The Content House: The New Cottage Industry of Platform Inhabitation

What does the dramatic rise of the TikTok “Content House” mean for architecture and domesticity?

The year 2020 will always be remembered as a fundamentally transformative year. Exactly how permanent the rapidly adopted new patterns of work and domestic life will prove to be is difficult to gauge, but a return to old norms currently seems unlikely. Digital communication, already the structural core of our everyday lives in the pre-pandemic world, has become for some the primary form of social and professional interaction. Our new “distributed” working lives have fractured the head office across a thousand sofas, spare bedrooms, and kitchen tables.

At the same time, for a generation of content creators rapidly professionalizing across Twitch streams, YouTube videos, and Discord servers, home has become the stage, studio, and media distribution center, and the definition of what a house is for has suddenly become hotly contested.

Our recent societal-wide, cultural beta-test has provided conditions where radical ideas can quickly become future norms, and so the recent explosion in popularity of TikTok, its “content houses,” and their occupants might require deeper consideration.

Cottage industry

Squeezing into the gap between the community focus of YouTube and Instagram’s fomo-as-a-service model, TikTok is precision-engineered around the experience of the contemporary teenager, driven by a directly social and distinctly granular form of creative production. While Instagram, for instance, appears to encourage an increasingly absurdist (and toxic) projection of “how I live,” TikTok’s central rubrik is more akin to “what it’s like to be alive.” This comes with associated slapstick, with the audience in on the joke, connected through a focus on content discovery rather than network formation. During the quagmire that was 2020, TikTok emerged as the perfect production tool and delivery method for the internet’s endless appetite for prison humor. No wonder Instagram has already ingested most of TikTok’s core principles into its newest “Reels” feature.

On the surface, the content house is a relatively straightforward phenomenon. Crews of wildly popular influencers or ambitious hopefuls decide to live together to boost their platform, their brand, and their merch sales, in tandem with the growth of TikTok. With the most notorious of these houses garnering a massive online presence, the recent domestic turn saw a spate of entrepreneurial talent management agencies leap on the trend, and by the end of 2020 as many as 30 content houses were clamoring for attention. These locations—the headquarters of various social media crews and influencers—serve as a large stage set for life as performance, micro-cosmic gossip generators, and workshop studios for the most digitally prominent and their arsenal of pranks, make-up tutorials, lip-syncing, dancing, gaming, and self-development challenges.

According to “The Internet’s most complete list of TikTok houses,” there are currently 36 notable projects at the time of writing, although they are fluid by nature, decaying as rapidly as the bloom.

Although the most successful influencers and content houses certainly have extensive fan bases, the benefits of shared “living” are obvious. The most simple explanation is, of course, that coliving is productive, providing a framework for groups of friends—but more often friendly collaborators—to build visibility. It’s the razzle-dazzle of an ensemble cast, situational comedy, and a chorus combined. Thanks to the encroachment of everyday life and co-living into this arrangement, the audience is also party to real world drama, albeit fragmented across channels.

As we live through the unique moment where people of all ages are returning to their bedrooms as the interface for much of social and professional life, content houses are a pivotal illustration of how platform engagement, mitigated through the domestic space, may be reconfiguring how we spend our time. Socializing becomes a performance in surfing the economies of attention and real estate. Or as the slogan of TooTurntTony, a producer of frequently viral TikToks, puts it: “Livin’ for a Livin.”

In every content house a heartache

The content house might be the most vivid picture of a domestic future at a time when surveys tell us that 50 percent of Gen Z use their smartphones for five hours a day or more.

Content houses dispense with certain core components associated with domestic life: privacy, family, tranquility, and stability. The successful content house is a tangle of frictions, collisions, and exuberance. It is, of course, impossible to know how “real” the drama forged in these content houses is, but narrative threads can coexist between the channels of its members, existing beyond any definite direction.

Where most latter-day reality TV has gradually succumbed to its own “kayfabe” (the suspension of disbelief demanded by professional wrestling—see the increasingly staged meta-fiction of Jersey Shore or Made In Chelsea), the intense emotional availability of many content houses appears to be authentic at least insofar as it is raw, unconstrained, and at the very least unregulated by a showrunner.

