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Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Known as a platform for dancing teens, TikTok is also becoming a community space for young users to bring attention to wonky civic issues like housing and transportation.
A growing number of TikTok users are taking to the app to discuss how hard it can be to exist in Los Angeles. In one example, a user complains about Google Maps claiming a sidewalk-less road is walkable. In others, users bring up exorbitant housing prices while cyclists demonstrate the lack of bike lanes.
Videos ranging from homogenous suburban developments to accessible public transit have found a growing audience. #Urbanism has amassed almost 60 million views, #suburbs has over 194 million views and #urbanplanning has 184 million views. Across the board, the top videos under each hashtag do not paint American cities in a positive light.
Such content isn’t unique to Los Angeles. Young users across TikTok mock ever-expanding highways and indistinguishable intersections. But Southern California,—where cars reign supreme and suburbs keep sprawling—seems particularly central to the growing discussion about transportation and urban planning.
Max Dubler, the communication manager at Abundant Housing L.A., said the public discourse around urban issues has moved away from academics and policymakers and into online spaces. Its first home was on the Facebook group New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, which gained traction in tandem with the Yes In My Back Yard movement. Since then, Dubler said people have gained large followings across different platforms by discussing urbanist issues. The shift away from more traditional outlets, like academic journals, has drawn in new audiences by highlighting how these topics impact their lives. TikTok’s visual element helps make the conceptual topics more understandable.
“A lot of this stuff is highly visual,” Dubler said. “You can have all the diagrams and charts as you want, but people understand what this kind of dumpy little teardown house turned into 15 apartments looks like and they can understand that this six-lane arterial street got redone with some trees in a bike lane. You could show people that and they understand it and they're like, I want that for my life.”
One of TikTok’s early urbanists is Jake Gotta, who took to TikTok due to pandemic-induced boredom.
Crammed between videos of dance trends, Gotta said his videos were able to carve out a specific niche for viewers. In short clips, he could dive into issues like affordable housing or zoning laws in order to inform people about problems impacting their lives.
@beachboyz2men Thrifty ice cream is living history (and only $2!!) #icecream #thrifty #california #riteaid #sodafountain #dessert #history #foodhistory #vestige #remnant #socal #helado
“Hopefully, that gets people to start understanding that all of this is a larger systemic issue and there's not just one quick fix,” Gotta said. “They start to understand more of the larger concept from getting all these little consumable bites”
TikTok offers Greg Ruben a platform for him to look at Los Angeles with fresh eyes after nine years spent in New York. He has delved into the history of the old houses in his neighborhood, Highland Park. A video on El Mio, also known as the Smith Estate, performed well, and that led Ruben to explore why L.A. is the city that it is. Even some of L.A.’s iconic, towering palm trees reveal how the city is man-made; the land used to feature mainly chaparral plants. With TikTok, Ruben explores how specific choices shaped the city.
“Everything here was brought by someone,” Ruben said. “There's really interesting historical and cultural context when you try to find out why those plants, why these architectural styles, why this layout of the city.”
Highlighting specific locations can help provide context for Los Angeles’ current state, Ruben said. A video on bungalow courts—a style of housing unique to early 20th century L.A.—can point to the history of affordable housing solutions in the city, while discussing the stairs in L.A. shows that the city once prioritized streetcars.
“I would love to imagine what would have happened if we had kept building that type of infrastructure—more pedestrian and streetcar infrastructure—and kept those alive.” Ruben said.
Showing off the human element of urban issues is what makes TikTok so useful to John Yi, the executive director of Los Angeles Walks. The discussion is often focused on city politics and infrastructure. His personal TikTok account allows him to show off his neighborhood, Koreatown, and demonstrate how those ideas are actualized in the streets. According to Yi, highlighting sidewalks built for cars or inaccessible parks can urge people to reconsider their own community spaces.
“I think that reframing something that's mundane in a slightly different way has been able to really attract people's attention,” Yi said.
TikTok’s format helps provide context for the theoretical content such creators often explore. From Gotta walking the hills of UCLA while discussing university housing to Ruben showing off staircases to Yi taking viewers through the streets of Koreatown, providing visuals can help viewers understand conceptual ideas. Time spent traversing the city to film content on top of the research that goes into each video can quickly add up. Reuben said he spends about five hours on each video, but payouts from TikTok’s controversial creator fund don’t amount to much.
Fostering community discussion keeps creators going back to the platform. TikTok’s algorithm helps push content to communities Ruben didn’t even know existed—a video about Cold War air raid sirens reached a whole group of users dedicated to the topic. But beyond self-proclaimed experts, Gotta said the algorithm can reach people who may have never considered how issues like local zoning laws were affecting their daily lives.
According to a Credit Karma report, about one-third of Gen Z live with family, and the rest have to set aside roughly half their monthly income for housing. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, who could become the first Gen Z member of congress, focused part of his platform on affordable housing. And as climate change progresses, both Gen Z and millennials are turning to public transit, while fewer teenagers are getting driver's licenses.
