TikTok offers a brand new experience of both technology and media. This is my attempt to explain how the platform changes our perceptions and the consequences it has for the future of culture.

This essay is from my newsletter about algorithmic culture. More of my writing can be found at kylechayka.com.

For someone who writes about technology, I’m not really an early adopter. I don’t use virtual-reality goggles or participate in Twitch streams. Like everyone on the internet, I heard a lot about TikTok — teens! short videos! “hype houses”! — but for a long time I didn’t think I needed to try it out. How would another social network fit into my life? Don’t Twitter and Instagram cover my professional and personal needs at this point? (Snapchat I skipped over entirely.) What could TikTok, which serves an infinite stream of sub-60-second video clips, add, especially if I don’t care about meme-dances, which seemed to be its main purpose?

Then, out of some combination of boredom and curiosity, like everything else these days, I downloaded the app. What I found is that you don’t just try TikTok; you immerse yourself in it. You sink into its depths like a 19th-century diver in a diving bell. More than any other social network since MySpace it feels like a new experience, the emergence of a different kind of technology and a different mode of consuming media. In this essay I want to try to describe that experience, without any news hooks, experts, theory, or data — just a personal encounter.

The literary term “ekphrasis” usually refers to a detailed description of a piece of visual art in a text, translating it (in a sense) into words. Lately I’ve been thinking about ekphrasis of technology and media: How do you communicate what using or viewing something is like? Some of my favorite writing might fall into this vein. Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay “In Praise of Shadows” narrates the Japanese encounter with Western technology like electric lights and porcelain toilets. Walter Benjamin’s 1936 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” shows how the rise of photography changed how people looked at visual art. By describing such experiences as exactly as possible, these essays become valuable artifacts in their own right, documenting historic shifts in human perception that happened as a result of tools we invented.

We can’t return to the headspace of buildings without electric lights or a time when photography was scarce instead of omnipresent, but the texts allow us a glimpse. So this is my experiment: an ekphrasis of TikTok, while it’s still fresh.

When you begin your TikTok journey, you are not faced with a choice of accounts to follow. Where Twitter and Instagram ask you to build your list yourself (the former more than the latter) TikTok simply launches you into the waterfall of content. You can check a few boxes as to which subjects you’re interested in — food, crafts, video games, travel — or not. Then there is the main feed, labeled “For You,” an evocation of customization and personal intimacy. Videos start playing, each clip looping until you make it stop. You might start seeing, as I did, minute-long clips of:

— Gravestones being scraped down

— Wax being melted to seal letters

— An animated role-playing game

— Firefighters making shepherds pie

— Tours of luxury apartments

— Students playing pranks on their teachers

— Dogs and cats doing funny things

The videos are flashes of narrative, many arduously constructed and edited, each self-contained but linked to the next by the shape of the container, the iPhone screen and the app feed. It’s like watching a montage of movie trailers, each crafted to addict your eye and ear, but with each new clip you have to begin constructing the story over again. Will the cat do something funny? Will the couple break up? Will this guy chug five beers? Or it’s like the flickering nonsense of images and text as a film spool runs out.

The mechanism to navigate the TikTok feed is your thumb swiping, like a gondolier’s paddle, up to move forward to new content, down to go back to what you’ve already seen. This one interaction is enough to allow For You to get to know your content preferences. You either watch a video to completion and then maybe like or share it, or you skip it and move on to the next.

The true pilot of the feed, however, is not the user but the recommendation algorithm, the equation that decides which video gets served to you next. More than any other social network, TikTok’s core product is its algorithm. We complain about being served bad Twitter ads or Instagram not showing us friends’ accounts, as if they’ve suddenly stopped existing, but it’s harder to fault the TikTok algorithm if only because it’s so much better at delivering a varied stream of content than its predecessors.

A Spotify autoplay station, for example, most often follows the line of an artist or genre, serving relatively similar content over and over again. But TikTok recognizes that contrast is just as important as similarity to maintain our interest. It creates a shifting feed of topics and formats that actually feels personal, the way my Twitter feed, built up over more than a decade, feels like a reflection of my self.

But I know who I follow on Twitter; they are voices I’ve chosen to incorporate into my feed. On TikTok, I never know where something’s coming from or why, only if I like it. There is no context. If Twitter is all about provenance — trusted people signing off on each other’s content, retweeting endorsements — TikTok is simply about the end result. Each video is evaluated on its own merits, one at a time.

