MFA Creative Writing

Torey Akers '22 on Lateral Networking, Doomscrolling, and the Pit of Honesty

In a historical moment when social media platforms have become both battlegrounds and lifelines, Revolutionary Algorithms: A TikTok Manifesto enters the discourse as much more than a book about TikTok. It's an analysis of how algorithm-driven spaces shape and reflect our splintered public sphere. In this interview with Katie Kerrigan '26, Akers unpacks the book's origins on Substack, her experience in the MFA, and poses the question: Is it legitimate for the federal government to censor an app? The question and TikTok's destiny loom. What follows is an important conversation covering the messy and sometimes unserious intersection where technology, culture, and power collide. The book is out now from Hachette.

Michael Rizzo, Program Manager

Torey Akers is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. She is a 2022 graduate of Hunter's Creative Nonfiction MFA Program. Her book, Revolutionary Algorithms: A TikTok Manifesto, is available wherever books are sold. She is currently an associate US editor at The Art Newspaper.

Katie Kerrigan is a Creative Nonfiction first-year in Hunter's MFA Program. They were born in London, grew up in Virginia, and now live in New York City. With a background in political science and philosophy, Katie is currently working on an essay collection that examines the beliefs and values embedded in the physical context of the cities that shaped them.

Kerrigan: I'm curious where this book began for you--its publication was incredibly timely, but the scope of your project extends well beyond TikTok itself. What were the origins of Revolutionary Algorithms?

Akers: I would say it was a pretty direct commission. [My editor] wanted me to talk about TikTok and I wanted to talk about TikTok and politics. So we had lunch at Sisters, and I had three Diet Cokes, and I was like "neoliberalism is a bed of blood," and she was like "sounds cool." I would say that I really struggled to get a focus going, and I kept proving myself wrong, so there were many false starts. But what I was trying to do, I think, is paint a picture.

I consider myself a techno-marxist at best, and tech-neutral at worst, and tech-neutrality was becoming very hot on Substack prior to a technocrat neoreactionary Christian nationalist South African on ketamine running our government. My sort of tech ideology is that even in our increasingly surveilled and digitized society, technology can be, at least ontologically, treated as a tool. I think that keeping the language of tech to "tool" and maintaining the scope of use is really, really important, especially as we careen on hot, loose legs into artificial intelligence as our primary modality of working and understanding the world and each other.

My party line about the book is that I wanted it to feel like scrolling through TikTok, which, I'm not entirely sure I accomplished, but I wanted it to feel like there was no stone unturned, even though the conceit itself is a little milquetoast, which is like "a sovereign state shouldn't delete an app from our phones because they want our data and we know what Hamas is now." I would say that's the origin. It's a direct commission that I then tried to turn into something a little more experiential and theoretical.

Kerrigan: Since the book came post-MFA, I'm curious what you were working on while you were going through the program, and maybe how that impacted this book?

Akers: Oh, sure. That's a good question. I was writing about art, and I have a book that no one wants and that I submit and am long-listed for once every six months, that I wrote at Hunter called Hard Luxury. It's about art and labor and art and economics. When I got out of Hunter, and I was writing about art professionally again, and I didn't want to write about art unprofessionally anymore, I started a Substack. Then my parents kind of started dying. My parents died a year apart, right after Hunter, so I was just writing about grief all the time, and I built this Substack platform out of that. People wanted that.

For whatever reason, that went to the searing heart of what I'm good at, so that's what started to get attention from people. One of the essays in the book is an AI and grief essay that I kind of adapted from my Substack. The rest is new material, for good or for ill. I think we spend a lot of time talking about what technology is doing to us, and railing against what it's doing for us, and not a lot about why we want it to do those things. There's a sense of genuine yearning and trying to synthetically make up for loss that I think is interesting. That's been my Hunter arc. I tried to keep my hand in, publishing here and there, doing readings, but I definitely went full in on my Substack after Hunter, and I had a lot of people looking at me like "should you be looking for an agent?"' and I was like "this is something, this is something, I just don't know what it's gonna be yet."

So when I got asked to do a book, I was pleased, but I was not surprised. This was unusual, but I used essentially the content creation logic, and I applied it to high-level writing. I can't produce more than one thing a month, but it's like five thousand words, and it's very well thought out. I tell everyone to get a Substack, even if you have like two followers, just because it keeps you accountable and it makes you write.

Kerrigan: Do you feel like coming out of Hunter, what you gained was more growth of process as opposed to a topic?

Akers: Oh yeah, yeah. MFAs are like finishing school, so what are you finishing, essentially? There are lots of people who are perfect writers who don't have sentence, line, or concept issues, but they can't write for fuck, they can't get it together, they can't find time. And that's what Hunter did for me. I needed people to make me at least slightly less pretentious, so that anyone could make sense of what I was saying. I don't have a volume issue--I'm always producing. I think I was using Hunter to be like here's my dense, thorny, experimental work, and have everybody be like "boo" until I crafted something legible. That book has some gnarly bits, but it's legible, and that's because of Hunter. I have a journalist job, so I can't do that there. There, if I'm talking about Kant, they shoot me. They take me out and shoot me.