Yi said younger generations, who tend to be interested in sustainability and environmentalism, have yet to fully tap into the transportation justice movement. Social media platforms like TikTok provide spaces to engage with these ideas, he said.
“Social media is like any other medium we've had in history, like television or radio,” Yi said. “[These] things have helped spread ideas and build community. I think social media is just taking the same page as all these others, but it's just a different medium now.”
Shifting complex conversations away from spaces dominated by credible experts, however, can lead to misinformation. Dubler said that housing can be a hard-to-understand technical topic, especially as some ideas within the space may seem counterintuitive. Just as TikTok’s visual element helps humanize the issue, he said it can also capitalize on those gut reactions with misconstrued facts. Big claims—such as Los Angeles having a certain number of empty homes compared to its homeless population—connect with people on a human level, but can lead them to draw incorrect conclusions. Much of what Abundant Housing LA is doing on social media is responding to false claims, Dubler said.
“It's like a little bit of nuance gets lost in translation when you're going from the policy, press and the academic journals to 280 characters on Twitter or 30 seconds on TikTok,” Dubler said.
Asking TikTok users to shape urban policy might be a big stretch. For Gotta, it serves as a useful tool to inform people of issues. A minute-long video won’t solve Los Angeles’ housing issues—but Gotta said it can get people to consider larger systemic issues. It also helps provide answers for topics that are of increasing concern to a young generation growing into adulthood.
“There's an entire generation growing up…that never thought they'd have a chance of buying a home unless they come from family wealth, [or] unless they got super lucky,” Gotta said. “Everyone's realizing that as they grow up, and searching for a reason why.”
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Slingshot Aerospace, the El Segundo-based startup developing software for managing objects in space’s orbit, raised $40.9 million to build out its global network of sensors and recruit new customers both private and public.
The round was a follow-on to Slingshot’s $25 million Series A-1 raise in March.
Sway Ventures led the round. In a statement, general partner Najib Khouri-Haddad called the funding “an investment in the future of space as we know it.”
“The massive growth in space operations carries a significant risk as well as an opportunity,” Khouri-Haddad continued. “Slingshot has aggressively and creatively carved a path to build new technologies that solve critical challenges and greatly reduce risks in space.”
In addition to the round, Slingshot took out a venture loan with Horizon Technology Finance, but wouldn’t disclose the terms. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Stricklan said that she was impressed with Slingshot’s ability to raise not one, but two venture funding rounds in a year marked by economic uncertainty.
“Our successful funding round during a global economic downturn is validation that investors understand the urgent need for safe and sustainable spaceflight operations as activity in orbit outpaces current space traffic management constructs,” Stricklan said.
Stricklan isn’t wrong – Slingshot has raised roughly $83 million since its 2017 launch, and about $66 million of that was in funding rounds within the last year.
The CEO added that Slingshot will face “unprecedented opportunity” as more and more private and public firms launch satellites and crafts to orbit, as the demand for Slingshot’s technology (essentially an air traffic control system, built for space) increases.
Slingshot offers several products already, but one it is eager to build out is its Seradata SpaceTrak, a system that tracks objects in space. Right now, the space radar platform keeps an eye on some 10,000 manmade objects so that no unexpected collisions occur, and has already secured the U.S. Space Force as a client.
To do this, Slingshot has to also expand a network of highly-specialized telescope sensors, and it currently runs a network of over 20 worldwide. This latest round of funding will help Slingshot build out this network with the goal of making its tracking data even more accurate.
It is also likely that Slingshot will use this funding for future acquisitions. It’s not been shy about buying out a company that’s working on technology similar to its own. In August Slingshot bought Colorado-based Numerica Corp.’s space domain awareness division, which tracks satellites in orbit around the clock. That same month, Slingshot bought Seradata, a U.K. based orbital sensing company, which it folded into its SpaceTrak system.
Other investors in the Series A-2 funding round included new backer C16 Ventures. Existing investors ATX Venture Partners, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, and Draper Associates also joined the round.
Stricklan previously told dot.LA she believes the overall space community is becoming more conscious of the effects their launches have on the orbital environment—a clear opportunity for Slingshot.
“The entire industry is concerned, especially with the careless disregard to space stewardship,” Stricklan said, noting that one turning point was a Russian anti-satellite test last year that created a significant portion of space debris. “It's caused a lot of folks to reconsider how they approach their operations on orbit through more of a sustainability lens. It’s pretty clear the world is on alert right now.”Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
It ain’t easy being a charging company…or at least a lot of them aren’t making it look easy. Between reports of abysmal charger uptime, declining stock values, lack of standards and meaningless jargon (is “hyper” really faster than “ultra?”), the race to electrify America’s roads has been a bumpy one. For Miami-based Blink Charging, however, the solution to smoothing the transition may be about becoming more than just a charger company.
In 2018 Blink won a grant from the California Air Resources Board to pilot a car sharing program specifically targeted to low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Under the project name “BlueLA,” the program has been helping put Angelenos into EVs—Chevy Bolts, specifically, with a pricing scheme that often comes out to just a few cents per minute.