You can feel the For You feed trying subjects out on you. Dogs? Yes. Cats? Not so much. Rural Chinese fishing? Sure. Scooter tricks? No. Skateboarding? Yes. Fingerpicked guitar outside a cabin? Duh. And through the process of trial and error you get an assortment of videos that are on their own niche but put together resemble something like individual taste. It’s a mix as quirky as your own personal interests usually feel to you, though the fact that all of this content already exists on the platform gradually undercuts the sense of uniqueness: If many other people besides you didn’t also like it, it wouldn’t be there.

A like count appears on the right side of each video, reassuring you that 6,000 other people have also enjoyed this clip enough to hit the button. Usually, the higher number does signify a better video, unlike tweets, for which the opposite is usually true. You can click into a comment section on each TikTok, too, which feel like YouTube comment sections: people jockeying to write the best riff or joke, bonus content after you watch the clip. There are no time stamps on the main feed. Unlike other social networks, it’s intentionally difficult to figure out when a TikTok video was originally posted, and many accounts repost popular videos anyway. This lends the feed an atmosphere of eternal present: It’s easy to imagine that everything you’re watching is happening right now, a gripping quality that makes it even harder to stop watching.

Over the time I’ve been on TikTok the content of my feed has moved through phases. I can’t be sure how much the shifts are baked in to the system and how much they are a result of me engaging with different content (I’m not reporting on the structure of the algorithm here, just spelunking). There was a heavy skateboarding phase at first, but the mix has evolved into cooking lessons, clips of learning Chinese, home construction tips from This Old House, art-making close-ups, and early 2000s video games. If you search for a particular hashtag, hit like on a few videos, or follow an account, the For You algorithm tweaks your feed, adding in a bit more of that type of content.

(A note on content mixture: “The mix” is famously how Tina Brown described the combination of different kinds of stories in Vanity Fair when she was the magazine’s very successful editor-in-chief in the ’80s. Brown’s mix was hard-hitting news, fluffy celebrity profiles, glamorous fashion shoots, and smart critical commentary, all combined into one magazine. TikTok automates the mix of all these topics, going farther than any other platform to mimic the human editor.)

A sense emerges of teaching the algorithm what you like, bearing with it through periods of irrelevance and engaging in a way that shapes your feed. I barely look at the tab that shows me videos from people I actually follow, but I still follow them to make them show up more often in my For You feed. The process inspires patience and empathy, the way building a piece of IKEA furniture makes you like it more. It’s easy to get mad at Twitter because its algorithmic intrusions are so obvious; it’s harder with TikTok when the algorithm is all there is. The feed is a seamless environment that the user is meant to stay within.

I didn’t tell TikTok I was interested in sensory deprivation tanks, but through some combination of randomness, metrics, and triangulation of my interests based on what else I engaged with, the app delivered a single video from a float spa and I immediately followed the account. Such specific genres of content are available elsewhere on the internet — I could follow a sensory deprivation YouTube channel or Instagram account — but the TikTok feed centralizes them and titrates the niche topic into my feed as often as I might want to see it, maybe one out of a hundred videos. After all, one video doesn’t mean I want dozens more of the same kind, as the YouTube algorithm seems to think.

Before the 2010s we used to watch cable television, sitting on the couch with the remote pointed actively at the screen. If the show on one channel was boring, we changed it. If everything was boring, we engaged in an activity called channel flipping, switching continuously one to the next until something caught our eye. (On-demand streaming means we now flip through thumbnails more than channels; platform-flipping is the new channel-flipping.) TikTok is an eternal channel flip, and the flip is the point: there is no settled point of interest to land on. Nothing is meant to sustain your attention, even for cable TV’s traditional 10 minutes between commercial breaks.

Like cable television, the viewer does not select the content on TikTok, only whether they want to watch it at that moment or not. It’s a marked contrast to how, in the past decade, social media platforms marketed themselves as offering user agency: you could follow anything or anyone you want, breaking traditional media’s hold on audiences. Instead, TikTok’s For You offers the passivity of linear cable TV with the addition of automated, customized variety and without the need for human editors to curate content or much action from the user to choose it. (Passivity is a feature; Netflix just announced that it’s exploring a version of linear TV.) Like Facebook, and unlike streaming, TikTok also claims to offload the risk of being an actual publisher: the content is all user-generated. Thus it’s both cheap and infinite.

