The Rise and Rise and Rise of Logan Paul: A Marxist Critical Perspective

Often in our modern zeitgeist it seems that bad actors arise seemingly from out of nowhere are command significant public attention. They wield controversy to boost attention paid to them, pursue monetary gain at the cost of personal values, and upend legal and social contracts to gain power and reputation. This societal output has been seen across multiple domains and in many different contexts. In politics examples include the likes of Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and Mitch McConnell. In the music industry examples such as Kanye West, Sid Vicious, and Eminem. But no industry is more illustrative of the perverse power of capital than social media influencing economy. This segment of the economy rose in 2021, from nearly 2.0 billion to almost 13.8 billion (Cong & Li, 2021). This acceleration of an already established trend seems to be linked to a rise in social media use during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Influencers use their personal charisma, expertise, talents, etc. to build personal fame and wealth while connecting brand owners and service providers with potential customers. While there are many ways these influencers draw attention to themselves, one of the most effective avenues is personal controversy. Many influencers appear to take advantage of the adage that there is, "no such thing as bad publicity." One such influencer is Logal Paul, an athlete, performer, producer, and entrepreneur.  

A Brief Overview of Paul's Rise  

Paul was a high school athlete from a middle-class Cleveland suburb who first gained national fame on Vine, a now defunct short form video app (Patsko, 2014). Paul wouldn't stay in Cleveland for long. Despite attending Ohio University on a scholarship, Paul dropped out and eventually moved into a luxury Los Angeles apartment complex where creators from the platform congregated. After the fall of Vine in 2017, Paul fully pivoted to YouTube. Paul's YouTube content was mostly vlog content relating to his life in the apartment complex and his efforts to make viral content. His vlogs were viral content in themselves that often blurred the lines of what was and wasn't staged. This is where Paul's reputation began to rely on a boom-bust structure tent-poled by controversies, apologies, and spectacle. It is in these actions of Paul that the effects of capital on the person and their psyche are mostly clearly seen. 

Paul's YouTube Era 

 In December of 2017 Logan Paul posted a video from Aokigahara, a forest at the base of Mt. Fuji that has a reputation of being a common site for suicides. The footage contained uncensored footage of a man who appeared to have completed suicide by hanging. The video received 6 million views the day it was posted. This was followed by the video being deleted after public backlash. Paul was punished by the platform removing some sources of advertising funding. He would go on to do an apology tour and provide $318,000 of a promised $1 million to suicide awareness charities. Initially when Marx and Engles spoke about the potential pitfalls of globalization, they mainly saw it as a means to ending the struggles of the proletariat (Marx & Engels, 1848). However, later when he wrote Capital, he notes that rich countries such as Great Britan came to exploit poorer countries such as India. According to Marx, "By ruining handicraft production of finished articles in other countries, machinery forcibly converts them into fields for the production of its raw material. Thus, India was compelled to produce cotton, wool, hemp, jute and indigo for Great Britain" (Marx, 1867). Paul, in this case, is partaking in a sort of cultural exploitation wherein Japanese culture is exploited for material gain in the West. This form of cultural dominance serves as in interesting example of the ways the dominant geographical area (North America and Western Europe) exerts its power and influence over the rest of the global capitalist system (Hutchison & Charlesworth, 2024, p. 145). 

In February of 2018 Logan Paul posted a video where he tasered dead rats he supposedly found on his apartment balcony. He also in the same video pulled a live koi fish from a body of water and mimicked performing CPR on it by applying compressions. YouTube would place a temporary ban on his channel, due to how close the video was to his previous controversial video. Two important forces are at play here. One is the way in which YouTube relies on content producers like Paul to create profit for them. YouTube creates very little content of its own and instead pays its creators based on views and other metrics. In a sense, Paul was responding to market forces within the YouTube algorithm. More shocks equal more views and for more time (Feroz Khan & Vong, 2014). This can help explain why YouTube has continued to re-platform Paul over the years. The platform makes money off Paul's antics as much as Paul makes money on the platform. Paul's fans leaving the platform could cause a migration to another platform. All the while, if YouTube were seen as being too soft on Paul, advertisers may pull funding dollars from the platform all together. This cycle of distorted incentives: Paul shocks for views. The platform makes its money. The advertisers get nervous. YouTube makes a show of stopping Paul. He comes back to shock more. It is a clean, simple engine. Paul must burn hotter each time- YouTube keeps the fire going, then slaps his hand to keep the stakeholders complacent. 

