What Casey Neistat really reveals about David Dobrik, digital creators—and the algorithm

This story is part of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business 2022. Explore the full list of innovators who broke through this year—and had an impact on the world around us.

In an early scene in Casey Neistat’s Under the Influence, his 2022 documentary about online celebrity, his subject, David Dobrik—then one of the top-10 stars on YouTube—films one of the complicated, high-wire stunts that made him famous. A man elevated by a jet of water tries to make a long-range basketball shot in a lush Los Angeles backyard while not losing his balance. Even as he fails repeatedly, Dobrik propels him higher. Neistat captures take after take, the tension rising as if this is a horror film. Finally, after several hours, the ball goes through the hoop and Dobrik returns the drenched shooter to earth. Dobrik then looks straight into Neistat’s camera, and with a grin, tells him that when he posts the video, they’ll say he nailed it on the first try. It’s a revealing moment exposing the artifice of Dobrik’s popular video blog, and Neistat knew how to capture it perfectly, because only a few years earlier, Neistat was a YouTube star, making zany viral videos of himself.

There have been several documentaries about YouTube’s power, but there’s only one from a filmmaker who was once one of the global video platform’s brightest stars. “My ambition was to tell that story from the inside,” says Neistat, who became a star creator after he began posting videos in 2010 that showed off new tech and travel experiences. Today, his channel has 12 million followers and a cumulative 3 billion views. Under the Influence, which debuted at SXSW in March to glowing reviews, harnesses his own experience to chronicle that of Dobrik’s, who emerged as a force on YouTube as Neistat was winding down. Neistat captures Dobrik, a comedic prankster, as he becomes one of YouTube’s most bankable stars—his 18 million subscribers by the end of 2020 translated into 2.7 billion views that year and a reported $15.5 million in earnings—and sticks with the story as two things emerge that halt Dobrik’s fairy-tale rise: his role in enabling an alleged sexual assault by a member of his supporting cast and the injury of another cast member during one of Dobrik’s trademark over-the-top videos.

Even before Dobrik’s public image is shattered in 2021, when these stories come to light, Neistat captures the exploitative reality of what goes into making seemingly effortless video stunts. He lets the camera roll as Dobrik demands 300 takes to get a dangerous shot he wants, a chilling bit of foreshadowing for when Dobrik later flings a friend from an excavator he was swinging from, breaking his face and skull. Neistat presses the brand partners who helped the twentysomething Dobrik become a millionaire on whether there’s anything that would lead them to abandon the sure-thing influencer, capturing their feckless responses. When he presents a Dobrik superfan as the avatar for the star’s audience, he treats her devotion with respect even as he demonstrates that Dobrik may not deserve it. Every choice Neistat makes heightens the stakes for what comes next, a metaphor for how the YouTube algorithm drives creators to push for greater shock value in order to keep garnering views. Neistat and his team are currently deciding on which streaming platform to partner with for Under the Influence‘s release.

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