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June 2021 Issue [Letter from Los Angeles]

The Anxiety of Influencers

Educating the TikTok generation
Influencers at Clubhouse Beverly Hills, Clubhouse For the Boys, and Not a Content House, in Los Angeles. All photographs by Philip Cheung, September 2020, for Harper’s Magazine © The artist

Influencers at Clubhouse Beverly Hills, Clubhouse For the Boys, and Not a Content House, in Los Angeles. All photographs by Philip Cheung, September 2020, for Harper’s Magazine © The artist

[Letter from Los Angeles]

The Anxiety of Influencers

Educating the TikTok generation
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It’s noon in Los Angeles toward the end of the Plague Year, and I’m lounging on the patio of a swanky three-floor mansion, watching a scrum of teenage boys perform trending TikTok dances. Arranged in a tidy delta formation near the jacuzzi and pool, the five boys smile into the glare of a ring light, at the center of which is affixed a smartphone recording their moves. These boys possess a teenybopper cuteness and, because they’re between the ages of eighteen and twenty, they have noisomely strong metabolisms and thus go shirtless pretty much all of the time, displaying…

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