The company has 40 locations around the city (with plans to expand to 300 by the end of 2024) where residents can pick up the vehicles and return them for charging. For now, these chargers only work with the Blink vehicles, and the vehicles only charge at their assigned charger location, but Blink is planning to fix both of those issues soon. In the future, users should be able to charge the car anywhere, and anyone should be able to charge at the Blink Charger so long as it’s not already occupied.
Blink has various pricing schemes depending on the length of the contract, which can range from hours to weeks. Disadvantaged residents save 25%, and for now, that discount is given mostly on the honor system.
“They self-identify based on income. We don't go through an arduous verification process,” says Brendan Jones, president at Blink Charging. “But if you put [the info] in and your driver’s license says, ‘Beverly Hills,’ we're going to question if you're really disadvantaged.” There are some automated checks in place to spot this kind of thing, but mostly, Jones says, it hasn’t been a problem.
The BlueLA program has effectively allowed Blink to expand into the mobility space, where the company can leverage its charging expertise and EV know-how into a new revenue stream. That’s the kind of thinking that Jones says the industry needs more of.
“We know that from a long-term business perspective, in order to make it really work, we need to generate revenue from two sources: Utilization of the chargers, and then utilization of the vehicles through memberships,” he says.
Blink Charging is exploring a number of similar “ancillary revenue streams,” according to Jones. The company is tight-lipped about the specifics, but he mentioned energy management systems, batteries, and solar, mobility solutions, even hinting that Blink may well be expanding into some of those other areas soon. Charging companies, he says, need to leverage their experience with battery tech and EVs to generate business greater than just building and operating the charger itself. In the future, especially, when there’s less government and private money flowing into the sector, charging companies may need to think about owning a piece of the EV ecosystem rather than just the hardware.
For now, Blink Charging remains in the growth stage. It's been publicly traded since 2018, and like much of the charging industry, its stock, BLNK, has taken a beating in 2022, and is down 46% YTD. Its Q3 financials do show some promising signs, however, with quarter-over-quarter revenue steadily increasing, and Jones says the company is working on projections as to when it might turn EBITA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, and Amortization) positive. If Jones is right, expanding the charger network and building ancillary revenue streams like BlueLA will be crucial to that effort.
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Most days, Kyyah Abdul films herself going through her nightly routine as she explains to viewers how they can make their resumes stand out.
Abdul is part of a subsect of TikTok focusing on workplace advice better known CareerTok and is one of the myriad L.A.-based work influencers whose content is focused on everything from resume layouts to salary negotiation to a behind-the-scenes look at the Google offices or work-from-home habits. But in light of the recent tech layoffs that have affected every company from Snapchat to Amazon, CareerTok creators are worried about how their previous content may impact their employment.
Abdul, for her part, has safeguards in place: Kyyah Abdul is a pseudonym to prevent her employer from finding her account.
“People don't realize the virality of a page like TikTok,” Abdul says. “Whatever you're putting out there and whatever message you're portraying, someone in a high place has seen it.”
TikTok’s popularity also means that discussions that were meant for a specific audience on the app have infiltrated the larger conversation around employment. Take quiet quitting, for example. The term, which describes doing the bare minimum of one’s job description, originated in a TikTok video in March. Since then, the term has spiraled into countless think pieces and ruminations on the state of the workforce.
Though Abdul knows that people's posts about their quiet quitting plans aren’t responsible for the mass layoffs, she says tech companies can find what their employees are posting—and they might not like what they see.
Deran Christian, who works in tech sales and posts about his career path, says he doesn’t discuss specific events or people from work on his account.
“Whenever I'm posting something I keep in mind if my manager were to see this, would I be comfortable addressing it?” Christian says. “My answer, is yes.”
Such limits, however, often lead CareerTok creators vulnerable to being accused of romanticizing tech jobs. Following an influx of videos showing off the perks, such as free food or an in-office gym, some creators began to question why no one was discussing the negative side of working in tech.
“This romanticization of tech has gone south because people who had those cushy positions in tech don't have them anymore,” Christian says.
The changing landscape, however, has invited a shift in content. In recent weeks, a number of work influencers have begun sharing their personal experiences being fired from their job. Last month, employees from Meta and Twitter took to TikTok to discuss how they got the news. Videos that paint a sharp contrast to the enthusiastic office tours that were popular amongst work influencers prior to the layoffs.
But even amidst an economic downturn and mass layoffs, it’s not all doom and gloom on CareerTok. Creators have also pivoted their content toward sharing tips on how an employee can predict if their position may be at stake, such as observing a company’s financials. Additionally, one former Twitter employee used the platform to share the resume that got him his next tech job.
Which is to say, just as CareerTok has helped people navigate job interviews and corporate politics, the community is now helping people mitigate layoffs. Abdul herself has posted videos ranging from ranking what positions are most likely to get laid off to laughing at her boss’ jokes during layoff season.
“I think what's great about career TikTok,” Abdul says, “is that it opens up a lot of people's perspectives to what they should be paying attention to so that they don't experience [layoffs] again.”
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
