Among the endless makeup tutorials, coordinated dances and people cutting things open to see if they are made of cake, there is one genre of social media video that has proved to be an unexpected hit: life on building sites.
On Instagram, there is a pair of Dutch brickies who, with cameras strapped to their helmets and microphones attached to their tools, bring the satisfying mortar slops and trowel scrapes of bricklaying to rapt viewers. There is a Canadian heavy machine operator who uses his digger with the precision of a surgeon wielding a scalpel, thrilling his followers with ever more elaborate tricks – from flipping bottles, to flicking open a cigarette lighter. On TikTok, there is a Spanish woodsman who, from behind the controls of his alarming contraption, can chop down a tree, strip it of bark, and cut it into logs in seconds. His dramatic feats of forestry have been viewed more than 100m times.
