‘[I’m] not sleeping for 12 days’: How the dangerous chase to gain millions of followers is creating the internet’s extreme-stunt guinea pigs

One of the most interesting recent examples is an Australian YouTuber who goes by the name “Norme”. When it comes to pulling extreme stunts for the views, he’s no new character: He’s reportedly eaten a cactus, as well as gone for more than two hours without blinking. In the past, he tried to break a world record for staying awake for the longest amount of time (a dangerous stunt that medical professionals warned him not to do), which he failed at after about 11 days. Then, in the exact opposite extreme, the streamer slept for over 38 hours on a Twitch live stream. On Instagram, he lays out what he wants with a bio stating plainly, “I want 10m followers pls pls pls.” He’s not alone: Across the web, streamers on YouTube and Twitch will do almost anything to draw the eyes of the internet.

Photo via Norme on YouTube

For his most recent stunt, Norme spent an entire month in complete darkness in a small room. In a dystopian twist, his followers sent him money for various reasons: $10 ensured that “Norme gets food.” If you wanted to spend just $5, he’d do a handstand. For $50, Norme would tape his mouth shut for an hour, and $20 bought him 15 minutes in a straightjacket. As you might imagine, Norme did not seem to be doing well for much of the experiment. He hallucinated about aliens, ripped the drywall down and ate it, and smashed a plastic piano over his head. The next month, he spent days sitting on a toilet, trying to break a world record for that, too... 

Norme is far from the first entertainer who’s tried extreme stunts for attention. All the way back in 1959, a radio DJ named Peter Trip stayed awake for 201 hours (more than 8 days!). By the end of the experiment, he was hallucinating “scurrying mice and kittens” as he entered a nocturnal psychosis. 

More recently though, in 2017, YouTube celeb Mr. Beast spent a full day simply counting to 100,000. His video description read, “I can’t believe I did this.” The entire project took him 40 hours to complete, with his followers watching the whole time. He said he only did the challenge because he was “bored,” and he ended up regretting ever doing it. More than 6.5 million viewers tuned in to watch him doing nothing but counting for hours on end, over the course of two days. Mr. Beast followed the video up the next month with a more daunting challenge to count to 200,000, writing in the video description, “I can’t believe I did this.”
 

Photo via MrBeast on YouTube

Now, in 2024, a streamer named iShowSpeed is constantly gaining attention for a wide variety of stunts. Just this year, he attempted to break the record for the most backflips completed in 24 hours. How’d it go? Well, although the streamer was attempting to backflip 1,001 times, he only got to 660 before calling off the whole thing. He was reportedly temporarily paralyzed… But he does plan on doing the same stunt again at some point in the future, in hopes of breaking the record for real next time. 
 

Streamers are constantly pushing the boundaries, and with followers paying them to do so, there’s no end in sight for creators who want to push the limits. Just tell that to Emilycc, who has been live streaming on Twitch for more than 1,116 days and counting! The creator has been streaming gameplay for more than 3 years straight, and with a record like that, why stop? If you click on her page, she’s still streaming, leaving viewers to peer into her bedroom at any given time of the day. 

Photo via Emilycc on Twitch 

In our lifetimes, we’ll watch as online content creators compete to outdo each other in their bids to capture the internet’s attention. Just like Mr. Beast doubling his counting challenge, or Norme sentencing himself to solitary confinement, streamers know they have to constantly up the ante to keep people glued to their streams. If they act in an extreme enough manner, mainstream news outlets will cover their story, sending even more people to their pages. The youngest generations are glued to this kind of content, and there’s seemingly no limit to what young content creators will do to draw in views from them.