The End of the Weird!Phil Era: If I Ruled the Internet
If I Ruled The Internet is a case of absolute power corrupting absolutely, and an instance where Phil is clearly responsible for the destruction of the world (as in many other weird!phil vids), but with no guilt or regret. There's a sense of gleeful domination and destruction, as the whole thing is a sort of power trip fantasy. He spends the video in an ominous enjoyment of things all along the spectrum, from harmlessly self-centered to world-destroying.
It's also arguably the last proper weird!phil video. It doesn't shy away from classic weird!phil imagery, but it weaves in a lot of references to other things going on in internet culture and the larger world in a way we don't see in earlier weird!phil. It's automatically meta in a different way because he's talking about the internet and because he's explicitly framing it as a hypothetical. In other weird!phil vids, he either narrates or portrays a fictional character (be that a fully separate character or an alternate-universe Phil), and there isn't generally framing or explanation; the story begins with the video. But here, he seems to be our real-world Phil, framing all the weirdness not as something happening in the world of the vid, but as fully hypothetical. Its meta approach does overlap with the one in The Silver Button, though, by talking about looking through the viewer's webcam and specifically into viewers' souls. And he takes it places that don't feel confined to the hypothetical, leaving behind the "woulds" in most of it, instead rooting it in the present ("right now" "in three seconds") and addressing viewers by name ("Jonathan, Mary, Sally, Jonathan, Jonathan") to amp up the meta. But the hypothetical framing might be a way to ease in an audience that may be used to Phil being weird, but isn't quite as used to the full weird!phil vid experience.
Phil talks directly about other YouTubers and video genres (I imagine he mentions Fred's channel specifically for the imitation; the highlighting of beauty channels reminds me of when he's said, much later, that he watches Louise's makeup videos and finds them relaxing). He moves on to other social media platforms and pop culture references that are beyond his usual brand. (I'm not totally sure how we get from internet platforms to pop music to the White House, but maybe it's a testament to Phil's faith in the internet's power that he claims those things as part of his domain? I'm also not sure if his "sorry Obama" is a reference to "Thanks Obama," but "om nom nom" is clear memeiness.)
But the weird!philness of it all remains strong. Besides from the familiar editing choices with visuals and music, this vid is heavy on imagery of eating, which we see from Phil a lot, but which especially evokes The Basket in this one. It goes from eating internet things like the Twitter bird to souls and planets, and that build towards an epic, even cosmic scale keeps it weird!phil. Phil spends a fair amount of the vid on portmanteaus of his name and naming things after himself, both of which, along with lions and catwhiskers last on in Phil's persona and branding long after the weird!phil trappings are left behind. But they're mixed in after horror moments like "it's just a little bite! Come here!" and given enough creepy music that something as silly as renaming Miley Cyrus "Phil Cyrus" fits into the ominous weird!phil world. And when we get lion people, they're destructive in a way that isn't consistent in the lion branding.
(It might say something about 2010 versus 2009 (or even 2020, in a way) that when he says "I will poke you all on Facebook," there's nothing suggestive about it. The obvious reason being his relationship, but he still could have acknowledged the innuendo aspect. Just a side note.)
This one is fundamentally about power, a theme we've seen before, with similar imagery and world-destruction endpoint, but here the destruction isn't a side effect of Phil's curiosity or his failure to stop some other force; it's something he chooses. And what the video delves into is what he'd destroy and how, not why. It just seems like... power. But Phil does include a line that sets off my parallel alarms with The Basket and The Silver Button: "Look at what you've done." Again, he places blame for the things somebody did, and in the same direction as in The Silver Button, but where The Silver Button implicated us in the act of watching, it's not at all clear that we've done anything in this one. The wording and line delivery imply a sort of 'you've created a monster,' that what we've done is bring about Phil's lion person form, but I don't see any indication in the vid of how we're implicated in this one, and this is the only moment that indicates even a sense that there's blame to be placed at all.
And we so end with another end of the world. Phil declares, "You will know it is the end. I am everything. Everything!" There's a specificity to the idea of consumption here that we don't always see from Phil, that eating isn't simply an act of destruction, but of making the destroyed things part of one's self. The world ends when it, and all of us internet residents with it, become part of Phil. And we're left with a tone. It might just be a sound effect, and it seems higher than a traditional dial tone, but to this '90s kid it still evokes a dial tone, and perhaps a boundary at the edge of the internet, where it used to give way to a phone line's other uses.
