As someone who writes for a living, having someone jumping into my Google Docs to make sure I haven't written something too abhorrent. It's admittedly one of my least favourite parts of the process—what do you mean someone else has to read and perceive the things I've written, what the hell—and the thought of even being present in the document while someone is scrutinising my work makes me want to vomit.
Which is why I don't know whether to [[link]] applaud or be terrified of YouTuber Beluga, who invited 833,013 people to edit a document titled: "A Hermeneutic Exploration of KSI's 'Thick of It' and its Multilayered Significance'. Which, yeah sure, okay.
The video Beluga posted to YouTube shows him drafting a message that mentions every single person in his server—today I learned that Discord warns you before you try to ping nearly one million people—which read "my school project is due in 10 mins. pls help!!!!!"
Unsurprisingly, it takes absolutely no time at all before over 100 people have already started to flood into the document. It seems like a few people start by trying to help out with some genuine edits—or at the very least make very light changes—before one bozo comes along and simply. Deletes the entire document.
It doesn't stay blank for long though, as it begins to rapidly move through a chaotic series of pasted messages, memes, and nonsensical ramblings. I was able to find people spamming keys to craft Shakespearean scripture such as "HERNOggyjbbjutynubkrnuknukeunf". You know, the good stuff.
I do also, unsurprisingly, spot a slur—which Beluga has dutifully blurred out—and chantings of "HELLO BELUGA". It's after this where things start to get pretty… weird. I get flashbanged by a glimpse of a pregnant emoji, an ASCII art toucan, a horrifyingly realistic minion, before I get flashbanged again by someone writing the word BALLS in a huge font.
The doc ends up growing and growing to over 600 whole-ass pages, [[link]] before Google Docs craps out altogether and throws up a nice error message for Beluga. Overall though, the one-minute video is, for the most part, a surprisingly pleasant mix of wholesome and cursed. At one point, one Google Doc-er calls it the "least chaotic Beluga video"... before being consumed by "SIGMA SKIBIDI DANCE" pasted over and over again.
Glancing over Beluga's other videos though, it defo seems like it might rank a lot lower on the chaos scale than I thought after watching it. The YouTuber's recently uploaded videos like "Giving 841,709 people my Netflix password," "Inviting 851,309 people to a Zoom meeting" and "Wishing 793,159 people a good night". An agent of chaos, both big and small. This is what happens when people remember they have free will.