The Gregory Brothers have had tremendous success with Auto-Tune the News (everyone knows Bed Intruder with Antoine Dodson). We met the group to find out how they got started, what it's like being a YouTube star and what they have planned for the future.
Sex writer Rachel Rabbit White thinks fucking is so great that she spends a lot of her time writing about it (and occasionally having it).
YouTube sensation Shoenice22 has spent the last two years eating and drinking everything from sticks of deodorant to tampons to full bottles of grain alcohol. He's an older, more self-destructive version of that weird kid at camp who would eat worms for attention.
The world knows Valeria Lukyanova as the girl who turned herself into a real-life Barbie doll. Controversy has surrounded her every move since her computer-perfect visage went viral last year. However, what most of the world doesn't know is that Valeria is not a real girl at all, but a time-traveling spiritual guru whose purpose is to save the world from the clutches of superficiality and negative energy. Valeria, a.k.a. Space Barbie, gives us exclusive access to her world to show us how physical perfection truly is the best medium through which to deliver life-changing philosophy to the human race.
"Looner" porn is a subset of pornography involving balloons and the people who love them. VICE caught up with Grim Looner, a 25-year-old looner porn star from Melbourne, to help burst any misconceptions we had about one of the most innocuous fetishes on the net.
Nicole Angemi aka @mrs_angemi is a pathologist’s assistant in real life, but online she owns one of Instagram's most controversial accounts, posting photos from autopsies in order to educate people about the human body. In this episode of My Life Online, Motherboard goes to New Jersey to visit Ms. Angemi to talk about her mission as Instagram's most famous coroner and about those who would like her account deleted.
The world of plastic surgery is undergoing its own kind of facelift — of the social media kind. Today, there's a small yet growing wave of surgeons who are sharing their surgeries with millions of viewers on social media in an effort to knock down the final frontier of privacy and show the world what really happens in the operating room. In this episode of My Life Online, we meet Dr. Matthew Schulman, one of Snapchat's most popular plastic surgeons and the man behind the snapchat account @nycplasticsurg. We join him in the operating room as he broadcasts a tummy tuck surgery in order to demystify the procedure to his millions of followers.
Onlyfans is a membership platform that allows users to pay and subscribe to their favorite influencer/adult performer. Since its inception, professional and amateur performers have flocked to the site in an effort to capitalize off of their homemade sex tapes and nudes. Meet Jose. Jose is a student and sex worker who uses his OnlyFans account as a way to make extra cash while working his way through school. In the beginning, Jose used social media as a way to explore his sexuality and to find 'like-minded freaks.' However, he soon realized how to use his platforms to break stigma and advocate for others like him.
Taylor Nicole Dean is queen of PetTube, a YouTube niche for bloggers with dozens of pets. But after disappearing for a few months, she finally came back with a video explaining how she had been addicted to heroin. In this episode of MY LIFE ONLINE, we track Taylor’s meteoric rise to celebrity and how addiction took over her life.
In the world of eSports, women gamers are still very much in the minority. VICE follows various women in eSports in their competitive gaming journey from the amateur to the professional level.
Andrew Callaghan's series ALL GAS NO BRAKES captures the underbelly of American culture as he crisscrosses the country in a rusty RV. Interviewing people on the fringes of society, the success of the show has made Andrew's oversized suit and bushy hair famous. In this episode of My Life Online, we meet up with Andrew and his crew in Sturgis, South Dakota for the annual motorcycle rally that is taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic to see how the sausage gets made.
21-year-old David Orin has gone viral by posting videos of him wrestling with pythons, willingly getting bitten on the face, and fearlessly flirting with venomous vipers. But, if you keep swiping, you will also see posts of David preaching the gospel, encouraging others to follow Christ, and condemning the sin of masturbation. As an amateur herper, a discipline rooted in biology & behavioral science, and a fiercely passionate fundamentalist Christian, David walks a fine line between two communities we often see as at odds. However, he feels like he can reconcile the two, with his love for God fueling his appreciation for all of His creations. There are plenty of Christian influencers out there, as well as plenty of herper accounts, but he’s the only one fusing the two, and people just can’t get enough. However, it’s not all snakes & sunshine - David is often criticized online for his lack of formal training and somewhat cavalier approach to the hobby. In this episode of My Life Online,
In this episode of My Life Online, Vice dives into the world of “Culttok" - Tiktok’s obsession with cults. After more than a decade of operating as a small off-the-grid farm, The Garden decided to try to attract more people to their commune by using Tiktok and they went viral. A few days later, Tiktok is filled with amateur detectives dedicated to exposing The Garden as a dangerous cult. But was The Garden a cult? Or was it just an online witch hunt? Vice takes a close look behind the hysteria.
Known as "The Legendary Black Redneck," Joel Patrick is a young black conservative influencer heralded by the right after criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement in a viral video. But after making a video criticizing the capital insurrectionists, he was suddenly ostracized by thousands in his online community and even lost close friends. With only his infamous bright-orange lifted truck in tow, he now heads down to Florida from his hometown of Dayton, OH to attend conservative conferences and confront his former allies.
For the chance to travel around the US and internationally, with expenses paid for, men are meeting the sperm donor demand that has spiked during the pandemic. As women are fed up with sperm banks that charge an arm and a leg -- upwards of $800 per nitrogen tank -- they are going to the internet to find their baby’s daddy. Using Facebook groups, women post what they are looking for and men around the US are raising their hand to, artificially or naturally, inseminate these women.