Kerrigan: And you need a place to talk about Kant! We all do.

Akers: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I would say Hunter for me was a process of clarifying my ideas. I think my manuscript at Hunter had real merit, and I'm starting the process of stripping it down to the studs and reworking it into individual essays. As a book, it sucks, and I knew that just because the writing is really, really good, but it doesn't hang together particularly well, and I don't have the patience to make that happen. I knew pretty early on that my hit was not going to be my MFA thesis. Which is not a problem necessarily!

Kerrigan: You said earlier that you wanted the book to be phenomenologically similar to the experience of scrolling on TikTok, and that was absolutely the impression I walked away with. It was kind of like when you've cultivated a For You Page that's very in touch with academia, so each one-minute video is scholarship, and you might walk away not necessarily being able to cite every source, but you have a much better understanding of an issue on the whole. I want to ask, because I have to ask, post-TikTok-ban-flop, and with the premise of this book being the general idea that the state should not delete an app, how do you feel about the way that the near-ban went down?

Akers: I was asked to do a talk at Joe's Pub as part of a House of SpeakEasy series, where you get in front of a bunch of kind of rich people and talk on stage for a while-like, ten minutes-about what your ideology is in promotion of a book, but also kind of cohereing your brand a little bit, and I'd never had to do that. So I used the opportunity to be like "What is my answer to the question of 'What happens when you write a tech book at the dawn of evil technocracy-or let's not say the dawn, maybe the midpoint of evil technocracy, or a technocratic overhall-and people are both asking how do you feel, and also is this okay?'"

I think my argument in the book stands, which is that none of this has ever been okay. I do not believe in a state that has a paternalistic relationship to speech, and we are already seeing that TikTok, because it is not American-owned, is evading the deeply McCarthyist edge that American social media and Meta-owned social media has. I sort of double-down on my idea. I think especially as encroaching christian nationalism starts to poison how we understand our society, we're going to see a lot more interest in bans from a state and federal perspective. We're going to see a total shift in how public art is commissioned, in terms of how propaganda is used, and the relationship between the military and the entertainment industry is gonna be turned up to 11. I think we're going to see a resurgence in the use of the 'box' physical television because social media is going to become such a swamp.

But I also think that social media is always going to be an organizing tool because it breeds echo chambers. As I said in the book, what do they do when you know too many things? They turn off the internet. Every time. I don't think that media needs to be noble to be protected, and what I'm worried most about, honestly, is that people are not rigid enough about the idea that intentions are set at home, values are set at home. Whenever I see people talking about their consumption, diet, all these words, these punitive, Christian nationalist words, by alleged blue voters talking about the way that they interact with the internet-even the notion of doomscrolling! I'm like, babygirl, there is doom!

Kerrigan: The doom was there before the scrolling.

Akers: If I were to answer the question very simplistically, I would say it is a little embarrassing to write a TikTok book when the TikTok ban is then used as a power grab by the Republican party. However, I believe that TikTok should not be banned and that people should continue to use algorithms that are not controlled by the American government to talk to each other and learn stuff and edify themselves and organize and connect.

Kerrigan: I think that even though TikTok wasn't banned following the book, what happened also followed logically from the arguments you laid out in here.

Akers: It was also still only a moratorium, so it could go away. And personally, if they take TikTok away from me, that's fine. [Editor's note: The deadline was extended to December 16, 2025.]

Kerrigan: You mentioned Joe's Pub and the self-branding exercise, and as a content creator, you said you barely do it-what do you think of the pressure there is now for writers to build a following, and the way that your career can be almost riding or falling on your ability to garner fame on the internet?

Akers: That's a good question, and I wish I had cooler stuff to say. I was chosen for a book because they thought I could sell books, and I have no idea if I did or not. I think people like me online because I'm iconoclastic, but that also means that, because I truly am a misanthrope, I am not going to hit what they want me to hit. One thing about getting a little bit of shine as a content creator-on TikTok, I have 74,000 followers, which sounds like a lot of people, but on TikTok, it's not a lot of people-I was put in many positions where I could have grown my brand. I've been mutuals and friends with people who now make all their money from the internet, and I had a really grumpy relationship to that potential, because I can make a viral video tomorrow. I know how to do that. A lot of people know how to do that; it’s not that hard, especially in terms of the RSS capture that TikTok has. If you just hit a couple of things and you’re a little antagonistic, you’ll get there. It’s more that I was like, “I know the kind of part of myself I'll have to sell.”

The publishing industry wants you to have a following. I got this deal because I have a following. The expectation is that because they fired all of their sales people, because they fired everyone who's not nailed down within the publishing industry so that the CEOs could maintain their monopolies and their bonuses and everyone else gets screwed over, if you are commissioned and have a following or you get a deal and have a following, then you might actually be able to sell some books and they won't need to allocate sales energy or staff towards that.

