Over the past few months, you may have heard of the online competition between Youtuber Felix Kjellberg, otherwise known as PewDiePie, and Indian media conglomerate T-Series. It’s a feud that has been seeping out of the Internet since September of 2018, in what may at first glance be seen as an arbitrary battle over who can gain the most Youtube subscribers. Especially if you’re not on Youtube very often, you may consider it to be inconsequential.

You should not think of it this way. In fact you should be following it closely, because it epitomizes a very real phenomenon that you will be affected by in the years to come (if you haven’t been already).

The tactics of crowd sourcing, narrative creation, propaganda, and global inundation that PewDiePie and his supporters have employed to fend off T-Series mirrors perfectly the tactics that have been used by state and non-state actors in real conflicts over the last few years. What you can witness between these two Youtubers is actually a glimpse into the future of warfare: crowd sourced, decentralized, and online.

When Flamewars Become Real

In their book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, Emerson T. Brooking and P.W. Singer argue that in the future, power in war will not just be understood through physical strength or high-tech hardware. It will be also be understood through the power to command attention, and to contest the thoughts and impel the actions of human beings.

The propaganda leaflets dropped over enemy territory in wars gone by have been replaced by the Internet’s tools of mass communication. Now anyone can airdrop leaflets into enemy territory from behind a computer screen.

These tactics also fit neatly alongside what a host of other theorists like John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt argued in a memo for the RAND Corporation and Jeff Giesea explained in It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare.

Trolling. Brigading. Ratioing. Downvoting. Flame warring. Memeing. Every internet user in the world has these tactics has at their fingertips. When employed individually they have negligible impact on the online environment, but when undertaken by millions of people simultaneously, they can produce tangible political change.

The anonymously created God Emperor Trump meme that was part of a wealth of organically created iconography that galvanized Trump’s grassroots support.

Think of ISIS’s propaganda efforts, and the overwhelming grassroots support that elevated Donald Trump to the White House in 2016. Think of how the Russians successfully confused Western policy makers with social media posts when they stole Crimea from the Ukraine, and what relatively small number of paid Russian trolls were able to accomplish by inundating online political spaces in 2016. Or how, in one of the first historical instances of this phenomenon, 4chan and Anonymous coordinated a wave of online and offline attacks against the Church of Scientology in 2008.

These actors mastered, in the words of Brooking and Singer, five key elements:

A powerful sense of community A true sense of authenticity A successful appeal to emotion, typically anger A simple and coherent narrative The inundation of online spaces with focused content

The Battle for the Soul of Youtube

Live subscriber count of PewDiePie versus T-Series

The competition between PewDiePie and T-Series first began in August of 2018. When it was realized that PewDiePie, the ultimate native Youtuber and the platform’s most subscribed channel, would be overtaken by T-Series sometime during October, crisis erupted.

In light of many controversies in recent years involving monetization and copyright policies, alongside an ever-cozier relationship between Youtube and corporate media companies, this galvanized the Youtuber community. Youtube is a site that began in 2005 explicitly about user uploaded videos (TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 was ‘You,’ heralding the era of the individual user being the driver of the Internet’s content).

That era is coming to an end. Youtube is now increasingly dominated by established media companies who populate it with tv and film clips, music, and trailers. The infamous example is the use of Will Smith — who is not a Youtuber — to host Youtube Rewind 2018. Youtube’s very identity is changing, and a native Youtuber being dethroned by a faceless corporation was the final straw for many people.

Your Front Row Seat

Unlike most online struggles that we will witness in the years to come, this conflict has an unambiguous victory condition that you can watch in real time: subscriber count. You can go on Twitter and track the hashtags. You can watch the videos in support of PewDiePie as they’re being released. You can watch as the subscriber gap changes as some major personality throws their support behind one side or a new viral offensive is launched. You can go outside and see a billboard or buy a T-Shirt that says “Subscribe to PewDiePie”. Best of all, you can subscribe yourself.

PewDiePie and T-Series are locked into a battle over who can reach 100 million subscribers first, largely seen as final symbolic threshold that a Youtube channel can conceivably reach.