Many of today’s most successful “content creators” find initial success in their bedrooms by default, often alongside similarly popular siblings and parental cameos. The content house represents the transition of adolescence bedroom-based content production into the coming-of-age rumspringa of co-living. The studio gives way to the garden, the bedroom, the garage, or the car.

Despite its emergence through social media, the content house’s most obvious ancestor is possibly reality TV. While the content house orbits around a physical location, it also denotes a period of time, documented and developed much like a TV series. New members are “cast,” content is developed in “seasons,” there are regular micro-show formats built to develop specific brand and advertising arcs. A content house might stream content for far longer stretches than a movie or series, often running uninterrupted for hours or even days. However, the main event, of course, is the near continuous output of brutally short clips for TikTok. While Andy Warhol proposed that we might each get fifteen minutes of fame, the average length of a clip in TikTok’s most played Top 100 lasts fifteen seconds.

The dramatic rise of TikTok

Once the internet’s premier tool for making short-form videos, Vine preceded the spectacular success of TikTok. When Vine launched in 2013, its major content “innovation” was that its videos were limited to six seconds and looped automatically, giving it a strange hyperactive quality that encouraged its users to experiment with the form. Vine was wildly popular for a short window of time, turning several of its most prominent users into internet celebrities. By 2015, six of the Top 10 most followed Vine users lived in various apartments at 1600 Vine, a luxury compound in Hollywood, where they frequently collaborated. The building became a hotspot for budding influencers and was profiled in The New York Times, which noted the curious overlap between platform stardom and geographic proximity.

However, the Vine platform was slowly dying. The core six-second gimmick was becoming stale, and the platform managed by Twitter was being swamped with abusive comments. The conference room at 1600 Vine was a natural location for a meeting arranged by top tier Vine makers, in which they put forward a rescue strategy directly to its executives. They proposed a number of changes to Vine’s function and management, not least to provide a more viable mechanism for reunermating those generating the content (allegedly requesting $1.2 million each for the production of twelve videos a month). Its most celebrated creators, carefully tracking their own analytics, were keenly aware of rapidly declining “impression” rates and were getting spooked. The deal was rejected, however, and many of the creators left the platform to focus on YouTube, Instagram, and the explosive popularity of Snapchat. By January 2017, Vine would be completely shut down.

Meanwhile, Beijing-based ByteDance would launch Douyin across China, and in less than 18 months the app would have 100 million users. After merging its purchase of the lip-syncing app Musical.ly, it would be released internationally in 2017 as TikTok. The app would cement itself on the home screens of the American teenager, claiming a space in the crowded and already mature landscape of social media by spending a billion dollars a year on advertising after its international launch. TikTok is at least partially the platform that the participants of the meeting were imploring Vine to become.

The 2019 US government-imposed takeover of the platform demonstrates how quickly a social network can transform into critical communications infrastructure, supported by Silicon Valley’s cultural unease with a Chinese social platform having such dominance in the US market—apparently requiring more decisive action than the application of the ‘Made in China” label. As a platform it also stands out, even in the rogue’s gallery of social media companies and their dubious data practices. Its algorithm and data collection techniques are highly opaque, and critical technologists regularly express concern about what might be going on under the hood. While TikTok’s emergence as a political football is instructive, the cultural significance of the platform shouldn’t be obscured by the geopolitical tangle of its conception or codebase, and these concerns don’t appear to faze the millions of teenagers fluent in the platform.

TikTok is not exactly shy about its management of attention. It has chiseled down the most intense, clingy aspects of behavioral design into weapons-grade addiction fodder. Part of TikTok’s appeal is that it takes the long tail of other online content, sound, and video, and encourages users to refine such fragments into the most seductive, instantaneously dissolvable digital pulses.

Through its design, appearance, location, and facilities, for some the home is becoming an appendage of platform interactivity. While it might be tempting to lean on sci-fi cliches, dazzling interfaces, or the zombie-like persistence of smart home fantasies as the key symbols of this version of domestic life, the house in the “house-as-platform-interface” model is moving in a different direction. A few dashes of vivid RGB LEDs aside, the layers of hyper-reality we encounter in the networked house are in image filters, face masks, and the distortions of music and slow motion camera prank footage rather than being set into physical architectural detailing.

