Early one morning in September 2013, while interning in The New York Times’s Tokyo bureau, I hit the streets to ask strangers how they felt about their city hosting the 2020 Olympics. The reporter who gave me the assignment called this type of interview a vox pop, short for vox populi, which in Latin means “voice of the people.” It’s a staple of daily journalism that is sometimes called a man-on-the-street interview, and it has weathered the shift from print and radio to television and the internet. This is probably because of the sheer clarity of its purpose: to approach random strangers and invite them into a chorus that speaks for a community, a city, a nation.
The vox pop has its limitations. To be heard, a person must be somewhere journalists visit. Those with a sour countenance might be ignored, and anyone too busy or self-conscious to speak with reporters will tend to weed themselves out of the chorus. Still, the vox pop works because it takes ordinary people as seriously as politicians and business leaders. Across social media, among endless variations on the form, some man-on-the-street interviews now seem explicitly concerned with elite perspectives. Influencers have co-opted the setup in short videos, not to focus on pedestrian wisdom but to fetishize wealth through staged sidewalk encounters with celebrities and C.E.O.s. Few content creators take the genre as seriously as James Dumoulin, whose School of Hard Knocks channel has 10.8 million followers on Instagram and 7.5 million followers on TikTok. In his videos, Dumoulin stakes out a stretch of sidewalk as someone exits a luxury car or high-rise building, then rushes toward them, tiny microphone in hand, to ask how old they were when they made their first million. Sometimes he announces his mission is to “go all over the world interviewing billionaires,” and adds, with all the conviction of a Bible salesman who sleeps in on Sundays, that he does this “to help the younger generation.”
What any young person might learn from such videos, besides a worshipful posture toward wealth and those who amass it, is hard to say. In his interview with Justin Kan, co-founder of the livestreaming platform Twitch, Dumoulin offers his usual opener — “Excuse me, sir. How did you get rich?” — and is met with a cavalcade of hustle-culture clichés: Never negotiate from a place of weakness. Money can buy you stability but not happiness. Big rewards come from taking big risks.
One fascinating conceit of these videos is the overwrought fiction of happenstance. Impromptu vox pop interviews seldom show journalists flagging down strangers, but instead skip straight to whatever they have to say; man-on-the-street content from creators like Dumoulin, on the other hand, tends to involve preambles that seem designed to convince viewers these are spontaneous encounters. In the video with Kan, the Twitch co-founder, a man with “SECURITY” emblazoned on his vest orders Dumoulin to “fall back,” then relents after the influencer reveals his mission to interview billionaires. Videos by Timothy Sanchez-Vega give the sense that a person can’t visit Tokyo or walk on the beach in Dubai without meeting a stranger made wealthy by the same sort of e-commerce his channel promotes. In TikTok posts by an Uzbekistani man living in Japan, walking up to strangers in their Lamborghinis could be mistaken for a path to financial literacy.
What follows are Kabuki-like displays of disingenuous preening: The host pretends not to know their interview subject. The interview subject acts as if they are pressed for time, but relents once they realize this will be a conversation about money. Some break the ice with what seems to be Dumoulin’s favorite stock joke: “I’m not a millionaire — I’m a billionaire!” Others take the opportunity to promote something besides their net worth, like when Tim Tebow, the former N.F.L. quarterback, is awkwardly prompted to speak about a foundation he started to fight against human trafficking.
This is part of a broader merging of television and the internet, whose falling and rising stars increasingly collide on the podcasts and TikTok channels that have replaced late-night talk shows. Like reality television, the appeal, initially, was a lack of celebrities. In his 2010s photo blog, Humans of New York, Brandon Stanton paired street portraits with revealing quotes from the diverse array of ordinary people who sat for him. Meet Cutes NYC gained 3.5 million Instagram followers with videos of couples being stopped on the sidewalk and asked to explain how they met. Then there’s Caleb Simpson’s TikTok channel, which thrives on a single irresistibly impertinent question: How much do you pay for rent in New York? At some point, though, the attention economy inevitably rewards a shift from seeking to managing — and monetizing — one’s audience. The vox pop format has bled into countless social media shows; Simpson’s channel is now dedicated to showcasing celebrity homes and promoting luxury real estate brokers, Netflix shows and Swiffer mops.
One way of thinking about these videos is as a kind of pornography, a means of arousing in viewers a sense of desire heightened to the level of fantasy. This fantasy is less about wealth than what was once called the American dream, only instead of hard work, what we fetishize now is secret knowledge; the idea that millionaires know something we don’t, that billionaires know something they don’t and that everyone is playing by the same rulebook. In search of it, we risk more than the soul-poisoning malaise that comes from watching too many sidewalk interviews with Benny Blanco.
Whether this is true becomes harder to see clearly in a world where content finds us, wherever we are, and relentlessly asserts its own bizarre logic. What can the man on the street tell us about all this? The only way to be sure is to go outside and ask him ourselves.
Joshua Hunt is a writer in London.
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