From the beginning of the internet, people have been searching for how to do things. From how to bake a triple-decker chocolate cake, to how to prank your friends, there’s always been a reasonable desire from the universal users of the internet to simply apply its practical uses for their purposes. One of the biggest ways the market services this desire is through the creation of how-to videos, informative short projects designed to help the curious attend to their curiosities. This was all well and good, until one man took it upon himself to almost single-handedly destroy the very fabric of the genre. His name is HowToBasic.

In short, HowToBasic creates incredibly absurd parodies of How to videos, designed to make you think you’re about to learn how to bake your favorite cake, only to see the ingredients smashed on a wall in a high quality montage of destruction that has both fooled and entranced viewers for 5 years now. Because of his popularity (Well over 10 million subscribers) on YouTube, often times if you are unfortunate enough to search one of the 475 topics HowToBasic has parodied, you are likely to fall victim to one of his ploys. So if you were, for instance, to stumble across his “How to Fix a Water Damaged IPhone” video looking to fix your own iPhone, you would be rather surprised to find that that video’s conclusion involves smashing your phone into a thousand pieces with a hammer.

All of his videos follow this model. They start normal, lure you in, and then an almost inconceivable amount of violence breaks out. As I’ve mentioned, this has made HowToBasic incredibly popular, but there’s one catch: No one knows who he is. Communicating in his videos and in the videos of others only in a series of incomprehensible shrieks, moans, and slurping sounds, HowToBasic has, for the most part, presented himself as a cameraman who, in his videos at least, appears to always be completely naked from the waist down. For 7 years, even the Internet has failed to unmask this enigma. That was, until two days ago.

Throughout his career, HowToBasic has stated(On Twitter of course. He can’t communicate on camera, remember.) that when he hit the 10 million subscriber milestone that he would reveal his identity once and for all. He did, and a few days ago he dropped the video, simply entitled: Face Reveal. In the video, which already has over 12 million views and is sitting at #1 trending in two days, we finally see the man behind the mask….. Sort of. At first, it is revealed to be Michael Stevens, a fellow viral star from the channel Vsauce, but then this turns out to be a farce, as he was soon replaced by another Youtuber, Max Stanley, who claimed that it was he who was, in fact, HowToBasic.

This trend continues, in the form of a montage of other internet stars from across the web yelling, screaming, hitting things, and saying “NO, I’m HowToBasic!” So, in short, we never find out who HowToBasic is, and the mystery continues, or did we?

I’ll explain what I mean. Maybe this had a point. Maybe the point of HowToBasic isn’t that he’s a person, but maybe he’s something we all embody. We’ve all given and received terrible directions before, and we’ve all had to deal with the trust that comes along with telling another person what to do, and having them do it the wrong way. Maybe, because of this, we’re all HowToBasic? Or maybe I’m just dumb and this guy’s a maniac. Either way, the video is an amazing trip!