a commodity in their entirety. His analysis focused on products, brands and design objects. The MrBeast phenomenon – a person who stages his own inner life, his generosity, his supposed authenticity as an aesthetic surface – goes beyond what Haug described. It is commodity aesthetics of the second order: it is not the commodity that looks beautiful, but the person selling it.
What does all this have to do with us
There is a strong temptation to treat MrBeast as an exceptional phenomenon. As a hyper-optimal special case that one can admire or reject, but which says nothing about ourselves.
That would be a mistake.
MrBeast is not the cause, but the symptom. The symptom of a society in which attention is the decisive resource, in which personality becomes a brand, in which the boundary between being and appearance – Haug’s crucial distinction – is systematically blurred. A society in which young people learn to present themselves as personal brands long before they understand what that means.
Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s book *Critique of Commodity Aesthetics* was published in 1971. It analysed chocolate, tobacco and washing powder. Yet its central question is more relevant than ever: what happens to a society that continually buys appearance for reality – and eventually forgets that there is a difference?
MrBeast is the answer. And it is more uncomfortable than his videos suggest.
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