Teenage streams

Over the last decade, teenagers realized they could directly market themselves without any complexity or baggage, and literally control the interests of intermediary media companies, agents, and record labels. They could talk directly to the camera, they could “be themselves” and build an audience. Achieving global fame as an actual teenager would ordinarily have some degree of dependency on the songs, words, or sports training from “the adults.” Today, teenage life can be sufficiently vivid on its own self-recorded terms to attract the attention of a generation of hyper-connected peers—and it’s also lucrative.

It’s noteworthy that while the ability to build an audience may be “organic,” the decision to conglomerate into a content house is far more strategic, often led in partnership with social media agencies and media management (in the case of Rhianna’s “Fenty House”) and directly under the coordination of an international brand. While at face value these names describe a physical location, they are, more accurately, attempts to build dynasties in the spirit of the Houses of Tudor, Lannister, or Kappa Kappa Gamma. They’re a distant cousin of the infamous “brogrammer” codeshops of Silicon Valley.

While the houses themselves feature as a backdrop rather than a character, the relationship to the actual building is perfunctory. Content houses appear to be almost universally rentals, leaning towards plain contemporary interior design that won’t accidentally overshadow its inhabitants. Despite the implication of dozens of young people sharing a house, the spaces appear meticulously clean and sometimes almost empty. As The New York Times discovered, the lack of furniture is useful to make continually filming content all the easier. White walls happily provide better bounce lighting.

The house must of course be introduced with a new tour video. A frequent trope is the uncertainty about what’s actually there, perhaps the discovery of a new room or kitchen appliance. The most obvious furniture is often actually the means of virtual production, film editing locations, camera storage, lighting rigs, gaming chairs, and streaming set-ups.

Not everyone is a full-time resident. In fact, residency itself is more a political denomination than a geographic, but the governance of the house appears to be relatively consistent and mirrors the archetypal structures found across entertainment. There are usually one or two founders of the house that float somewhere between svengali, management, booking agent, and participant.

With respect to the actual output of the content house, the work of artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch has been maniacally prescient. The ultra psychodramas of smushed frat houses and party palaces that they have depicted in their videos and exhibitions prefiguring the rampant energy of content culture leaps to mind when watching clips of Jerma985’s recent three-day Twitch streaming event The Dollhouse. It’s a generation of video makers and content producers drinking from the same Mountain Dew fountain of post-commercialized early internet voyeurisms such as MTV Cribs.

Another film, Players by Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, although tonally in stark contrast, chips away at the reality of platformed living. It documents six young professional online poker players who are coliving in Bangkok to maintain the ideal time window for competition against their most lucrative market—late-night and likely intoxicated American gamblers.

Dismantling and reordering

The reformulation of the domestic in the wake of new media technologies is nothing new. Japanese architect Toyo Ito details a similar phenomenon in 1988 in Dismantling and Reordering the House in a Disorded City from his collection of essays Tarzans in the Media Forest:

“The kind of spaces desired in houses, everything—a cozy living room with a low sofa facing toward audio-visual equipment, a dining room with a large table, around which meals can be enjoyed, a kitchen containing splendid modular fittings—are no longer places that play a part in the simplicity and vitality of family life. Like stage-set for television dramas they are no more than highly fictional spaces prepared for our aspirations toward family life.”

He goes on to observe that a new generation of young, newly financially independent women had reconstituted the expectations of Tokyo apartments by living maximal urban lives while forgoing furniture and maintaining only a minimal domestic footprint. Noting how this effect was becoming more universal, he follows on: “We are compelled to go back and forth between temporary, fictional urban spaces and fictional urban spaces, wherein functions become the remnants of flows of images.”

Ito was also a proponent of mediatheques and liquid archives, the architectural response to the shifting sands of networked culture towards the end of the millennium. Not unreasonably, the 90’s saw a glut of architectural propositions, exhibitions and realised projects that responded to the internet as a condition that could be examined, perhaps even contained through civic and public space, usually through the reconfiguration of libraries, museums and cultural zoning. While the visual and theoretical language of that era has aged with mixed results, the central intuition of how sizable the impact of networked media would be on the social consciousness was broadly accurate. The most glaring overestimation of many architects of that time was perhaps simply that we might even leave the house.