The passivity induces a hypnotized flow state in the user. You don’t have to think, only react. The content often reinforces this thoughtlessness. It’s ephemera, fragments of the human mundane; Rube Goldberg machines are very popular. Sure, you can learn about food or news, but the most essentially TikTok thing I’ve seen in the past few days is a video of a young man who took a giant ball he made of beige rubber bands to an abandoned industrial site and bounced it around, off ledges and down cement steps, in the violet haze of early dusk. The clip is calm and quiet but also surreal, like a piece of video art you might watch for 15 minutes in a gallery. It has no symbolism, no story arc, only a pleasant absence of meaning and the brain-tickling pleasure of the ball gently squishing when it hits a surface, like an alien exploring the earth, unaccustomed to gravity.

I’m biased in favor of such ambient content, which is probably why I get so much of it. But numb immersion — like a sensory deprivation tank — seems to be the point of the platform. On Twitter we get breaking news; on Instagram we see our friends and go shopping; on Facebook we (not me personally) join groups and share memes. On TikTok we are simply entertained. This is not to discount it as a very real force for politics, activism, and the business of culture, or a vehicle to create content and join in conversations. But for users, pure consumption is encouraged. The best bodily position in which to watch TikTok is supine, muscles slack, phone above your face like it’s an endless tunnel into the air.

Sometimes a TikTok binge — short and intense until you get sick of it, like a salvia trip — has the feeling of a game. You keep flipping to the next video as if in search of some goal, though there are only ever more videos. You want to come to an end, though there is no such thing. This stumbling process is why users describe encountering a new subject matter as “finding [topic] TikTok,” like Cooking TikTok or Tiny House TikTok or Carpentry TikTok. There’s a sense of discovery because you wouldn’t necessarily know how to get there otherwise, only through the munificence of the algorithm. A limiting of possibilities is recast as a kind of magic.

What is the theory of media that TikTok injects into the world? What are the new aesthetic standards that it will set as it becomes even more popular, beyond its current 850 million active users? It seems to combine Tumblr-style tribal niches with the brevity and intimacy of Instagram stories and the scalability of YouTube, where mainstream fame is most possible. The startup Quibi received billions of dollars of investment to bet on short-form video watched on phones. The company shut down within eight months of launch, but it wasn’t wrong about the format; it just produced terrible content (see my review of the service for Frieze). TikTok is compelling because it’s so wide, a social network with the userbase of Facebook but fully multimedia, with the kinds of expensive-looking video editing and effects we’re used to on television. The platform presents media (or life itself?) as a permanent reality TV show, and you can tune in to any corner of it at any time.

TikTok isn’t limited to power users or a particular demographic (as in the case of the mutual addiction of Twitter and journalists), and that’s largely because of the adeptness of its algorithmic feed. There is no effort required to fine tune it, only time and swiping. Though the interface looks a little messy, it’s actually relatively simple, a quality that Instagram has abandoned under Facebook’s ownership in favor of cramming in every feature and format possible. (Where do we post what on there now — what’s a grid post, a story, or a reel, which are just Instagram’s shitty TikTok clone?) In fact, just surfing TikTok feels vaguely creative, as if you move through the field of content with your mind alone.

Even if you are only watching, you are a part of TikTok. Internet culture has always been interactive; part of the joy of Lolcats was that you could make your own, using the template as a tool for self-expression and inside jokes. In recent years that kind of creative self-expression via social media has fallen by the wayside in favor of retweets, shares, and likes, centralizing authority around a few influential accounts and pushing the emphasis toward brands (which buy ads and drive revenue) and consumerism. TikTok returns triumphantly to the lowbrow, the absurd, the unimportant.

The culture that it perpetuates are memes and patterns, like the dance moves that users assign to specific clips of songs. Audio is a way to navigate the platform: You can browse all the videos made to a particular soundtrack, making it very potent for spreading music. Users also create reaction videos to other videos, showing a selfie shot next to the original clip. Everything is participatory, and the nature of the algorithm makes it so that a video from an unknown account can go as viral as easily as one from a famous account. (This is true of all social networks but particularly extreme on TikTok.) The singular TikTok is less important than the continued flow of the feed and the emergence of recognizable tropes of TikTok culture that get traded back and forth, like the “I Ain’t Seen Two Pretty Best Friends” meme. The game is to interpolate that phrase into a video, sometimes into an otherwise straight-faced script: the surprise of the meme line, which is more absurdist symbol than meaningful language, tips you to the fact that it’s a joke.

