new york tiktok city
things right now 041—week of 06.16.25
Yellow Font Aesthetic or New York Porn
City as Luxury Product or Bloomberg’s New York
City as Main Character or West Village Girls
City as Set or Subway Takes
City as Content or Real Estate Porn
Charlotte’s New York or Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Yellow fonts. Yellow fonts. Yellow fonts everywhere.
Oftentimes swirling and editorial, other times traditional closed captioning: a yellow that isn’t acid or neon, electric or harsh, but instead warm, soft, something you could paint the walls of an infant’s nursery. It’s gender-neutral, of course. Its friendliness stands in contrast to the schizophrenic slop AI generates, with textures too slick and plasticine, boundaries bleeding and sticky as a computer brain tries to hallucinate three dimensions out of two. It’s a happy midcentury yellow. It’s coded postwar prosperity: saturated, but not too saturated; naturalistic, yet still synthetic. It’s the crayon color chosen to draw lemons, bumblebees, a summer sun. It’s still and pleasant, distant from shaky citizen journalism, greyed out and anxious, documenting crime and protests and riots on X.
Ethan Barber’s TikTok content is the ne plus ultra of the genre: endless 4K compilations of New York: the iconic East River bridges, sleepy Sundays in Central Park, bustling Midtown streets, and skyline, endless skyline. Better than anything New York City’s tourism board could produce, the montages riff on yellow’s happy midcentury connotations. The video soundtracks feature the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Motown. It’s high vibration music for Early Bird Americans who imagine a move to the Big City will be auspicious, that it will bring romance, friendship, happy coincidences, energy, money, definitely money.
The face New York presents on TikTok is the culmination of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s luxury city—a happy, shimmering cloud obscuring downtown’s dilettante vampires. In an ironic twist, the content coming out of New York shines bright and optimistic as the world veers towards conflict. Dimes Square, the city’s last scene, would be more in line with the global mood.
But Dimes Square is over and has been for some time.