Internet anthropologist Coldhealing on TikTok culture, AI content, and the generative video tipping point

Summary

Coldhealing (real name withheld, age 28, based in New York, formerly Peoria, Illinois) operates as an independent internet anthropologist, surfacing niche TikTok and broader platform culture that mainstream media largely misses. Active on TikTok since 2018, he argues that algorithmic curation creates blind spots at the institutional level, where coverage of events like Davos skews heavily toward tech because journalists and analysts are served content matching their existing interests, not a representative slice of what actually dominated the agenda.

The Poolside PM Moment and Day-in-the-Life Format

The video that most expanded Coldhealing's audience was the "Poolside PM" clip, originally posted around 2022 by a woman sharing a lighthearted afternoon working remotely by a pool. When he reposted it to tech Twitter without heavy editorial framing, it was recontextualized as a symbol of excess during the 2010s-to-early-2020s tech hiring boom. The original creator responded multiple times to the discourse, which Coldhealing attributes less to his repost than to the broader commentary it generated.

The day-in-the-life genre has shifted sharply since then. The aspirational, highlight-reel format that defined 2022 content has been displaced by an intentionally mundane aesthetic, think middle managers filming protein shakes, one-mile jogs, and commutes set to somber music. The inversion reflects a cultural exhaustion with performative comfort, though the format remains uniquely provocative because viewers instinctively benchmark it against their own daily lives.

Employee-generated brand content of the poolside PM variety is now effectively dead, according to Coldhealing. HR departments actively discourage it, and social norms have caught up. A Palantir employee posting a lunch highlight reel today would face immediate backlash in a way that simply was not true three years ago.

Generative AI Content: Not Winning at Scale Yet

Generative AI video is more visible on Instagram Reels than on TikTok, in Coldhealing's read, and has not yet reached the threshold where it competes with human-made content on raw engagement metrics. The clearest current use case is lower-budget international creators who use AI generation to compensate for less visually compelling environments.

The default audience response to AI content remains negative, centered on familiar objections around water usage, energy consumption, and displacement of artists. However, a meaningful cultural signal is emerging: when AI-generated content is perceived as genuinely creative or additive, such as a cinematic mock-trailer dramatizing the Beckham family feud that circulated recently, comment sections shift to explicit approval. The consensus framing becomes "good use of AI" precisely because no human creative is being displaced by a joke trailer that no studio would greenlight anyway. Coldhealing reads this conditional acceptance as an early indicator of broader cultural adoption, even if the long-term tradeoffs remain unresolved.

A related emerging genre involves AI-generated reenactments of real figures in scenarios no paid actor would accept, Epstein dramatizations being one cited example. This category has no incumbent being displaced and faces no supply constraint except regulatory and platform tolerance.

Platform Dynamics and the IRL Streaming Ecosystem

IRL livestreaming on platforms like Kick functions primarily as a content farm feeding short-form clips into TikTok and Reels. Coldhealing cites creator World of T-Shirts as a case study, a New York-based figure who evolved from solo street content to a crew-supported live stream, where the livestream itself is secondary to the highlight clips it generates. Short-form vertical video remains the terminal destination for nearly all content formats.

Publishing, Purity Rules, and Generational Migration

Coldhealing recently published an essay in GQ about returning to Target after a seven-year self-imposed boycott, framing it as a study in personal purity rules. The piece originated from a long-form blog post that a GQ editor discovered independently. He describes working with professional editors as materially improving the final product, despite having studied writing academically.

The broader thesis on purity rules applies directly to phone behavior. He identifies smartphone usage norms as the dominant emerging arena for self-imposed rules, predicting five or more years of experimentation before cultural consensus settles on what constitutes acceptable phone etiquette. Anti-alcohol sentiment and New Year's resolution culture fit the same pattern but are less structurally novel.

On generational migration, Coldhealing contrasts Gen X's move toward cities like Portland as escape-driven, millennials dispersing to mid-sized markets like Austin, Nashville, and Denver, and Gen Z converging on New York City specifically. His ground-level read is that Gen Z wants density, existing systems, and proximity to other people, a pull dynamic rather than a push one, partly accelerated by TikTok's role in making New York aspirationally central to creator culture.