In his aforementioned essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin wrote that “aura” was contained in the physical presence of a unique work of art; it induced a special feeling that wasn’t captured by the reproducible photograph. By now we’ve long accepted that photographs can be art, too; even if they’re reproductions, they still maintain an aura. The evolution that I’m grasping for here — having started this paragraph over many times — is that now, in our age of the reproducibility of anything, the meaning of the discrete work of art itself has weakened. The aura is not contained within a single specific image, video, or physical object but a pattern that can be repeated by anyone without cheapening its power — in fact, the more it’s repeated, the more its impact increases. The unit of culture is the meme, its original author or artist less important than its primary specimens, which circulate endlessly, inspiring new riffs and offshoots. TikTok operates on and embraces this principle.

Could it be that we’re encouraged to assign some authorship to the algorithm itself, as the prime actor of the platform? After all it’s the equation that’s bringing us this smooth, entrancing feed, that’s encouraging creators to create and consumers to consume. I don’t think that’s true, though, or at least not yet. We have to remember that the algorithm is also the work of its human creators at Bytedance in China, who have in the past been directed to “suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform” as well as censor political speech, according to The Intercept. Recommendation algorithms can be tools of soft censorship, subtly shaping a feed to be as glossy, appealing, and homogenous as possible rather than the truest reflection of either reality or a user’s desires. In Hollywood, a producer tells you if you’re not hot enough to be an actor; on TikTok, the algorithm lets you know if you don’t fit the mold.

As it is, TikTok molds what and how I consume more than what I want to create. I feel no drive to make a TikTok video, maybe because the platform’s demographic is younger than I am and it still requires more video editing than I can handle, though it can also algorithmically crop video clips to moments of action. But when I switch over to Instagram and watch the automatic flip of stories from my friends and various brands, it suddenly feels boring and dead, like going from color TV back to black and white. I don’t want to only get content from people I follow; I want the full breadth of the platform, perfectly filtered. The grid of miscellany of Instagram’s discover tab doesn’t stand up to TikTok’s total immersion.

TikTok’s feed is finely tuned and personalized, but I think what’s more important is how it automates the entire experience of online consumption. You don’t have to decide what you’re interested in; you just surrender to the platform. Automation gets disguised as customization. That makes the structure and priorities of the algorithm even more important as it increasingly determines what we watch, read, and hear, and what people are incentivized to create in digital spaces to get attention. And TikTok absolutely wants all of your attention. It’s not about casual browsing, not glancing at Twitter to see the latest news or checking your friend’s Instagram profile for updates. It’s a move directly toward an addiction that will be incredibly profitable for the company. And the more we trust that algorithmic feed, the easier it will be for the app to exploit its audiences.

This is an essay from my newsletter about algorithmic culture. More of my writing can be found at kylechayka.com.

Tuca & Bertie on Netflix — clearly surreal. If you like this essay, hit the clap button, follow me on Medium, or subscribe to my newsletter.

The Streaming Wars are the sequel to the Content Wars in the Media Cinematic Universe. On the one hand, it means various platforms like Hulu / Amazon / Netflix competing over the biggest licensing deals for shows like The Office or Friends. On the other, it means that the flood of funding also makes its way to smaller, weirder projects to fill out the platform and maybe capture a few more subscribers.

Such a project was Lisa Hanawalt’s Tuca & Bertie, on Netflix, which wasn’t picked up for a second season. Hanawalt is the cartoonist behind the similarly anthropomorphic Bojack Horseman, an unconventional hit for sure, but Tuca & Bertie was on another level — more abstract, less linear, more frenetic, less familiar as a narrative about female friendship and families of choice (instead of darkness-haunted male protagonist). I watched it over the course of a few days and liked it but couldn’t shake the feeling that it was an acquired taste — were there enough people in Netflixland to make it worth producing the show?

It’s the same feeling that I get from Neo Yokio, the one-season (so far) Netflix anime from Ezra Koenig and Jaden Smith, which I think is unbelievable genius — a kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald satirical cartoon of post-apocalyptic New York and Instagram-y image obsession. (Who greenlit this???) Also a show like Terrace House, at least the English translation. Sure, I’m obsessed with it, but how many viewers could a quiet reality show about Japanese people being (mostly) polite to each other get? (And if Terrace House was all you wanted, you could just pirate it specifically, but that’s another story.)

When Tuca & Bertie didn’t get renewed, I saw some people on Twitter blaming the fact that they had no idea it existed — otherwise they would have watched it. “I have watched every season of ‘Bojack Horseman,’ and yet I can’t remember ever being shown a banner or thumbnail for ‘Tuca & Bertie’ on my Netflix homepage. I had to seek it out,” Dana Schwartz tweeted. Michael Idov gets Adam Sandler recommendations instead of quirky cartoons.

