FOIA requests received by federal agencies

It turns out that the machinery of American bureaucratic transparency and the machinery of one man's relentless algorithmic self-promotion have been breathing in perfect synchronisation for nearly a decade, which is either a cosmic joke or evidence that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to what we do with it. The correlation is 0.938, which is to say that MrBeast's subscriber count and the number of FOIA requests filed against the federal government have been moving together with the kind of eerie precision usually reserved for celestial mechanics or coincidences that make you uncomfortable at parties. One wonders what the inverse would look like: a world where people stopped asking the government for documents at precisely the moment a YouTuber stopped convincing teenagers to eat things.

The real explanation is probably far simpler and more depressing than cosmic alignment: both metrics are measuring the same underlying expansion of American digital life. Between 2016 and 2024, internet adoption plateaued but time spent online did not, meaning more people developed both the curiosity to interrogate their government and the habit of watching someone named MrBeast give away money to strangers. FOIA requests rose from roughly 714,000 in 2016 to about 886,000 by 2023, a thirty percent increase, while MrBeast went from four million subscribers to 215 million—a number so large it exceeds the population of Brazil by about 70 million people. Add to this the simple fact that both phenomena accelerated during the pandemic, when everyone was home watching YouTube and apparently becoming more litigious about government transparency, and you have your answer: two completely separate measures of how much time we all suddenly spent online, both riding the same wave of technological saturation.

This is what happens when you have enough data points and enough desperation to find meaning: two unrelated trends become briefly, shockingly correlated, and you have to sit with the knowledge that you might have been the one looking for the pattern all along. The FOIA requests continue. MrBeast's subscriber count continues. Neither has any idea the other exists. Which is somehow the most comforting thing about all of this.