Dirt: Hype Haus/ humbling
Our biweekly recap from Eliza Levinson.
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Eliza Levinson returns twice a week to tell us what is going on in streaming and the metaverse.
I watched Hype House, despite my better judgment. The show is one of Netflix’s more recent dalliances into reality TV, and centers around the crumbling dynamics of a group of child TikTok influencers desperately clinging to relevance.
In early 2020, Taylor Lorenz profiled the Hype House for the New York Times, which – at the time – boasted 19 members, most of whom were white, and a few of whom have successfully transitioned from the livestream to the mainstream – household names, for the social media-fried: Addison Rae; Charli D’Amelio and her sister, Dixie; Charli’s ex-boyfriend, Chase Hudson (“Lil Huddy”). The House is described on the show and in coverage as being located in LA, but as a native, I will proudly disagree: it would take two hours to get from Moorpark, where the teens live, to the city center; probably longer, given LA traffic. I say this not as a dig to said teens, who have many things to learn (least of all LA geography), but rather to emphasize the emotional and psychological backdrop of the storied “content house,” which bills itself as an aspirational land of all play and no work and actually functions as an incubator for extreme isolation and pressure, both social and financial.

By the time Netflix crews enter the Hype House, the house’s halcyon days are long over. Chase has moved out into his own palace in LA proper (Encino, lol) – a “Cheesecake Factory”-lookin’ villa that some speculate once belonged to Jeffree Star – and Hype House founder Thomas Petrou mourns his former business partner-slash-bestie’s bid for independence with the raw hurt and vitriol of a helicopter parent.
As is often true of Netflix reality shows, whose glossy, 25-minute mindlessness can’t hold a candle to the glass-flinging, self-incriminating drama of Bravo epics from Vanderpump Rules in its prime to Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (stay tuned for more on that Tuesday), not much happens in Hype House. Thomas, the eldest in the house at 22 and a consulting producer on the show, grows increasingly agitated that none of the next-gen members of Hype House seem to want to make content. Alex Warren (20) is doing his best, but has been noticing a downward trend in his viewership and can’t seem to bring it back up. During the show, Alex will try – and fail – to go viral, including a prank on his roommate that merits death threats from fans, a broken foot, and a fake proposal and marriage to his disappointed girlfriend Kouvr Annon (21). Thomas has high hopes in Vinnie Hacker (18), but is frustrated that Vinnie – best known for live-streaming video games and TikTok thirst traps – would rather do his thing alone. Neither of the show’s most entertaining cast members, the charming Larray (23) and the problematic Nikita Dragun (25), live in the house, though they’ll briefly have a falling-out over who was responsible for Larray’s choice to attend a party while having Covid.

For the millennial-and-above set reading this, the fact that Hype House is a depressing and dystopian watch may come as no surprise. Where to begin? It’s already triggering to see the living conditions of teens and early-20-somethings, who possess no furniture other than bean bag chairs, seem uninterested in basic hygiene, and subsist on potato chips and pizza. I haven’t lived in the US since 2017 and, for the first few episodes, felt like I was witnessing transmissions from a parallel universe. I kept asking friends things like “Is this what the US is like now?” and “Is this person actually famous?” and “Is this what children want?” Being told that Charli D’Amelio was one of the most famous people on the internet felt like if someone pointed, at random, to a car on the street and told me it was the most famous car in the world. Are kids, like, okay? Who are these fans – the rabid viewers all of Hype House’s participants are so afraid of offending? Who are these people? I’m four months older than Nikita Dragun and feel 200.
I’ve written about this before, but social media – like a lot of stuff online, including video games – exists in an economy of “playbor”, a term invented by Julian Kücklich in 2005 to refer to the dubious space in which individuals do work for big companies for free, which seems made up until you think about modifications for video games or anything posted on social media. We do it because it’s been designed to feel like a game, when it reality it is Marxist exploitation in its truest sense – as I wrote last year for X-Tra, this is “a fundamentally unequal exchange wherein the value produced by workers (a company’s net revenue, a boss’s salary) exceeds that of the laborers’ compensation.” (I apologize for quoting myself.)
Poor Thomas Petrou and Alex Warren are so deeply entrenched in social media’s logic of playbor that every aspect of their daily lives has become consumed by their Sisyphean bid for lasting celebrity. To be fair, both are more concerned with the money than the glory: like almost everyone in the world of Hype House, they became exponentially wealthier than their lower-middle or working-class families overnight, and have, as such, gone on to provide significant financial support to dependent siblings, parents, and grandparents. In their empty and isolated mansion, the Hype House teens have crash landed from online stardom left with only our culture’s two unflattering constants: work and loneliness.

