TikTok has become a home to people broadcasting themselves live at work. Viewers are captivated.
Dylan Longton really knows how to flip an egg. A 33-year-old line cook at an unassuming diner just outside Albany, New York, Longton can make an omelet do a backflip and land it smoothly right back into its pan cradle. And people love him for it. Not just people in Albany, or people in New York. People all around the world, sometimes more than a thousand at once, tune in on TikTok to watch Longton flip eggs, and reheat bacon and homefries on the grill.
Longton has been doing this a long time—the egg-flipping, that is. He has worked at the diner, Windowbox Cafe, since he was 12. The livestreaming-to-thousands-of-strangers part is new. In 2020, Longton started play around with TikTok and amassed a modest following by posting prerecorded videos, the style the platform’s best known for. Then, about a year ago, after seeing a wedding DJ stream a dance party, Longton set up his iPhone in a car mount above his grill workstation and invited random people on the internet to watch him work. And they did. “I’m like, Are these numbers even real? Is it right?” he told me.
Longton now goes live for hours at a time, often starting at 8 a.m. after some prep work and staying on until his shift winds down at 2 p.m. (If he has to go to the bathroom, he runs out quickly with the camera still on.) His streams have a much different feel from the chaotic stress of competitive cooking shows such as Top Chef. They’re laid-back, calming even. Longton is a friendly, undemanding host. It’s just him, fulfilling order after order, occasionally lifting up a plate of standard diner fare to the camera and describing it to eager viewers. “Sau-siege,” he says, holding a plate with two sausages. Then he moves it off camera. Later, he makes some scrambled eggs. “Just some scrammies,” he says, holding it up. “Some typical scrams.”
Livestreaming remains a relatively niche subsection of TikTok, but since TikTok Live’s launch in 2019, it’s grown into a billion-dollar economy of its own. It is full of people doing everything and anything for attention. That everything includes working ordinary gigs—workstreaming, if you will. At any given moment on the app, you might encounter a fast-food worker assembling burgers, a fruit seller chopping coconut, a factory worker grabbing parcels, a nail tech giving a manicure, or a pet groomer shaving down a dog’s knotted fur.
These streamers aren’t necessarily influencers, on the scale that Bella Poarch or the D’Amelio sisters are, with millions of followers. A TikTok account needs only 1,000 followers to livestream. Even so, some get pretty popular: Last week, I watched one man chop fruit before more than 22,000 viewers. During the streams, viewers ask questions of the host and talk to one another in a chat that the host can follow. Sometimes the streamers talk back; other times the viewer is just invited to watch quietly as they work. People can give streamers cartoon gifts, like a rose, which through a complicated system basically function as tips, though TikTok takes a cut of each payment.
Longton told me livestreaming is enjoyable and a good source of extra cash. His work is “way more fun” now that he streams it, he said. Sometimes he pretends to freeze in order to trick his audience. Once, a piece of bacon got stuck half off, half on his grill, and the chat blew up asking him to rescue it. Now he hangs one like that every day, and his audience has named it Antonio. Longton declined to tell me exactly how much he makes from TikTok Live, but noted that his earnings vary from day to day. He compared it to “having a good second income.” But, he said, “I can’t quit my day job.” For now, he’s still obligated to make people their scrammies.
The appeal of Longton’s stream is not particularly complicated. His videos are pleasant. Many have a certain ASMR quality, a comforting, low-stakes warmth that comes with the familiarity and repetition of the work at hand. Longton’s digital “breakfast club” has regulars who tune in and chat among themselves. On one of these streams last week, viewers told me that they find it hypnotic, relaxing, and mesmerizing. It helps that Longton is an endearing host.
The nature of videos like Longton’s does seem like a perfect fit for their very modern medium. TikTok Live is an especially chaotic section of the app, where people work nonstop to keep the audience’s attention. Livestreams that feature recurring actions done over and over seem to do particularly well. They’re simple and easy to understand. Many livestreams are cross-promoted in TikTok’s main feed, its “For You” page. A viewer scrolling TikTok could be teased with a clip from a random livestream and decide to pop over if they’re intrigued by what they see. “You can drop in at any moment,” Christine Tran, a researcher of digital cultures and livestreaming at the University of Toronto, told me. “It doesn’t require continuity.”
These streams also leverage a kind of backstage access, and in doing so, scratch a curiosity itch. In some cases, the videos seem to deepen people’s appreciation of the skills and dedication that can go into these jobs. When a user on Reddit posted a TikTok Live recording of an Amazon factory worker grabbing various items to ship, they noted that the video made them more appreciative of that labor. But not everything is cheery. The videos can lay unglamorous jobs bare for everyone to see. Last week, I watched a Burger King worker tell 2,000 people on TikTok Live that she no longer wished to work in fast food, as she assembled burgers. Workers have claimed that they’ve been fired for disclosing too much on TikTok. The app’s Live section presents a challenge for corporate oversight because, unlike regular TikTok posts, the videos are relatively ephemeral. (Though such videos can be screenshotted or recorded by a tech-savvy viewer, and still make the rounds.)
Employers seem to have mixed feelings about behind-the-scenes footage being posted on TikTok. Some bigger brands have hoped to capitalize on the attention offered by the platform: Chains like Dunkin’ have gone so far as to hire employees to post videos of themselves on the job as a form of marketing. Longton, for his part, says he’s brought in new customers via TikTok, so his boss tolerates it. He thinks he works even better while livestreaming because of the scrutiny that comes from being watched by hundreds if not thousands of people while doing your job. “If I break a yolk, I’m like, Oh shit,” he said.
Longton is, after all, working. When watching him, it can be easy to forget that he’s doing his actual job while also performing it. Streamers who take this approach have the benefit of getting double-paid for a single shift, points out Sophie Bishop, a professor of media and communication at the University of Leeds. But, she told me, workstreaming could also be seen as a symptom of “influencer creep”—a term Bishop coined to describe the pressure even noninfluencers feel to post thoughtfully and curate an online persona. Diner workers and truckers and Dollar General employees may now feel obligated to think about their digital presence. On TikTok, every moment is an opportunity to make content and to make extra money. Even during the boring workday.
Longton doesn’t profess to feel any burden. In the Windowbox Cafe, though, the influencing is indeed creeping. Audiences were curious about his grill-mate, Matt Taylor, who lurked in the background of his stream. So they set up a second camera. Now it’s not just eggs. “Everyone’s like, ‘We want to see the pancakes and the French toast, too,’” Longton said. “So then we got all sides going.”
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