One day last November, Mitch Japczyk, an administrator at an Illinois staffing agency, was called upon to help solve an office mystery. A handful of his co-workers were huddled around the office printer, where a one-page document had just printed itself out, unprompted. Nobody in the office knew what it meant.

“ATTENTION!” the document began. “PewDiePie is in trouble and he needs your help to defeat T-Series!” It went on to explain that PewDiePie, a 29-year-old Swedish YouTube personality, was in danger of being overtaken as the platform’s most popular channel by T-Series, an Indian music label and Bollywood production studio. In order to prevent this from happening, the author recommended five steps:

1. Unsubscribe from T-Series.

2. Subscribe to PewDiePie.

3. Share awareness to this issue. #SavePewDiePie.

4. Tell everyone you know. Seriously.

5. BROFIST!

Japczyk, now 33, spends more time on YouTube than many of his colleagues and was able to explain the broad strokes: PewDiePie (rhymes with “cutie pie”; real name: Felix Kjellberg) was a YouTube megacelebrity with a group of hard-core fans, known as the Bro Army, who often went to extreme lengths to show their support. But it was only when Japczyk got back to his computer that he realized the scale of the operation. A hacker was claiming responsibility for finding a set of 50,000 printers all over the world with unsecured network connections, taking them over and using them to print these fliers.

The printer hack wasn’t an isolated incident. For months, tributes to PewDiePie had been popping up all over the world. Billboards and fliers appeared in India, Bangladesh and Times Square. Early this year, hundreds of Estonian fans held a parade in the nation’s capital city, chanting his name and holding signs that said “Sub 2 Pewds.” Someone chalked “Subscribe to PewDiePie” on a World War II memorial in Brooklyn.

Like Japczyk’s colleagues at the staffing agency, many people who witnessed these events most likely wrote them off as dumb stunts or random emanations from some Gen Z media universe they weren’t plugged into — which, of course, they were. But as the “Subscribe to PewDiePie” movement grew, its meaning got blurrier. Some people were cheering for PewDiePie because they liked his videos. Other people saw him as the flag-bearer of an older, weirder internet culture that was being steamrollered by bland corporate interests and needed to be defended. And a few had much darker motives.

On March 15, a white nationalist in Christchurch, New Zealand, said, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie” on his Facebook live stream, just before going on a shooting rampage, killing dozens of worshipers inside two mosques. A few weeks later, another violent white nationalist cited PewDiePie, this time in writing. In his manifesto, the suspect — accused of killing one woman and injuring three others at a synagogue in Poway, Calif. — even claimed that the YouTuber aided in the plot. “I had the help of a man named Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg,” wrote the shooting suspect, who, like the Christchurch suspect, has pleaded not guilty. “He was kind enough to plan and fund this whole operation — the sly bastard.”

Just to be abundantly clear: As far as we know, these were both sick jokes. Kjellberg has no connection to either man, and there is zero evidence that their deeds were actually inspired by him. But he was not a randomly chosen target either. For years, Kjellberg has been trying, fairly unsuccessfully, to shed a reputation as a far-right sympathizer. Partly, that’s because a few years ago, he made some Holocaust jokes on his channel, which led to a nuclear-grade backlash. And partly, it’s because Kjellberg responded to being called out for those jokes, and other offensive statements, the way a reactionary might: by mocking his critics, casting himself as the victim of a media smear campaign and refusing to back down.

Modern right-wing extremism is wrapped in so much irony that it’s hard to know what motivates any particular adherent. The suspects in the shootings in Christchurch and Poway might have been casually trolling PewDiePie by mentioning him in the context of mass murder — knowing that it would set off a media frenzy and stall his campaign to rehabilitate his image. They might have been trying to bait reporters into wrongly blaming PewDiePie for the killings. (Which would make those reporters look gullible and out of touch, thereby proving that PewDiePie was right about the media.) They might have just been chaos-loving nihilists. A lot of internet culture exists in this frustrating quantum state — things are either total jokes or total nonjokes, depending on their context and your vantage point.