What my Netflix homepage looks like: a lot of promotion, not so much recommendation.

The Netflix homepage is like the Facebook feed or Google search results — things that are surfaced more or better get a flood of traffic, while the pieces of content off in virtual corners of the platform only get a trickle. At some level this is a corporate decision. Streaming service executives decide what to promote most heavily, which probably aligns with what they invest the most money in. But it’s also easy to blame “The Algorithm” for not showing you what you’re interested in. I watched Bojack, too, not to mention Hilda, a Netflix cartoon for children / tweens, but I didn’t get Tuca ads served to me until I already started watching it.

After all, that’s the promise of The Algorithm, right? You give it your data so that it can crunch the numbers, slot you into a generic user profile, and more easily deliver you exactly what you’re looking for, whether it’s Millennial Romantic Comedies or Documentaries About Street Food With Lots of B-Roll. My demographic of Online Journalists want to see Tuca & Bertie, and support someone like Lisa Hanawalt, so why didn’t the platform automatically help us in doing so?

Sometimes there’s an algorithmic mismatch: your recommendations don’t line up with your actual desires or they match them too late for you to participate in the Cultural Moment. It induces a dysphoria or a feeling of misunderstanding — you don’t see yourself in the mirror that Netflix shows you.

One idea at play here is the sense that the platform is actively delivering you mostly what it thinks you want based on ~data~, versus just what the executives have decided to highlight. (In my own Netflix experience, I don’t think that’s really true.) On large content platforms, you want to think you’re being tailored to even when it’s not the case. It’s a kind of Mechanical Turk situation: a human is ultimately feeding you the recommendation behind the image of a robot.

Another idea is that we do identify to a degree with what The Algorithm serves us. Sometimes what we get recommended (seemingly automatically) affirms our own tastes — the robot gives us this because we’re cool enough to merit it, as in the case of Tuca & Bertie. Or it even sees through the projection of our tastes. The new Twitter web interface feels even more algorithmic than it used to be; one journalist got fedFriday’s Chance the Rapper content even though that’s not what he would have admitted to wanting.

On YouTube, I watch a lot of City Pop videos, in part because it’s the easiest way to consume the relatively obscure Japanese genre. The top comment on the Haruomi Hosono album above is, ”i feel bad for all the youtube users that dont have old Japanese jazz and city-pop in their algorithm.” In that sentence there’s the sentiment that everyone has “their” individual algorithm, a disembodied curator picking stuff for them, and the assumption of cultural literacy based on what it chooses. “I get served City Pop stuff because I’m enlightened / curious enough to want it.” As if The Algorithm is a wiser older brother judging us ready to start listening to… the Grateful Dead? John Coltrane? I don’t know, I never had one.

There is so much content on streaming / content platforms and so much more all the time that the services have the burden of delivering it to us in such a way that we don’t feel overwhelmed by it. There were a million channels on cable TV, but they were each only playing one thing at a time. Thus The Algorithm is completely necessary to navigating it all. It acts as a filter so we’re not totally blindly groping in the pile.

Often we have to turn to other sources to get a good enough guide, however. Journalists, critics, and human curators are still good at telling us what we like, and have less incentive to follow the finances of the company delivering the content to us.

A streaming show that has already been dead for months, the Uncanny Valley of content.

When I had a few sick days recently, I ended up watching this Netflix show Friends from College, which I found by googling “What to watch on Netflix” or something. It was a totally banal ensemble comedy about 30somethings in dramatic relationships starring Kegan-Michael Key — in other words something that should have been pushed on me. After I made it through two seasons, I found out that the show had already been cancelled months ago and there would be no season three, presumably because not enough people had watched it. Every day there are new tweets with disappointed viewers who realize they’ve embarked on a story that won’t end.

I’m not sure who to blame, but I’m also not too worried — Netflix will try something similar again soon, and maybe next time it’ll stick around.

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studyhall.xyz // info@studyhall.xyz // @studyhallxyz

We’re pleased to announce that we have hired Stella Becerril as Study Hall’s first community organizer. Stella will be directing our efforts at organizing freelancers and our collective public statements in regard to freelancers’ relationships with publications.

Stella is based in Brooklyn via Chicago, where she contributed to organizing the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012 and building local Black Lives Matter movements. In 2016 she was an organizing fellow at Local 555 of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Portland, Oregon. She is a graduate of the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute’s organizer training program. Stella is also a freelance stylist and writer, contributing to publications like Jacobin, In These Times, and Fader.

