Eat Until the Algorithm Is Satisfied: The Strange Economics of Watching Strangers Consume Everything
There is a woman on YouTube who just ate four pounds of crab legs and 64 ounces of ramen, and six million people watched her do it. Nobody is entirely sure why. The performance of having too much — too much food, too many packages, too much money, too much stuff — has become one of the defining content formats of our era, and the platforms enabling it are making an absolute fortune off our collective fascination.