A few weeks after the Poway shooting, Kjellberg’s publicist called me. Kjellberg hadn’t given an interview in years — a guy with millions of YouTube subscribers has little need for reporters — but in the wake of the shootings, I had asked, and he agreed to talk. People were accusing him of supporting white nationalism again, and he wanted to explain why they were mistaken. I flew to Brighton, the seaside town in Britain where Kjellberg has lived since 2013, and we met at an Airbnb near his house. He showed up a few minutes late, popping out his earbuds to greet me.

“Here we are,” he said.

“Here we are,” I agreed.

In his YouTube videos, Kjellberg is a spring-loaded ball of manic energy — he screams, he curses, he cracks himself up. But in person, he was withdrawn and polite, with the stiff body language of a job applicant. He seemed eager to make a good impression, or at least to appear nonthreatening.

“I’m happy to have this opportunity,” he said unconvincingly.

One crucial thing to understand about YouTube is that there are really two of them. The first YouTube is the YouTube that everyone knows — the vast reference library filled with sports highlights, music videos and old Comedy Central roasts. But there’s a second YouTube inside that one. It is a self-contained universe with its own values and customs, its own incentive structures and market dynamics and its own fully developed celebrity culture that includes gamers, beauty vloggers, musicians, D.I.Y.ers, political commentators, artists and pranksters. The biggest of these personalities have millions of subscribers and Oprah-level influence over their fandoms. Many Inner YouTubers never watch TV and develop elaborate parasocial bonds with their favorite creators. For people who frequent Inner YouTube — generally people under 25, along with some older people with abundant free time — the site is not just a video platform but a prism through which all culture and information is refracted.

I started hanging out on Inner YouTube in earnest a few years ago, and its scale and insularity was jarring at first. Imagine a genetic mutation that gave everyone born after 1995 the ability to see ultraviolet light. Imagine that these people developed an identity around UV light, started calling themselves “UVers” and became suspicious of any media product made exclusively on the visible spectrum. As an old person with normal eyes, you would experience this change as a kind of slow cognitive decline. Every day, as more and more of the world played out in UV, you would struggle to catch glimpses of it. All of a sudden, people would be talking about Area 51 or eating Tide Pods, and you’d have no idea why. This deep chasm of understanding between Inner YouTube and the rest of the world has proved to be the defining problem of Kjellberg’s career.

When Kjellberg started his channel in 2010, YouTube culture hardly existed. He was a 21-year-old college student in Gothenburg, Sweden, who liked playing video games in his apartment. Eventually he took his game footage, superimposed some running commentary in the corner and started uploading it to YouTube — early examples of a genre that became known as “let’s play.” Thanks to some combination of goofy charisma and algorithmic luck, Kjellberg’s channel blew up, in a way no YouTube channel ever had. In 2012, he hit a million subscribers. The following year, PewDiePie became the biggest channel on the site, and Kjellberg started making serious money — a reported $4 million from ads on his channel — and was involved in various lucrative offshoot projects, including a deal with the Disney-owned Maker Studios. In 2014, a survey found that PewDiePie was more popular with American teenagers than Katy Perry, Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio.

PewDiePie playing a video game on YouTube. Screen grab from YouTube

Despite the fact that PewDiePie’s audience had grown larger than that of any late-night talk show, many mainstream outlets still treated him like an exotic animal. Journalists wrote breathless stories about his earnings (sample 2014 headline: “This Guy Makes Millions Playing Video Games on YouTube. What?!”), and late-night hosts puzzled over his mass appeal (“Why do you think people like it so much, watching you play games?” Stephen Colbert asked him on “The Late Show”). He appeared on several episodes of “South Park,” where the running gag was that nobody could understand what he did for a living.

Inside YouTube, PewDiePie was a prized talent. The company put up PewDiePie posters in its headquarters and gave him a starring role in YouTube Rewind, the company’s year-in-review video. (Rewind has become a kind of annual report card for Inner YouTube’s top creators, who analyze it frame by frame, looking for hints about their place in the platform’s pecking order.) During these years, PewDiePie was not just the YouTuber with the biggest channel. To many Inner YouTubers, he represented the values of the platform — lo-fi, authentic, defiantly weird. In 2016, when his channel became the first in history to hit 50 million subscribers, YouTube commissioned an enormous ruby-colored statue of the “brofist” — he signs off most videos by raising a clenched hand to the webcam — and mailed it to him.

