A fearful realisation, but it appears that, in Logan Paul, the world may be in the presence of a genius. Is that genius good or evil? I have yet to decide. Logan Paul has yet to decide. We will only know one way or another when he explodes the moon as some sort of viral prank.

For those of you born before the year 1998: Paul is a YouTuber, most famed among people who are allowed to portion-control their Ribena on the assurance that they won’t get too hyper on it (that means: you and, to a lesser extent, me) for the January 2018 video where he went to Japan’s Aokigahara forest, or “suicide forest”, and found and broadcast footage of a dead body there. You are not supposed to do that, it turns out. YouTube cut ties with him, Paul lost thousands of subscribers and commercial partners, and went to ground for a month before coming back with an apology video. And now he’s … hold on, bigger than ever?

It’s hard to ever know what’s going on with YouTubers: they exist in a strange and fascinating liminal area of fame, where they are enormously, hugely, Beatlemania-famous to millions of people, but all of those people have curfews and intricate Proactiv routines and can’t legally buy scratchcards, so it doesn’t really count. If you have ever accidentally strayed into the wilds of Instagram and said to yourself: “Who is this teenager, and why do they have nine million followers?”, you will already know this. Logan Paul never stopped being famous to people who knew who Logan Paul was before he became The Infamous Logan Paul. And now he’s crossed over into the mainstream, again, briefly bobbing his head above the Actual Fame waters before dipping back down into the merch-and-a-podcast depths, and traditional media is baffled all over again. Thirteen-year-olds, as they always do, smile knowingly in the background.

The latest prank/exquisite worldwide Derren Brown-style mindfreak (delete as appropriate) was Paul’s appearance on Fox Business, which soon went viral, studded as it was with non-sequiturs about how fast he could run (“I’m the fastest YouTuber – I’m the fastest entertainer on the planet”), an outlandish bet to see if anyone could outpace him (“Yeah, I’m betting $100,000 that I’m the fastest man on the planet”) and his current health status (“I also have pinkeye”). For Paul haters, the video was a gift: that forest wanker, making a fool of himself on national TV! Like and retweet! For Paul’s fandom (the “Logang”), the video was endorsement of their lord, and the godly powers he holds: a deliberately erratic TV appearance designed to go viral and get coverage in the newspapers and websites of yore, those fusty old institutions that don’t understand him.

“I bank on the naivety of old people and millennials, to perpetuate my brand, make me go viral and keep me relevant,” Paul told his podcast, ImPaulsive, after the clip had gone viral. “The amount of earned media I got because of this clip – hundreds of thousands of dollars, for free, because of the haters.” Paying attention to Paul just makes him more powerful, people! That’s what he wants!

As a result, Paul – who made $14.5m last year – is this weekend throwing The Challenger Games, where various YouTubers you have never heard of will compete in various track and field events for cash prize donations to local charities. It’s not the first time Paul has pivoted to athletics – he boxed fellow YouTuber KSI last year, in a PPV match that reportedly made them both millions. Once again: Paul is a machine designed to make money, no matter how hard and how publicly that engine explodes.

This has positive repercussions for the extended Paul universe, too: it makes them more famous. Paul’s brother Jake – with whom he is near-constantly embroiled in a Gallagher-style love-hate public spat – is recently engaged to fellow YouTuber Tana Mongeau (4.5 million followers), despite the pair only dating for three months. This week she managed to: prank Jake into thinking she was with child, using a dummy pregnancy test and a hidden camera; go out to dinner with ex-girlfriend Bella Thorne’s recent ex Mod Sun, which caused Twitter beef with Thorne because the three of them used to be in a polyamorous throuple before Mongeau met Jake; bat off suggestions from the older Paul that her and Jake’s relationship is a fake idea; and reveal a billboard advertising her MTV special, Tana Turns 21. Most of these people were born in 1997, and are millionaires. The world is a very exhausting place to be.

It’s Logan that threatens me the most, though. The waterproof way he just bats off controversy. The casual, joking manner with which he makes vast amounts of money. His recent reinvention as a sort of athletic Howard Stern, fronting up the world’s number one podcast by basically burping and shouting into a microphone. The knowing way he manipulates the great old gears of media to do what he wants. It’s not a great push to imagine him, in 10 years, the first YouTube billionaire, heading up a Murdochian media empire, cackling atop a skyscraper built in the shape of his head. From then on, it goes two ways: Doctor Evil world destroyer, or four-term president. As my inevitable future employer and possible executioner: I wish you nothing but luck, Logan Paul. Nothing but luck and good energy.

Has Alex from Glastonbury found the path to fame?

Alex from Glasto news now, and the cherub-faced viral star – he very much looks like if Justin Bieber got into aggressively shouting at you outside a Spar instead of having a multi-million dollar pop career – has finally released his debut song. What Ya Kno’ ’Bout That Bro? is an erratic two minutes and 37 seconds of Alex slowly boasting about wearing a hat and getting on stage with rapper Dave at Glastonbury, and how Thiago Silva now follows him on Twitter.

What is the point? Well, it’s hard to know, but I have a theory. In wider culture we call this Ferdification, after clonk-headed mechanic Ferdi Mathew-George, the Albanian mechanic who last year got hit in the head with a bike so hard he released a song about it: taking a bit of viral currency, and trying to turn it, alchemy-like, into something, anything. Both Alex and Ferdi dived head first into the “waving in nightclubs” personal appearance scene. Both garnered huge semi-ironic social media followings. Both released overproduced videos with GRM Daily, where the line between “is this a pisstake?” and “is this … actually good?” became alarmingly blurred. Ferdi, for his sins, disappeared without a trace, I guess because saying “why you coming fast?” a lot and not really knowing where the joke is can only last so long. Alex, if nothing else, seems to have a faint idea that he needs to take every chance he gets while he can, just in case. If nothing else comes from this, at least he got a music video, Dave’s phone number and (I’m speculating here) a cornucopia of mucky DMs.

Is What Ya Kno’ ’Bout That Bro? a good song? Absolutely no. Is it an earnest attempt to turn 15 minutes of fame into the best summer of one human bucket hat-cum-GCSE student’s life? Yes. And is it so mad to think that this can’t be a path to legitimate, actual fame, in these bizarre hot times we live in? Cardi B got her start doing sort of motivational speeches on Instagram, and look at her now. Lil Nas X managed to leverage a medium-to-large Nick Minaj stan account into making Old Town Road the biggest song of 2019. There is no normal path to fame any more, and we need to let go of the old beliefs that tell us otherwise. Alex from Glasto might be the only person who recognises the truth any more. He’s the only smart one left.