I think it's an unfortunate reality, but I also apply this in my other fine arts life: if you sign up to be an artist, you are, A. signing up for humiliation and punishment, and, B. signing up to apply your ingenuity to doing things differently. I think that at this point any creative industry is run by the internet, at least in part, but if you don't have a following, you should still write your fucking book! I think in terms of whether one needs to have social media, we're at the crest of the Substack book boom. I think there's gonna be a pretty direct pipeline between having a following on Substack and getting noticed by publishers. I got followed by Tin House the other day. These people are soliciting from that platform specifically. So there is an internet game to play there, and I play it badly or not at all.

Kerrigan: So, to play it your own way is kind of the way to do it?

Akers: Yeah! I think if you're a writer, you should be delusional and original. That's kind of the whole point. I think iconoclasm is important if you're gonna be an artist, because why else would you do it? It's a really stupid way to make money. There's very little glory, and alongside the glory come very cruel people on Goodreads. You have to be in it because you care about the form, and if you care about the form, then you're not going to let the existence or lack of existence of an Instagram following tell you not to finish your book.

I've heard other people, especially youths-you know them, you are one-being like, I'm not sure what to do, I'm a writer but I don't know what to write, I don't know if I'm good. Girl, get a desk job! This is the least of your worries. The bar to clear to be in a difficult, old-fashioned, punishing, racist, oversaturated industry cannot be simply getting it on paper. That can't be the bar you need to clear! There are so many other bars. I believe in delusion, and while it's good to have so many pragmatic toes on the ground in terms of understanding the landscape of the industry and what can work for and against you, if you don't give a shit about social media, don't start now! Because, also, people can smell that!

Kerrigan: Do you focus on that when you're writing, about how you're coming off and how you'll be received? Or do you just let it rip?

Akers: I think that's why I like writing so much, because I can control it. We were talking earlier about establishing likeability, and I think the feedback I get the most is that people like me. I am very likable, people like me in person as well, most of the time, but I also think that I am cooler when I write, and I am not cool in person. I'm bleeding everywhere, I love things so much, I don't have normal interests, I have no point of abstract attachment, I'm not intimidating, but when I write, I feel like there's an "Ur-girlina" whose body I can morph into. I think the most important part of being a writer, no matter what kind of writer you are, is being honest. I think it's about finding the real pit of honesty, and then working outwards to build a world around that pit of honesty that someone else can live inside. It’s really hard.

I think that's why, at this point, people are so attracted, especially in fiction, to deeply unlikeable or even sociopathic characters. I think when you live in a late-stage capitalist abstractionist hellhole that isolates you constantly, you feel sociopathic. And so honesty feels like sociopathy, but that's actually just a transmogrification of guilt. Honesty is so much more complicated than sociopathy, because if you were a sociopath, you'd at least be having a nice time. Have you ever gone out with someone and you're like "you're evil, but you seem to be vibing?" That's a sociopath! But yeah, I'm always thinking about how I'm coming off. I think that's part of nonfiction, though-I'm sure you're always thinking about how you're coming off.

Kerrigan: Yeah! I mean, I think we should be. Also-and this is jumping tracks a little bit-I'm curious if there's anything that you've carried with you after finishing the program, maybe into this book or your work or your Substack, not just from Hunter, but from Saïd and Mychal specifically?

Akers: I think about something Mychal said to me all the time, and it's been distilled to a quote in my head. And he actually did the blurb on the back of my book! He said, "Torey, when you're in you're bag, you're in your bag, you're the best. But when you're not, you're insane." And I'm like, yeah! My best friend, I've known her since high school, and she's one of my favorite readers, said a very similar thing. She said, "When you are honing in on one idea, and exploring all facets of that idea, you're very good, but you get very easily overwhelmed." So I think about that a lot. I've thought about that a lot with this book.

Kerrigan: And, finally, do you have any advice for Hunter students-the future MFA-ers and the nonfiction babies?

Akers: The best advice I've ever been given, and I do it to this day, and I think everyone should do it, is to network laterally. Don't worry if Leslie Jamison gets on a Zoom with you, whether or not she's going to remember you. The people who you need to care about are the people in your cohort. Those are going to be your connections for life. My cohort, we still get on Zooms and critique each other, even though we're in Portland, Hawai'i, Kentucky, and New York. Jaydra, like I said, I flew her out to read at my book opening. She's coming back again and putting me on for a reading she's doing. We're constantly sharing resources.

These are your people! So if you get something, you get a nice byline or whatever, put somebody else on. You start working somewhere where you've got access, put somebody else on. Start a journal, start a series, start whatever. The biggest thing that came out of Hunter for me was those relationships. Art is really hard and really punishing, and you get rejected a lot. It's good to have people who give a shit about your writing, who you can check back in with, and who you can do progress reports with, who want you to win. So yeah, network laterally, invest in your cohort, invest in those relationships, and find those people.

To get updates on applying to the Hunter MFA Program, please REGISTER. You'll receive announcements, events news, and more.