ALT He also knew that there would be no coming back from it. “Those were my words,” he told me. “I said, ‘There’s no coming back from this.’ But I had to do it.” Everything in Greg’s life had been leading to this moment: the Granite City factories closing; the stresses born from his medical problems and from being a single father; the lawn care work; the search engine optimization; the 100 million views. Greg was surrendering his life to YouTube and its algorithm, to what it indicated Greg should be. “I had to become the third baby,” Greg said. “I had to turn myself into a baby.”

ALT For a long time, Tony was hesitant to lean into the hog stuff. It seemed crude. Off-brand. It was “nasty, locker-room humor,” he says, the kind of unvibrant masculinity the haters wanted. Only now that he’s broken the seal, Tony sounds happy. Maybe he should be. He says he was paid around $12,000 for the posts—not exactly Kardashian money but enough to cover rent and then some. And yet: This was a chip that Tony could cash in only once. The “reveal” will not go viral a second time. There can’t be a second time. All of the comments, all of the cruel schoolyard taunts exploding in scale since the algorithm first chose him: This was the price for everything. Was it worth it? Tony seems to brush my question off. Yeah, he says, he could have held out for $50,000, maybe even $100,000. But tonight, at least, those aren’t the numbers on his mind. “It felt really good,” he says, “to go viral again.”