Kjellberg unboxed it in his kitchen with his camera rolling and seemed genuinely moved.

“YouTube really has given me everything,” he said.

Years ago, YouTube embarked on a radical experiment in self-governance. In 2012, the company vastly expanded the number of creators it allowed to make money from ads on their channels, provided they stayed within some loose boundaries of taste. This made YouTube unique among social platforms, in that it was possible for popular creators to earn a full-time living directly from the platform. YouTube built an algorithm that recommended those creators’ videos based on how engaging they were. Then it stepped back, let the machines run and let a thousand media moguls bloom.

So Kjellberg’s relationship with YouTube has always been a two-way street. His videos brought the company lucrative advertising revenue and a steady stream of loyal users at a time when it was fending off competition from Facebook, Netflix and other video platforms. In exchange, the company promoted his channel and turned a blind eye to some of his more erratic behavior — as in 2012, when he was criticized for his habit of referring to beating his video-game opponents as “raping” them, or in 2016, when he was temporarily banned by Twitter after joking that he was joining ISIS. Kjellberg called these mistakes his “oopsies,” and he knew they were easily fixed with an apology. At the time, YouTube took pride in being a creator’s utopia, and PewDiePie was hardly the only one pushing the limits. Gamers with David Duke vocabularies were everywhere, and a nascent group of right-wing reactionaries was beginning to learn that skewering political correctness was a ticket to YouTube virality. But so was a more garden-variety brand of shock humor, carefully calibrated to the sensibilities of teenage boys.

Edgelords — people who post offensive things online for attention — had always existed on message boards like 4chan. But YouTube brought them out of the shadows and turned provocation into a viable career path. On YouTube, there were few rules and no lawyers looking over creators’ shoulders — which is precisely why millions of young people went there, to find the kind of stuff they couldn’t get on TV. The platform’s algorithms promoted engaging videos, with little regard for what made them engaging, and showered ad revenue on the most successful channels. And as all kinds of boundary-pushers raced to fill this void, it became harder to tell who had an actual ideology and who was just feeding the machines what they wanted.

Kjellberg knew plenty of edgelords — he was a gamer, after all — but he never considered himself one of them. Sure, he cursed and shouted while playing video games, but that was normal behavior. Of the hundreds of videos he posted every year, most were solidly PG-13. Around 2015, though, he began to take more risks. He continued playing video games, but he started experimenting. He did viral challenges, made fun of other YouTubers and reviewed meme submissions from his fans. His video titles from that period sound like a jumbled set of X-rated refrigerator-poetry magnets:

“SEX WITH YOUR CAR SIMULATOR”

“FIST ME DADDY”

“FINGERING SHREK”

“TOILET EXPLOSION DEATH???”

Today Kjellberg attributes this period to a combination of immaturity, boredom and YouTube’s platform incentives — which encouraged creators to increase their watch time by doing outrageous things. He says that he grew sick of playing video games and that his channel’s growth had plateaued, which gave him the urge to let loose. “Looking back, it was a bubble waiting to burst — this bubble of, how far can we push this?” Kjellberg told me. “I think YouTube at that time was at a place where no one really knew where the limit was.”

PewDiePie’s YouTube channel surpassed 100 million subscribers this year. Screen grab from YouTube

But Kjellberg did know where the limit was, because he had already started breaching it. In early 2015, he nearly blew up his Maker Studios deal over a video in which he read erotic fan fiction starring characters from the hit Disney movie “Frozen.” According to a person with knowledge of the incident, Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, was very upset when he found out that a YouTuber employed by one of his subsidiaries was cackling over pornographic depictions of Elsa and Olaf the Snowman. Iger calmed down after a Maker Studios staff member explained that erotic fan fiction was a popular internet genre. (A spokeswoman for Disney said that Iger found the video to be “in poor taste.”) Another former colleague of Kjellberg’s told me about an incident that happened in November 2016. Kjellberg arrived at a taping of “Scare PewDiePie” — a show he was making for YouTube’s premium video service — in a T-shirt with a swastika drawn on it. Kjellberg explained that the shirt was part of a running joke on his vlog, in which he and his friends, at least one of whom was Jewish, pranked one another by drawing things on one another’s shirts. The colleague intervened, telling Kjellberg that it would be irresponsible to wear a Nazi symbol on a show that millions of young people would see. (Videos posted by Kjellberg during this period show him and a friend wearing shirts with swastikas drawn on them, but Kjellberg denied wearing one on the show’s set.)