In this episode of My Life Online, we get to know the 69-year-old who is one of the top creators on OnlyFans. Unable to do any other work during the pandemic due to her heart condition, Michelle turned to OnlyFans. Now one viral video and a year later, she’s raking in more cash than she has ever made in her life—but the money isn’t just for her, her goal is to buy a house for her disabled son before it’s too late.
“Be ho no mo” and “hell is hot don’t be a thot” isn’t something you would typically hear from a preacher, but Sister Cindy isn’t your typical preacher. Sister Cindy and her husband Brother Jed are confrontational evangelicals, traveling to college campuses around the southern United States for over four decades to inform students of their sins and bring them closer to God.
In this episode of My Life Online, we dive into the life of Amouranth, one of the most-watched woman on Twitch, who rakes in 1.5 Million Dollars a month. Kaitlyn Siragusa, aka Amouranth, spent 60% of the last 5 years (that’s 1055 days) live streaming and often live streams for 14 hrs straight - gaming, dancing, talking to fans, licking microphones and even sleeping. Because her content is considered to be sexually risque, she often gets trolled, swatted & banned but she does her best not to listen to the haters and works tirelessly on her media empire. Every minute she spends online gets her closer to her ultimate goal of building an animal sanctuary-- but she struggles with chronic fatigue, overall deteriorating mental health, and perpetual loneliness -- is it worth it?
ird's Aren't Real is a viral conspiracy theory that has captured the minds of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans. Believers insist that the American government systematically replaced the millions of birds in the sky with government surveillance drones to spy on civilians. But are they serious?
Erik Lamkin describes himself as a guy with a HUGE appetite that LOVES food, but his path to YouTube eating was not easy. Erik first tried a competitive eating competition as an attempt to overcome his fear of food and it proved to him that eating a large amount of food in one sitting wouldn’t change his body. Today, Erik the Electric has almost 2 million subscribers on his youtube channel tuning in to watch him eat and follow along in his athletic ventures. What is it like to be an online sensation for the very thing you feared? Is his struggle with food over - or is it an ongoing struggle that he must overcome to pay his bills?
Moments after Trevor Jacob published “I Crashed My Airplane” to his Youtube channel, the video immediately garnered public outrage. People from all corners of the internet claimed that Trevor had crashed his plane on purpose for video views and clout. After enough outcry, the Federal Aviation Administration agreed that Trevor had, in fact, crashed his plane for clicks and revoked his pilots license. But did Trevor actually crash a plane just for Youtube? In this episode of ‘My Life Online’, VICE spends time with Trevor Jacob, a US Olympic snowboarder turned Youtube daredevil turned publicly cancelled pariah.
Louie Lingard aka NotLewy hates "inspiration porn" and has garnered millions of followers on TikTok for making crude jokes that make fun of his physical disability. Despite his success, comedy isn't his passion. He wants to be a rapper but when he creates content about his music (and not about his disability) his views plummet. He feels stuck between what the TikTok algorithm wants and what he wants.
Kasey Altman lived an almost ideal life in NYC before she was diagnosed with a rare form of juvenile cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma. Instead of choosing to battle this cancer alone, she created a Tiktok account to document her journey and find community. Through the cancertok community, Kasey became a leading advocate and activist for the cancertok community.
Since the show, “To Catch a Predator” went off the air, a corner of YouTube has taken up the mantle: posing as underage kids online, waiting for older men to send sexually explicit messages and then filming a confrontation with the men in public. The Dad's Against Predators duo has been making this content for years but is particularly controversial because law enforcement has publicly denounced them, telling them to leave this work to the professionals. In this episode of My Life Online, we shine a light on the grey area this content inhabits - Are these vigilante YouTube creators helping expose predators or making it more difficult for law enforcement to do their jobs? Are they potentially saving lives or just risking their own?
Since she formally ‘went dark’ online, the question on the lips of her fans and haters alike, has been “where’s Caroline”? Well we know, and travel to Sarasota, Florida to find Caroline far from the madding crowd. Her plan is to finally deliver her long promised books but she remains distracted by the constant activity of her trolls who keep an active eye on Calloway’s every move. We spend time with her as she plans to infiltrate a 15k strong Reddit group dedicated to trolling her, and talk to the “people who really hate me”.
Andrea loves everything fetish and freaky -- she runs a YouTube channel called Burping Girl that showcases her massive burpsto gawkers and belch lovers alike. Some of the videos are by request and some are of her own making – but all are equally loud and ridiculous. But it's not all fun and games... Andrea now has to make a choice, does she stop making these videos to preserve her health – or does continue down a dangerous path of self destruction?
In this episode of My Life Online, we meet Crackhead Barney, the incendiary influencer and host of the internet show 'Crackhead Barney and Friends.' We learn the backstory of how Crackhead Barney became an online sensation by carving a niche in trolling MAGA rallies and gatherings, creating chaos, and pissing off people across the country and the political spectrum. However, along with internet fame come significant risks. We witness how Barney’s quest for internet hype is intertwined with real dangers to her personal life and safety. We gain an inside look at the ups and downs that accompany being one of the biggest trolls on the internet.
Lyle the Therapy Gecko started as a kind of accident. The pandemic hit, and like most of us, Lyle found himself in his mom’s basement, laid off from his job, and spending too much time online. After a few too many nights on Reddit’s streaming platform, Lyle put on a gecko costume and decided to stream himself. Suddenly, the views and calls started pouring in- and so did people's problems. Lyle found himself in a new predicament, alone in a basement acting as a therapist to the masses. In this Episode of My Life Online, we unmask the man behind the costume.