Her work will involve reaching out to other writer organizations and unions to coordinate our efforts and producing a public report from Study Hall member survey data. Most of all, she’ll be a conduit for our members to communicate what they need to succeed in their work and a representative of our collective voice. Our subscriptions fund this necessary work of bringing freelancers together.

Stella is on Twitter @xicanaspice and you can email her about community organizing at stella@studyhall.xyz. For more information about Study Hall go to our website studyhall.xyz or email info@studyhall.xyz.

Welcome!

— Kyle Chayka & P.E. Moskowitz

I opened my Gmail account this morning and my emails started writing themselves. As I typed just a few words the next words appeared before I even thought of them. The screen told me I could hit tab and there they would be, like graven type, ready to send. That they weren’t the right words at all didn’t seem to matter — it was mind-reading magic! Shitty, annoying magic. I turned off Google’s auto-suggestions as soon as I could. (Apparently some people have had this feature for a while, but the plague just hit my inbox.)

But we live in a world of digital suggestions at the moment. They bombard us with things we might want at a speed we cannot possibly consume them. It’s not just display ads with Amazon products we already bought anymore. It’s the next song on Spotify, the next YouTube video. “Search for something or check out what’s happening,” Twitter suggests as soon as I open the app with a bright-blue alert that I can’t seem to make disappear. Yes, I know what the magnifying glass means. I’ve been on the internet for decades.

It’s even present in our text messages, which have come to feel like one of the more private spaces in online communication. Apple has slowly shifted how iMessages appear — I’ve noticed that using the dollar-sign turns any text into a link to send that amount of money and the names of musicians links to stream said artist on iTunes. This is less convenient than manipulative, pushing users toward in-house products through the medium of our own words.

Google itself seems to want to replace my brain wholesale. Gmail tells me when to reply or follow up to emails with blaring orange text — it’s been three days since this person didn’t email you back!!! This would be more helpful if I actually expected a response or we hadn’t finished the conversation on some other platform, text or Twitter DM or even IRL.

The company calls its email mind-reading feature “Smart Compose.” It follows the “Smart Reply” feature, which uses AI to analyze the emails you receive and suggest appropriate responses in batches of choices, which usually look something like “Yes!” “No!” “Maybe!” “Have a good weekend!” The options appear in cutesy bubbles, along with the rest of Gmail’s nightmare redesign, that resemble the conversation options in a choose-your-own-adventure video game. Smart Reply is a Magic Eight Ball based on the data of your previous language and the crunched-up text of everyone else who has ever used Google products.

I can imagine a world in which this is useful for someone, I guess. Say, if you have to agree to several dozen meetings a day or have to maintain the illusion of your bullshit job through the exchange of pointless email — so pointless that it can literally be written by robots. I would prefer to opt out.

I want to ask the same question of these suggested words that I now ask of YouTube or Spotify recommendations: are these really my thoughts, taste, or desires, or are they just an algorithm-generated facsimile of what was once more organic reality? Sure, it’s more complicated than that. But when The Platforms are treading directly into your personal communication, intercepting your sentences and subtly redirecting them, maybe it’s time to rethink the tools we use.

After all, the word “suggest” in psychology means to slowly guide a subject toward a particular feeling or idea that isn’t already present — an artificial implant. By using these tools we surrender ourselves to the suggestion of machines controlled by companies that already only want to sell advertising. Wait, did I really mean to write “meet you by the Starbucks All New Cold Brew near the Apple iPhone XS Max store!”?

We should question the idea of the “automatic” in auto-complete. For Surrealist artists, Automatism meant giving the subconscious free reign. It was writing or drawing that emerged uncontrolled, an artifact of whatever made the artist a unique human being, expressing the individual psyche. Instead of letting the robots write for you, just remove all the mental filters and write whatever comes to mind. At least it’ll lead to a more interesting future instead of the homogenized, sanitized mono-platform existence we’re heading toward.

We are a media-focused newsletter and digital community for freelance media workers. Subscribe: studyhall.xyz // Contact: info@studyhall.xyz.

Overview:

Study Hall is a subscription-based digital community of 1000+ media workers, with weekly newsletters, a listserv, and social network with exclusive resources. We recently made our first public statement on labor with an open letter against The Outline’s treatment of staff writers and freelancers (see coverage). Our members are excited about building on this momentum and developing more public standards and expectations for publications’ relationships with freelancers.