I talked to roughly a dozen people who knew or collaborated with Kjellberg during this period, and none thought he was a genuine anti-Semite. Some theorized that Nazi jokes were just the most offensive type of humor he and his friends could imagine, and therefore the funniest. They said he didn’t understand the power he had as YouTube’s most popular creator, or what millions of impressionable kids might make of a blond, blue-eyed European joking about Hitler. Even today, Kjellberg — whose 100 million subscribers would collectively form the 14th-most-populous nation on earth — has a hard time making sense of his influence. In his mind, he’s just a normal guy who happened to get famous.

“My job is just: I go to my office; I record a video in front of a camera,” he told me. He then glanced down at the microphones sitting on the table. “It’s weird for me to be in this position, because I don’t really want to be in this position.”

In February 2017, Kjellberg learned that The Wall Street Journal was preparing to run an article about nine videos, posted on his channel over the course of six months, that contained anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi imagery. Kjellberg knew that the videos were controversial, and he did some quick damage control. In a post on his Tumblr, he explained, “I think of the content that I create as entertainment, and not a place for any serious political commentary.” His jokes, he said, were “in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes.”

Some of the videos The Journal featured were clearly less offensive in context, like the one in which he told his fans to stop building swastikas in a video game. But other jokes — like a video in which he tested the limits of what people on the gig website Fiverr would do for money, including paying two Indian men to hold up a sign that read “Death to All Jews” — were harder to explain. A few of these videos captured the attention of established anti-Semitic groups, who speculated that Kjellberg wasn’t totally kidding and might be converting to their cause. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi hate site, was so hopeful that it changed its tagline to “the world’s #1 PewDiePie fan site.” Today, Kjellberg blames himself for stepping over the line, but he also characterizes what happened as a kind of category error — a group of outsiders, blind to UV light, who mistook his trolling for genuine hate. Of course, even people who understood that he was trolling found it irresponsible. As a writer on the video-game website Polygon put it, “Intent only gets you so far when it comes to toying with hate speech in front of an audience of tens of millions, many of whom are younger children.”

The fallout from The Journal’s article was swift and brutal. Maker Studios ended its partnership with Kjellberg, and YouTube canceled his “Scare PewDiePie” series and dropped him from a V.I.P. advertising program. By the end of the day, Kjellberg — who was on a Valentine’s Day getaway with his longtime girlfriend, Marzia Bisognin, when the article went online — was in danger of losing his whole empire. “I spent the day being in this little cottage with no internet,” he said. “And then I go on Twitter, and there’s J.K. Rowling calling me a fascist, and I’m like: ‘How is this happening? This is crazy.’ ”

A few days later, Kjellberg posted an angry, defensive video in which he vacillated between self-deprecation and grandiosity, accusing The Journal of punching down at a “rookie comedian” seconds before saying things like, “Old-school media does not like internet personalities because they’re scared of us.” He recast The Journal’s article as a conspiracy, implying that the jealous, dishonest mainstream media had ginned up a fake controversy in order to take him (and by extension, all of YouTube) down a peg. By turning attention to the news media, Kjellberg found a fight he could win. Mainstream outlets had, in fact, botched some of their early coverage of YouTube culture, and YouTubers were inherently suspicious that the media establishment saw them as competition.

PewDiePie felt besieged, even though his audience dwarfed that of any mainstream media outlet — and the Bro Army agreed. For weeks, they barraged The Journal’s reporters with harassment and threats, and even dug up off-color jokes one reporter made years earlier on Twitter. Kjellberg promptly featured the tweets in a video; afterward, the reporter received so many death threats that The Journal offered to briefly move him out of his house. The Bro Army also took aim at YouTube, which fans believed was siding with the media and punishing PewDiePie in response to outside pressure. When the 2017 version of YouTube Rewind came out, he was nowhere to be found.

