Hype House and the failed promise of creator collectives

In a scene from the Netflix reality show Hype House, released in January, 23-year-old influencer Thomas Petrou contemplates the future of his TikTok content house. The space had been co-founded in 2019 by Petrou and Chase Hudson, a fellow TikTok star-turned-pop-punk artist who now performs under the name Lil Huddy. “[In the early days of Hype House] TikTok was very new, so these kids didn’t feel like they were famous yet, even though they had five, 10, 20 million followers when we started,” says Petrou, who is presented as a caring, paternal house manager, to his girlfriend Mia Hayward. “They all felt like just normal kids, and I think that was the part that kept us all so humble in the beginning. [When we were starting out] we were like, just kids messing around, hanging out, filming the content. It wasn’t about numbers or followers. We were just growing and having fun, but it just doesn’t work any more.”

Throughout the show, tension is high and morale is low. Some members are accused of not pulling their weight, others refuse to make content at all. Despite Petrou’s repeated attempts at patching things up, the house is on the verge of falling apart (spoiler: it basically does). He wistfully laments the naive optimism and pure creative spirit that made the Hype House work at first, propelling former members like Addison Rae and sisters Charli and Dixie D’Amelio to mainstream superstardom.

Early on, these kids were dancing like no one was watching, although of course everyone was. Awakening to their influence naturally meant monetising it, and the house’s most successful inhabitants quickly moved onwards and upwards. The D’Amelios got their own reality show and clothing and makeup lines soon after leaving, while Rae recently starred in Netflix’s He’s All That and signed a multi-picture deal with the streaming giant. Prototypical e-boy Lil Huddy moved out, signed a record deal with Interscope and released his debut album in September of last year. The rest are left scrambling for views.

The business model of content houses is inherently contradictory. They are designed to incubate talent and build a collective brand, but launch the individual careers of the most famous in the group. Petrou grapples with this, too. “I feel like it’s kind of setting yourself up for failure,” he says in the documentary. “People are separating into their own avenues and people are growing in their own future careers, and I think that was the whole goal of the house. And maybe it’s time for me to focus on that, too.”

Hype House paints a dispiriting portrait of fleeting internet fame where escalating pressure to produce content, feverish fandoms and oppressive public scrutiny fuel anxiety, ennui and isolation. And Petrou’s moment of reflection ultimately underscores the show’s bleakest revelation, that the utopian promise of a content house – collaboration, community and cross-promotion – is fundamentally at odds with the demands of the industry. If social media rewards and amplifies the individual over the collective, how can creator collectives flourish?

Taylor Lorenz, the newly appointed Washington Post columnist who is writing a book about the creator industry, notes that creative people cohabiting and collaborating is hardly a new concept. “In LA, you have these houses and apartment buildings full of groups of struggling creative people,” says Lorenz, who first reported on the Hype House in early 2020. “And I think all of that now is moving on to the internet and being captured on the internet. And people feel this need to kind of like, brand those houses, but at its core, it’s sort of like young, creative people just trying to navigate their own careers.”

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According to Lorenz, content houses can function well – it just depends on the business model. “Obviously, you need the right dynamics,” she says. “You have to make smart business decisions, decide if a brand partner is right, be good at having house rules, and resolve personal conflicts.” (Hype House also portrays the collective as a kind of surrogate family for the ones they’ve left behind, especially for those whose childhoods were marked by addiction, abuse and abandonment. Relationships ending or souring breeds misery and loneliness. “I’m so happy for them,” says Petrou of those that have flown the coop, like Rae and Hudson. “I just wish they would talk to me.”) Lorenz says that houses like the Atlanta-based Collab Crib, the first Black creator house which got its own reality show on Facebook Watch last August, are well managed. Houses run by management companies with exploitative leaders tend to fail, like the TikTok collective Clubhouse, which was launched by a real estate developer, or Team 10, the influencer collective run by sociopathic boxer Jake Paul. Clubhouse CEO Amir Ben-Yohanan has been accused of mistreating influencers as young as 15; Team 10’s Instagram account is currently inactive.

But even the ones that achieve mainstream celebrity seem psychically bruised from the sheer magnitude of their fame. The nature of social media means speaking directly to fans – and way, way more of them – than traditional celebrities, which invariably invites heightened scrutiny. In The D’Amelio Show, the D’Amelio sisters’ Hulu reality show which premiered in September, Charli complains of anxiety-induced headaches and body pains due to constant fear of public backlash and judgment. In her review of the show for The New Yorker, Naomi Fry writes that, “What the show does manage, perhaps surprisingly, is to serve as a pretty good PSA for the toll that social media’s panopticon-like effects take on its participants.”

This is the entertainment business, after all. And the promises and pitfalls of TikTok fame ultimately mirror those of Hollywood: young hopefuls flock to LA with dreams of creative community and fame, only to be swallowed up by a corrupt and cutthroat industry. The few that do ascend, do so alone. But the difference between Hollywood fame versus social media stardom is that the former opens doors to brand deals to stay rich and relevant, whereas the latter relies on it. The creator economy turns on a commercial imperative to churn out (sanitised, brand-friendly) content at an untenable scale – a standard that’s doubtless reinforced in the pressure cooker of a content house. Nowhere is that clearer than TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, a feature which allows brands to swipe through potential talent according to their most relevant numbers, like follower count, location and engagement. It’s a professional Hot or Not list. And ultimately, brands aren’t choosing groups; they’re choosing individuals. “[Content creators] are in a meat grinder on the internet everyday, but I don’t know that any of them ever address the structural problems that got us there,” says Lorenz. “This is the natural end point of hustle culture and capitalism and selling this dream of, like, anyone can make it online, and it’s like, no, they can’t.”