We are looking for a part-time community organizer who will develop these organizing efforts based on their own experience and ideas. We’re not sure exactly how this will work, but that’s the appeal of the experiment. This is not precisely a union — our members work for clients at will, with no pressure or expectations for boycotts or blacklists — but it might serve some of a union’s function for those who opt into it, particularly in terms of having a collective public voice. We also want to start more deeply collaborating with unions and other media organizations.

Job Structure:

• $1000 / month to start, with a contract of 3 months. The initial payment will be made in advance of beginning work.
• Approximately 10 hours a week of work, with progress benchmarks and deadlines.

This is a contract position, ideal for someone who already freelances or wants to add to the work they already have.

Expectations:

The work will be remote but it’s always nice if we can meet in person. Study Hall’s staff are currently based in NYC, Philly, DC and Chicago.

The organizer should have experience in organizing and/or community development as well as some fluency in digital journalism (aka media twitter). Freelance writers with reporting knowledge of labor practices will also be considered.

The organizer should be digitally confident: we use a few different platforms and while we don’t expect you to already know them, we want someone who is adept at learning how to use digital tools.

The organizer will manage discussions in our community about unions, advocacy, and labor structures, actively participating in the listserv and following conversation on a weekly basis.

The organizer will:

• Develop proposals for organizing Study Hall’s members going forward and will be the point of contact for suggestions and feedback.
• Work with Study Hall’s staff to use member survey data to write public reports and develop new surveys around organizing efforts (publication and payment standards, for example).
• Develop connections with other labor and media organizations.
• Think about governance structures for our community, looking toward long-term implementation.

We want this to be a collaborative process, so responsibilities and areas of focus can vary depending on who you are and what you want to do.

Why you should work for us:

• Develop “basically unprecedented” organization for media freelancers.
• Get paid to think about unions and experiment with labor structures.
• Develop relationships with and among our 1000+ members.
• Contribute writing to Study Hall newsletters & features for added fees.
• Work for a tiny, sustainable, non-VC media organization funded by people who care about it.
• Tons of room for growth and ambition

Application process:

Send an email to both Study Hall co-founders Kyle Chayka and Enav Moskowitz, kyle@studyhall.xyz and enav@studyhall.xyz, with the list of information below (applications without this format will not be considered) by the deadline of September 24. We’ll contact selected individuals for interviews ASAP.

1. Subject line “ORGANIZER APPLICATION: Your Name”.

2. A paragraph in the body of the email summarizing your work experience with organizing, community management, and digital journalism as well as your current location / work situation.

3. A paragraph in the body of the email on why you want to fill the role and what you bring to Study Hall, briefly summarizing your vision for organizing the community.

4. One-page resume attached.

5. Please follow the above formats — applications that don’t show us you haven’t actually thoroughly read the job description!

Email us at kyle@studyhall.xyz and enav@studyhall.xyz with any questions. We will likely receive a high volume of applications, and cannot respond to everyone personally. Finalists will be contacted shortly after the application deadline to set up in-person or Skype interviews. Thanks for reading, and subscribe to Study Hall here.

— Kyle Chayka and Enav Moskowitz

We are a media-focused newsletter publication and digital community for freelance media workers. Subscribe here.

Overview:

Study Hall is looking for its first staff writer. As we expand our weekly newsletters, original stories, and resources for freelancers, we want someone to lead in developing our voice. The role will focus on writing our Digest and Opportunities emails as well as contributing original media reporting and commentary that’s compact, punchy, thoughtful, and informative.

We are building Study Hall into a subscription-funded publication and community. Our inspirations are The Awl, Today in Tabs, and early-days Gawker, focused on the media and looking outward. But we’re also trying to be something new: we want to make vital, fun, stuff that people will read instead of constantly refreshing Twitter. If you were obsessed with those publications, we want to talk to you. Similarly, we want to launch new voices: the role could be perfect for a recent graduate or a writer early in their publishing career.

See a sample of the Digest here and sample of Opportunities here.

Structure:

The payment is $1500 per month, paid upfront for the first month and then halfway through each month. An initial test contract will run three months and then get renewed. The volume of work is based on tasks not time, but we estimate 15 hours per week.

Since the staff writer will be in charge of developing the newsletters, they will also receive raises and more responsibilities in direct connection with subscriber growth. There is also significant potential for added paid work in the Study Hall ecosystem, working as an in-house researcher for freelancers or developing new publication projects.