Athletics and Performance 

Logan Paul’s exploits do not begin and end with video production, however. Paul currently wrestles with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) as of 2021 (Bengel, 2021). His character was presented as a heel, a wrestling industry term for villain. As a heel, Paul would apply tactics that would make the crowd boo at him. Typical heel behavior includes stealing the spotlight, insulting the crowd, cheating during the match, and being adversarial to the crowd’s favorite wrestlers. The position is a good fit for Paul’s skill as a showman and athlete, skills he had built earlier in his infamous boxing career. 

 In November of 2018 he began participating in his first of two boxing matches against fellow streamer/Youtuber KSI (Alexander, 2018). They both hired trainers and boxing coaches, each filming their individual progress. They also both participated in the type of spectacle building and hyping that is customary in the lead up to boxing matches. He would eventually have an exhibition match with Floyd Mayweather in 2021. The spectacle building during this period involved events that blurred the lines of fact and fiction. A good example of this was when Logan Paul’s brother knocked a hat off of Mayweather’s head prior to their bout. It may or may not have been scripted- but the spectacle was real.  

Entrepreneurship 

Logan Paul is known for two entrepreneurial ventures. Primarily he’s known as one of the co-founders of PRIME, a company that sells energy and electrolyte drinks. The drink itself is controversial as it had been seen as a fashionable thing to drink amongst children and teens for a period. PRIME energy drinks, debuted after the success of their electrolyte drink, have been found to have high levels of caffeine and inconsistent labeling. This led to bans, in schools and by state governments, of his energy drinks in multiple countries such as Australia, South Africa (Rall, 2023), and New Zealand (Taunton, 2025). It would be bad business for a company not to know who they were selling their drinks to. This would imply that the leadership team of PRIME would have to have reasoned that children would be a primary purchaser of their energy drinks as well. This highlights the ways in which profit interests and the culture industry can influence those with the least agency into becoming consumers, even at the cost of their own health (Hutchison & Charlesworth, 2024, p. 145). PRIME Hydration has also been sued for high levels of Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (Limehouse, 2024). The results of the trial are still pending. 

Paul’s second business venture was a crypto company. A boom-bust industry to mirror his roller-coaster-like reputation. This was a follow-up to a previous venture in crypto where he profited from his fans inflating the price of a low-quality coin called Dink Doink. When the price went up, Paul sold his impressive stake in the coin- causing the price to plummet. This set off a cascade of selling that has become the commonplace of influencer crypto “pump and dump schemes” (Yaffe-Bellany, 2022). Not satisfied with simply defrauding his fans for an undisclosed amount of money, Paul moved on to CryptoZoo- an NFT venture. CryptoZoo would also crash spectacularly. Paul doesn’t seem done with his ventures in crypto either. He’s currently working as co-owner on a project called Liquid Marketplace. It has been accused of being a "multi-layered fraud" by the Canadian government (Shaukat, 2024). In a sense, cryptocurrency is one of the purest forms of alienation of workers under capitalism one could imagine. It was not merely enough to alienate workers from the whole of their labor, breaking all aspects of production into its smallest possible parts. Indeed, cryptocurrency allows influencers and the wealthy to create profit from the mere promise of profit. This represents a type of opportunity hording wheren one’s buying power gives them the opportunity to invest in high-risk grifts and everyone who is not graced with insider knowledge or extreme risk tolerance is left holding the bag (Hutchison & Charlesworth, 2024, p. 658). 

Conclusion 

  Logan Paul's career is a modern lesson in the perverse power of capital. His actions are a response to market forces, where the pressure to create "more shocks" for "more views" creates a cycle of distorted incentives benefiting both the platform and the creator. As a figure who has leveraged cultural exploitation and the creation of profit from the "mere promise of profit" through cryptocurrency, Paul represents a pure form of alienation and opportunity hoarding. His enduring success highlights a chilling trend- in the social media economy, the drive for capital will inevitably supersede ethics, even at the cost of public well-being.