The Hype House brethren aren’t the only ones struggling to hold onto a buck in this economy: Ozzy Osbourne found himself on the wrong end of the backstage-to-blockchain pipeline this week, as his debut NFT, CryptoBatz, culminated in a “phishing scam causing tens of thousands of dollars to be drained from buyers,” writes Jeff Yeung for Hypebeast. According to Corin Faife at The Verge, the scam was made possible when Osbourne’s CryptoBatz project changed its Discord link from discord.gg/cryptobatznft to discord.gg/cryptobatz.
Using the old link, scammers – operating through Collab Land, what Faife describes as “a bot spoofing community management service … asked users to verify their crypto assets to participate in the server – but directed users to a phishing site where they were prompted to connect their cryptocurrency wallets.” In the end, these scammers (as-yet unidentified) stole over $40,000 (USD) in cryptocurrency. To make matters worse, Ozzy Osbourne and the CryptoBatz teams did not delete outdated posts with the NFT’s old Discord link, which contributed to user confusion and subsequent scamming.
Trivia fact: the collection’s name comes from “the infamous moment he bit the head off a bat during a 1982 performance in Des Moines, Iowa,” explained Nick Reilly at Rolling Stone last month. Though Osbourne’s NFTs don’t offer users a percentage of royalty fees, as in the case of Nas’s hugely successful drop this week, the collection of 9,666 “unique NFT bats” “will give collectors a unique opportunity to birth an additional NFT; activating a feature that will allow their purchase to ‘bite’ and mutate with another NFT from their digital wallet.” Which is, honestly, kinda cool.
~Catch up on Dirt~
— What do Joss Whedon and the green M&M have in common? They’re both in Tuesday’s roundup, from moi
— Ashley Bardhan celebrates Mouse Trap Monday & Daisy Alioto talks @WomenFishMe in Monday’s newsletter
— Dirt asks Adidas’ Global Director of Digital Growth, Sam King, “What’s In Your Wallet?”
Streaming news
— Jack Wright, a peripheral character on Hype House, has come forward with a video describing his sexual assault by former castmember Sienna Mae Gomez. Gomez was fired from the show and edited out prior to its airing. She has since published a Medium post and an apology video, in which she makes the questionable decision to dance. The video has since been deleted — Everyone’s an entrepreneur: SNL’s Pete Davidson and Colin Jost bought a Staten Island Ferry boat for $280,000, which will be used as an “arts and entertainment venue.” The comedians explained their reasoning in a Weekend Update sketch last weekend — Will there be a second season of And Just Like That? Page Six suggests that people on the inside are “feeling good” about more Che Diaz, with additional episodes allowing them to “prove a point” — Updates from the set of White Lotus season 2: Jennifer Coolidge, Michael Imperioli, Aubrey Plaza will all be in it, and it’s set in Sicily, Italy — is Barbie Ferreira getting written out of season 3 of Euphoria? Inside the alleged drama between Ferreira and creator Sam Levinson — A possible Grey’s Anatomy Easter Egg in this week’s episode of Euphoria for Eric Dane, who was/is on both shows — Disney announced that it will reimagine the seven dwarfs in a live-action remake of Snow White
Dispatches from the Metaverse
— Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon talk about their Bored Ape Yacht Club purchases on a recent episode of The Tonight Show — Viktor Tóth is training rats to play video games in an experiment I personally don’t think sounds very humane — “The internet isn’t a safe place for women, rules new report” (lol) — How, exactly, do influencers go from going viral to getting rich? Rebecca Jennings investigates for Vox
Playlist
— Sarah Marshall talks about the true story behind the Amityville Horror on a two-partseries for You’re Wrong About — Television by Television — “Blame” by Gabriels — “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke —By Eliza Levinson