The social media philosophers

Another confession: I am not nearly well-versed enough in the teachings of Aristotle, or Finnish architecture, for that matter, to rigorously assess her argument. But for maybe the first time on that godforsaken app, I felt the old-fashioned thrill of actually using my brain. 

“There’s so much noise on the internet – endless amounts of grift, endless stuff that doesn’t really matter long term,” Yi tells me, a few weeks after our first TikTok encounter, Zooming in from her bedroom in Toronto, Canada. “I want it to be the exact opposite of that, because, despite everything that our tech overlords are trying to extract from us, social media is still capable of being a very valuable tool.” 

A stylist and accessories designer by day, a digital philosopher by night, the 26-year-old has been posting online since she was four – first on forums, then Facebook, where she ran a popular K-pop fan page and honed an instinct for “what lands on the internet”. These days, she addresses her 87,900 TikTok followers with daily bitesize musings on everything from nightclub design to subjective truth, via anti-ageing culture, nostalgia and the relationship between desire and creativity. 

Yi is far from alone in her pursuit of bringing intellectual thought to social media. And it’s not necessarily a new phenomenon – video essayists such as Lindsay Ellis and Abigail Thorn of PhilosophyTube have been creating long-form YouTube content in this style for over a decade. But on TikTok, an app that is regularly blamed for our dwindling attention spans and general societal decay, a new generation of creators is attempting to use social media as an edifying tool, wielding the algorithm to inspire audiences to read Kafka and embrace “research as a leisure activity”, as a viral video by @mister.tomfoolery puts it. 

Some of these creators have always existed on TikTok as, let’s say, thought provocateurs – people like Yi who spill streams of consciousness on camera and see what sticks with the app’s impatient audience. But right now, what’s striking is the number of creators who have pivoted from more generic fashion, beauty or lifestyle videos to this particular style of content. 

Take 21-year-old Zara McIntosh, for example, who first began posting makeup tutorials on YouTube as a teenager. As she grew older, her output broadened to include vlogs, fashion and “Get Ready With Me” style videos, but it wasn’t until she started her signature TikTok series “Taboo on the Bus” in 2023 that she truly found her stride as a creator. The concept is simple: McIntosh rides a bus route from beginning to end, filming herself discussing issues that span feminism, classism, LGBTQ+ rights and mental health. Her most recent episode – an impassioned monologue on the politics of women’s body hair – racked up nearly a million views in a matter of days. 

“[Previously] the deepest insight [in my] content would have been me chatting about my day – never anything serious,” she says. “I remember feeling like it wasn’t very substantial. I kept thinking: this can’t be it.” Currently studying advertising and public relations at Edinburgh Napier University, McIntosh spends up to 15 hours researching each three-to-four-minute episode of “Taboo on the Bus”, depending on the subject. “Some require academic sources and scientific research, because I never want to say anything that’s not backed up,” she explains. 

Right now, McIntosh is juggling that research with her dissertation. “It’s annoying that it’s getting to a point where I have to prioritise uni over my own research,” she says. And it’s hard to take your foot off the gas when you’re already building momentum: the response to “Taboo on the Bus” has been so positive she’s launched an extended-cut podcast, where fans with longer attention spans can listen to the full journey. 

Two things are happening here: a) audiences are, apparently, tiring of generic, overly PR’d and manicured influencer content; b) influencers – or some of them, at least – are tired of actually creating said content. For people like McIntosh, you could chalk it up to simply maturing: in her case, going to university and learning more about the world. But it’s also no coincidence that more thoughtful, substantive content is thriving on TikTok against a backdrop of social and political turmoil. Distrust in mainstream media is at an all-time high. The standards of our politicians? An all-time low. 

“The world has been permanently in a chaos-state for many years now. For young people, it seems only natural that they would seek out sources that try to make sense of it,” says Louise Yems, strategy director at The Digital Fairy, a London-based creative agency specialising in internet and youth culture. “We’re [now also] seeing a wave of distrust in [social media] platforms following recent world events – particularly on TikTok, post the ban that wasn’t. Many users are vocally calling out potential censorship, so it will be interesting to see whether this remains a platform where people are able to hold power to account long-term.”

Ah yes, America’s will-they-won’t-they ban, the one that, in January, briefly caused a nationwide TikTok blackout in the US. Many influencers tearfully said their goodbyes and renounced the app in the run-up to the January 19 deadline by which the Chinese-owned platform was expected to sell to a US buyer in exchange for continued operation in America. And most of those influencers predictably returned to the platform once Donald Trump’s administration extended the deadline after his inauguration. 

Except for Kayla Jaffe. The algorithm first introduced me to the 30-year-old at the start of January, with a video of her predicting that having no social media presence will soon become a signifier of wealth. Then, less than a month later, she disappeared from the app altogether. She’s one of the few people who stood by her word to stay off TikTok even if it returned to the US. She’s also one of the creators who was directly inspired to post more political content by Trump’s re-election. 

“I kind of knew in the back of my mind that he would probably win, but it was really a shock for me,” she says. As a New York-based policy consultant for nonprofits and local government, Jaffe realised that she’d been living in an echo chamber, both in real life and online. “The content I was consuming was not the reality of this country. I realised I needed to be paying more attention – not just to what’s happening within my very niche circle, but the conversation happening more broadly in this country and globally.” 