After the Journal article, Kjellberg seemed to lose whatever was left of his inhibitions. He started his own parody news series, “Pew News,” in which he mocked the media and dissected negative articles about him. He took on the kinds of culture-war topics he once avoided, like microaggressions and the wage gap. Kjellberg never identified himself as a conservative, but his new, more politicized views attracted the attention of right-wing personalities like Carl Benjamin, a British YouTuber known as Sargon of Akkad, and Alex Jones, who offered Kjellberg a guest slot on Infowars. (Kjellberg politely declined.)

Kjellberg started his own parody news series, “Pew News,” in 2018. Screen grab from YouTube

Kjellberg also kept making oopsies — bad ones, the kind that would instantly end careers anywhere outside YouTube. In a September 2017 video, he yelled “nigger” on a gaming live stream. (He apologized, saying in a video, “I know I can’t keep messing up like this.”) In 2018, he recommended an anime review channel that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be rife with anti-Semitic and hateful content. These scandals made Kjellberg toxic outside YouTube. But they only strengthened his fan base’s perception of him as a martyr, a symbol of YouTube’s freewheeling culture sacrificed at the altar of corporate profits. And they endeared him to the alt-right, which saw in him a potentially valuable ally. “In an age of ruthless cultural conformity, someone like PewDiePie isn’t supposed to exist,” Paul Joseph Watson, a far-right YouTube commentator, said in a 2019 video defending Kjellberg from his critics. “Which is why they’ve tried to tear him down, over and over again.”

Kjellberg and I sat in the Airbnb together for an entire afternoon, and I spent at least an hour trying to pin down his actual political beliefs or get him to talk about how this period of intense criticism shaped his views. He spoke freely about his feud with the news media — he now regrets going after the Journal reporters, he said, especially given what happened to them afterward — but when the conversation approached partisan politics, he clammed up. He told me that he was “more apolitical than anything,” and when I asked him whether he was more right-wing or left-wing, he said he was “somewhere in between.” We had a lot of long, futile exchanges like this:

“Are there any politicians who excite you?”

“No.”

“Like, anywhere in the world?”

“I couldn’t name one, no.”

“What did you think about UKIP endorsing you?” I asked. On Twitter, the far-right British party had recently told its followers to subscribe to his channel to stop T-Series from overtaking him.

“It’s kind of funny how a political party would post about a meme,” he said. “But it’s also kind of like, Ehh, don’t drag me into your politics.”

To Kjellberg, the past few years have proved that there is no reward for engaging in politics, even if it would be good fodder for his channel. He is especially annoyed that he continues to be linked to the far right, despite his insistence that he doesn’t support its causes. When Kjellberg is accused of being far right, he doesn’t respond by protesting that he’s actually a “classical liberal” or a “heterodox Stoic” or whatever YouTube reactionaries are calling themselves these days. Instead, he insists that he’s not interested in politics at all. It’s a clever strategic position for a guy whose audience straddles the partisan divide.

But it’s also plausible, if you watch more than a few of the roughly 4,000 videos on his channel. PewDiePie doesn’t endorse candidates, debate podcast hosts or make fun of transgender-bathroom bills. He plays video games, reads memes off Reddit and sometimes jokes about stuff in the news. His political preferences, to the extent they exist, seem almost entirely predicated on entertainment value. President Trump, he told me, “became a meme for a while,” until it stopped being funny. And while recent history has taught us that extremists often use stupid memes to smuggle their views into the mainstream, in Kjellberg’s case, the memes themselves seem to be the point.

Kjellberg described the New Zealand shooting as a major turning point in his life. The morning after, he was in bed, struggling to get back to sleep, when his phone began buzzing. He saw, on Twitter and in a flurry of texts, that the shooting suspect had said, “Subscribe to PewDiePie” just before he began his slaughter. After Kjellberg absorbed the shock, a sequence began unspooling in his mind. First, the news media — which wouldn’t understand that all that “Subscribe to PewDiePie” stuff was as much a joke as an actual endorsement — would accuse him of inspiring a mass murderer. All the Nazi stuff would come back up. He would have to issue a statement, and doing so would make it seem as though he were drawing attention to himself and away from the victims.