This is a contract position, ideal for someone who is developing their own freelance writing career as well. We have no need for pitch exclusivity, only commitment.

Expectations:

• We very much prefer New York-based applicants for reporting and management, but will consider the right non-NYC applicant.
• The staff writer should be very fluent in Media Twitter and already keeping up with various individual editors and publications.
• The staff writer should ideally be familiar with Google Groups, Mailchimp, Basecamp, and Patreon (no in-depth experience needed).
• The staff writer will submit weekly drafts for the Digest and Opportunities emails before their run dates (Mondays and Tuesdays).
• For the Digest, the writer will develop Q&A structures for editors and writers, carry out interviews, and report media industry stories. With the help of our staff, they will collate job opportunities and freelance calls as well as scout them out.
• We want this to be a collaborative process, so responsibilities and areas of focus can vary depending on who you are and what you want to do.

Why you should work for us:

• Learn about the freelance ecosystem
• Contact editors and publications in a professional capacity
• Develop a unique voice in the newsletter arena
• Report longer features for added fees
• Develop community with our 500+ members
• Work for a tiny, sustainable, non-VC media company
• Infinite room for growth and ambition

Application process:

Send an email to both Study Hall founders Kyle Chayka and Peter Moskowitz, kyle@studyhall.xyz and peter@studyhall.xyz, with the list of information below (applications without this format will not be considered) by the deadline of May 15. We’ll contact selected individuals for meetings within a few weeks.

1. Subject line “APPLICATION: Your Name”.
2. One or two paragraphs in the body of the email on why you want to fill the role and what you bring to Study Hall, briefly summarizing your vision for Digest and Opportunities.
3. Three clips of recently published writing hyperlinked in body of email with the name of the publication.
4. Updated one-page resume attached.

Email us at kyle@studyhall.xyz and peter@studyhall.xyz with any questions. Thanks for reading, and subscribe to Study Hall here.

A new website and a new effort to build community in the media industry.

We’re happy to announce the formal launch of our Study Hall subscription newsletter, listserv, and digital community for the media industry. Check it all out on our new website, designed by Jarrett Fuller in Brooklyn, with logo and art from Berlin-based designer Bruno Pinto da Cruz.

What It Is:

Study Hall launched in 2015 as a coworking space for freelance writers in Brooklyn. Our office in Gowanus is still going strong, but we realized that there’s a much wider desire for community and information-sharing in media, apart from the noise of Twitter and beyond New York City. So we built a weekly email newsletter with media news recaps and job and freelance opportunities, paywalled with subscriptions through Patreon. That has since grown into a thriving space with over 300 subscribers, from freelance reporters to staff editors and cultural critics.

We have three levels of membership. For $2 a month, members get the weekly email of media news and commentary. For $4 a month, they get an additional email of jobs and freelance opportunities and access to our Listserv. For $11 a month, they can join our Basecamp, an app platform with real-time chat, editor contact lists, pitch databases, FAQ resources, and private groups for LGBTQ, women, and journalists of color. We also have groups based on location and practice, like criticism or investigative reporting. We think of it as a shared business back-end for freelancers; it’s a decentralized corporation.

Study Hall co-founder Peter Moskowitz is the editor of the newsletter and we brought on the freelance journalist Erin Corbett as our part-time community manager.

Why We Think It’s Cool:

Whether newspaper, magazine, or website, strong media companies are always built on community. Not the abstract community of Facebook users or anonymous traffic metrics, but communities of specific interest and expertise in which everyone has a stake. We are creating a shared space in which our readers are also our editors, writers, and professional colleagues. Along with other community-based media organizations, we want to develop a more reader-focused, accessible, and open version of our industry.

Our Future:

Study Hall’s digital branch is still in its early days. From here, we plan to expand our newsletter into a subscription email publication that can help fill in where the likes of Gawker, The Awl, and Today in Tabs have left off, promoting young writers and offbeat writing.

We plan to explore cooperative legal and business structures that can help Study Hall function at its higher levels more like a guild or union for media freelancers. Our goal is to build an organization in which everyone has equity, one that can survive without investors and be sustainable without grants. It should also be fun. We might even make tote bags.

While Study Hall currently focuses on the media, we believe similar self-organized structures can be useful in any industry where contractors make up an increasing percentage of the workforce (that is to say, every industry).

We hope you’ll join us! You can subscribe on Patreon, and if you want to talk shop or send your thoughts, email info@studyhall.xyz. Follow us on Twitter or whatever.

Kyle Chayka & Peter Moskowitz

studyhall.xyz