Escaping local maxima

Alison Gopnik, Berkley Professor of Psychology and leading voice in cognitive development, has put forward the idea that the human’s extended childhood gives humanity extra space to explore and exit cultural “local maxima.” That is a good, but not a great, social pattern. The plasticity of the young mind gives humans an evolutionary advantage as we adjust the balance between “exploring” and “exploiting” the contents of our environment.

Teenagers as a group have few advocates when it comes to urban life. After all, how many buildings—let alone homes—are designed with teenagers specifically in mind? However, the teenager is perhaps the default user of the internet. The relationship between the lives of teenagers being shaped by, and in turn shaping, the structural forms of platforms built on newly available technology is complex and symbiotic, but online culture is largely driven by teenagers and young adults. From this perspective, as this culture comes to occupy more of the physical domestic space and platformed home-working slouches towards ubiquity, the content house may not be a temporary cultural moment but a genuine experimentation with the purpose of domestic space.

Platform as Habitat

So what does TikTok mean for domestic spaces, architecture, or even the city?

A simple reading is that it’s the extension of the trend of teenagers, hyper-literate in both the functionality and cultural context of platforms, to renegotiate their boundaries while reaping the benefits of wild permanent connectivity. If society depends on the younger members to experiment on behalf of everyone else, this is what it looks like today.

It’s in the DNA of design theory to seek out the “architecture” of such phenomena, but from a material point of view there isn’t all that much to cling to. The reality is that architecture for the purpose of the content house is conceptually interchangeable with real estate. Indeed even the relationship between these spaces and the cities they occupy is indirect—most content houses appear to film relatively little in the external world. It might be brand maintenance, but since the trend has existed almost entirely during—and perhaps as a result of—the pandemic, who knows. They exist in an uncomfortable sofa crevice between a notionally “real” city and a GTA5 live stream. The figure of the city is primarily as a flavor of lifestyle and narrative framing, with the majority setting up shop in Los Angeles, the archetypal lifestyle capital.

Much has been written about the complex history between the urbanity of Los Angeles and the history of other forms of media, most obviously radio and cinema. That social media and such a digitally dislocated trend might retain a natural geographic center of gravity (at least in America) are both curious and then obvious, given the ambitions of many of TikTok’s elite. Relocation to Los Angeles follows the same playbook as moving in together, and usually comes first.

It brings to mind the 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself by Thom Andersen. Andersen’s film attempts to revitalize a view of the city of Los Angeles and its unique architectural history as character within “the movies” by differentiating it from the abbreviated identity of LA—a construct swimming in its own industrially fabricated cinematic imagery. The content house is perhaps the logical extension of the latter, now appearing as a sun-drenched lifestyle pantomime stretched across a landscape of anonymous, disconnected mansions.

For many, architecture itself has slipped into a vernacular propaganda of people cut-outs and V-Ray. Perhaps the content house is simply the realization of the fully dematerialized way of life that this visual form often accidentally proposes.

It might be more instructive then to consider what TikTok means for those living in these spaces. While by no means universally the case, for many WiFi is now genuinely the most important domestic amenity and there’s barely any architectural precedent that prepares us for that. Not least because it can provide potential and instant access to a hungry audience, numbering in the millions. In the long run, the relationship between privacy and domestic space may turn out to be little more than a default setting.

From another angle, TikTok through the content house is also a radical social proposal. Take the “Hype House” at face value, for example, and you see 21 young people deciding to cohabit, supporting themselves almost entirely by making videos no longer than sixty seconds. From the point of view of the architectural program, it’s as magnificently brazen as it is contemporary. That the Hype House is not an outlier, but a trendsetter, outlines how many budding TikTok stars (or indeed just teenagers) might embrace the model of platform as habitat, if given the chance.

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Christopher Burman

Christopher Burman is a designer and artist based in London. His work focuses on the overlaps between sensory perception, technology, and the city. He is co-founder of the collaborative environmental design studio Heat Island and is currently a lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He was previously Director of Digital Strategy at Strelka KB, Moscow, and a participant in the postgraduate research program The New Normal at Strelka Institute.

Instagram: @burman.work

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