It had been about a month since the shooting when I asked Kjellberg about it, and he looked genuinely pained. He repeated his concern for the victims and their families, and he reiterated what he said about himself a hundred times before: He wasn’t a white nationalist, and he didn’t condone violence. He told me that he was planning to release a video calling for an end to the “Subscribe to PewDiePie” campaign and was hoping to return to his roots as a goofy, uncontroversial gaming vlogger.

We parted ways. And then, for whatever it’s worth, everything he said would happen did. A few days after our interview, he persuaded his fans to end “Subscribe to PewDiePie.” He stopped grinding axes with the news media and started playing Minecraft again. He and Bisognin married and went on their honeymoon. He got new advertising deals, and he returned to YouTube’s good graces. YouTube sent him a “red diamond” play button on the occasion of his 100 millionth subscriber, along with a congratulatory letter from Susan Wojcicki, the chief executive — a sign that, in the company’s eyes, he has turned back from the edge.

The charitable way to interpret PewDiePie’s new attitude is that he has actually grown up, developed a thicker skin and taken stock of his own power and responsibility. The more pragmatic way is to point out that Kjellberg is a professional YouTuber and that — for now, at least — his career prospects are partly dependent on his ability to stay out of trouble. Either way, if Kjellberg ever achieves something like redemption, it will always be complicated by the world-historic nature of his YouTube stardom and the daily high-wire act it requires of him. Stand too close to the edge, and he risks jeopardizing his standing with the people who sign his checks, host his videos and write about him on gaming websites. Stand too far from the edge, and he risks looking like a sellout in front of 100 million fans, many of whom follow him expressly for the unfiltered straight talk — or worse — and could turn on him if they sense that he is taking directions from above.

In September, after reaching 100 million subscribers, PewDiePie uploaded a new video. In it, he pledged to give $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League, one organization that criticized him for joking about the Holocaust. It was a symbolic gesture of closure, a signal that he had matured and was ready to apologize and move on. “I’ve finally come to terms,” he said, “with the responsibility I have as a creator.”

Some of his fans, though, weren’t ready to bury the hatchet. They barraged the video’s comment section with anti-Semitic slurs and conspiracy theories and accused the Anti-Defamation League of blackmailing him into making a donation. Some of them were actual anti-Semites, but others were just suspicious. Why would PewDiePie donate to an organization that criticized him? Was he being bullied? They had been conditioned to think that any time a YouTuber apologized for stepping over the line, it was because someone from the outside — a media organization, an advertiser, YouTube corporate — was forcing his or her hand. “As his second family,” one commenter on a PewDiePie-themed subreddit wrote, “I feel like we’re obligated to voice our concerns when there’s something clearly not right here.”

The next day, Kjellberg posted another video and announced that he wasn’t giving the $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League after all. He said that it “doesn’t feel genuine for me to proceed with a donation at this point” and that he “didn’t know a lot of things” about the group’s activities when he made the pledge. He would find another charity, he said, one that better represented his values. Some people interpreted Kjellberg’s about-face as a sign that he wasn’t actually sorry for the Nazi jokes. Others surmised, probably more accurately, that he feared offending his most vocal fans more than he feared the criticism he would face for retracting a donation to a Jewish anti-hate group. No one was particularly happy, least of all Kjellberg, who took to his YouTube channel to confess that he just wanted to make the drama go away.

Watching all this play out, I thought about something he told me back in Brighton. We had been talking about the likelihood that T-Series would soon dethrone him after six years as YouTube’s top creator. Kjellberg surprised me by saying that it didn’t really bother him — that, in fact, he had been getting nostalgic for the days when he had fewer subscribers. He confessed that he periodically thought about giving up on YouTube altogether. His wife had given up her popular YouTube channel last year. I suggested that he could do the same thing — shutter his channel and spend his days lounging on a hammock somewhere with her.

“Don’t tempt me,” he said with a smile. “I kind of question if the positive outweighs the negative,” he went on. “It’s a lot more than I think I signed up for.” He seemed to catch himself mid-daydream and clarified: Deleting his channel is not something he would really go through with. Like many other extreme ideas, it’s just something he plays with from time to time.