At the time, she’d been posting more personal videos about her life in New York, avoiding politics on account of the fact she “wasn’t a journalist” with verified sources. In the era of Trump 2.0, however, the guilt of not using her platform for good won out. “In 10 or 15 years from now, when my child asks, ‘Where were you?’ I didn’t want to be the type of person who had a platform [and didn’t use it].” 

After TikTok’s brief ban, Jaffe transitioned to the newsletter platform Substack, where she publishes “Notes from Kayla”, weekly essays on subjects ranging from rising sobriety in America to the Black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. There, she’s able to explore her interests in more depth, unrestricted by the limitations of bitesize videos that need to hook viewers in within their first few seconds. 

Ultimately, though, Jaffe’s goal is to use her digital footprint to build communities in real life. She’s currently working with a local cafe to host a salon series this spring – the first topic will be on modern dating. “I see Substack – and, if I decide to go back, TikTok – as a way to funnel people into in-person experiences,” she says. “At the end of the day, that is what is going to be most meaningful for me and, hopefully, others.”

Jaffe’s sentiment is one I see echoed constantly on social media these days – young people craving in-person experiences, whether that’s through videos that recommend trendy wine bars, creators launching supper clubs and book clubs, or monologues railing against a capitalist system that leaves many young people with little time or money to go out with friends at the weekend. 

Enter: 24-year-old Hailey “Hailo” Denise Colborn, a former Miss Teen USA Winner turned writer and entrepreneur. She’s the founder of Hot Literati, “a modern-day salon for artists and writers who see the world differently,” as per the website’s tagline. On TikTok, that exists as videos of Colborn reflecting on her morning reading sessions or sharing inspirational quotes by Kelly Clarkson and Friedrich Nietzsche; on Substack, a collection of essays by Colborn, as well as a book club, video interviews with people such as the author Rachel Yoder and a lively subscriber chat. The collective’s in-person events, however, are where the intersection between digital communities, old-school literature and new-school meme humour gets interesting. 

“Our first [in-person] event in New York was a Dostoevsky-themed party,” Colborn tells me, smiling enthusiastically over Zoom. “We didn’t really promote it online. We only posted flyers [around New York] to see if we could bring people who love Dostoevsky into one room – and it worked.” 

The writer Ingrid Norton read partygoers a passage from The Idiot before they entered the venue, a DJ played sets that mixed in quotes by the Russian author, actors discretely performed an immersive staging of The Brothers Karamazov around guests and, at one point, all the men participated in a pageant that required them to explain “what moral beauty meant to them”. 

Colborn knows that at least one member of Hot Literati’s online community was present at their Dostoevsky night, but doesn’t care too much about having her in-person events mirror her digital life. “I’m just curious,” she says, matter of factly, about her motivations. “I love art. I love artists, and I love giving them the opportunity to work together. The beauty [of the event was] connecting people who would never usually be in the same room.”

Everyone I speak to for this piece is noticeably earnest while talking about the motivations behind their content – completely void of the ironic, self-deprecating and slightly nihilistic tone that once characterised internet humour. It seems that, for a certain subsection of internet users, it’s no longer cool to be an opinionless, detached, glamorous face selling teeth-whitening strips. In an age of anti-intellectualism, it pays to show that you’re capable of intelligent thought. 

“[Intellectual influencers] point to a broader shift in status signalling,” says Louise Yems of The Digital Fairy. “Clout isn’t commercial, it’s cultural. In short, it’s not what you have, it’s what you know.” And, as McIntosh points out, these days staying silent on fraught political issues can be just as damaging to an influencer’s reputation as having a controversial opinion. 

“In the past six to 12 months, I’ve noticed a lot of people holding influencers accountable when they’re not using their platform for good,” she says. “I’m very close to 100,000 followers on TikTok, so I feel a responsibility to speak on behalf of important topics, be that Palestine, Donald Trump, or the riots [in the UK] last year.”

But it would be wrong to conclude that these creators are making this content out of fear. In truth, what they’re doing is using social media for its original intended purpose: to connect. “The big things I’m concerned about are climate change and fascism – and these are things that run amok when we’re isolated from each other, because then we don’t trust each other,” says Yi. “My content starts in the spaces of pro-sociality, [encouraging people to] go up to your fellow human being, have a pleasant interaction, engage with art more deeply. Because that’s the very base foundation of how we are going to fight this thing. One person is powerless to stop climate change. One person is powerless to stop this backslide into fascism. It’s something that’s only possible through communal work.”

It’s a bold and ambitious mission statement. But maybe that’s what we need from our influencers. After all, they have the power to convince people to buy their product recommendations. Why couldn’t they help us think deeper and form communities instead? 

Not long after my conversation with Yi, a new creator pops up on my feed, this time a young girl vlogging a trip to her local library. She spends hours trawling through books, photocopying her favourite images and quotes, then collating everything into a giant folder, all while telling me how she’s been inspired by one of Yi’s videos. 

The cynic in me thinks she didn’t really need to film this – she’s just grasping for cultural clout. But then I realise that she’s the one in the library, while I’m at home judging, in my pyjamas. Maybe it’s time I let myself be influenced, too. Then, next time, I’ll be able to tell you who Juhani Pallasmaa is.

Olive Pometsey has written for The Face, British GQ and Elle UK