Theory Underground Is Looking for an Editor
We need shorter-form gateways into the longer-form content by a special kind of editor.
I just gave my Intro to Heidegger lecture at TU. This was the third one in the Intro to Theory series so far. Parts one and two were on Marx and Nietzsche. Coming up: Levinas, Lacan, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Žižek, and many more, including guest lectures from notable names like Nick Land and Simon Critchley.
These lectures run two to three hours, and are meant to be comprehensive crash courses for busy people with no background in philosophy. You can’t rush or pack these thinkers into a TikTok and have anyone walk away actually equipped to think with it. What I’ve tended to do is provide a ton of unapologetically long-form content for free, and then say there is a lot more of that on the members-only side.
However, this means I have too many hundreds of hours of long-form content currently free, meaning people don’t know where to even begin. What I want is a new form of content for TU, which is shorter and focused on piquing a person’s curiosity without giving them the whole lecture. If all they see is the free clip, it’s useful and inspiring, but the chances are they might want to go deeper. So we need someone who can find the gold inside these lectures, 60 second shorts (for Insta/Tiktok) as well as the 12-to-20-minute segments for YouTube/Substack, and clip, edit, and ship them without losing what makes them work.
Theory Underground is looking for an editor.
But I’m not just looking for skill. I’m looking for a specific kind of person.
You’re already a working editor. You’re good at what you do. You make a living. But somewhere in the back of your mind there’s a restlessness, a sense that the projects crossing your desk aren’t doing anything. You cut clean. The clients are happy. The work pays. And none of it changes anyone’s life, least of all yours.
Maybe you’ve heard names like Žižek or Heidegger or Lacan tossed around online and thought I’d love to actually understand what these people are talking about, but where do I even start? Maybe you’ve felt that itch to go deeper into the kind of questions that don’t have a market rate. Questions about meaning, about work, about what the good life actually looks like when you strip away the hustle. Maybe you’ve wanted a crash course in the ideas that shaped the modern world but never had the on-ramp.
This is the on-ramp.
Here’s what I’m offering, and I want to be honest about it, because honesty is the only foundation worth building on. The pay will scale with TU’s success. That means this isn’t a top-dollar gig today. What it is, right now, immediately, is an education you can’t buy. You will spend your working hours inside two-to-three-hour lectures on Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, and Žižek. But it’s not just that. TU is also running deep seminars on stewardship, regenerative farming, cultivation, and what it actually means to build something that lasts. We’re reading Wendell Berry alongside Bourdieu. We’re studying soil alongside alienation. The project isn’t only critique and deconstruction. It’s about cultivation and construction. Taking apart the machine inside of and between us, and learning how to grow something real in its place.
You will, in the process of cutting this material, learn it. Not as trivia, but as tools for understanding your own life and the world you’re living in. If that’s exciting to you, then you might be perfect for the role.
The spark of curiosity matters. A talented editor who doesn’t care about the material will cut on energy and pacing alone. The result will look clean and feel hollow. Someone encountering these ideas for the first time is able to feel them land or not land in real time. This becomes the test case for the whole project. You’ll know where to cut because you’ll feel the lightbulb moment yourself.
The Real Challenge: These lectures don’t move in a straight line. I rarely say the most important thing only once. I’ll introduce a concept, move on, circle back to it from a different angle, hit it again with a new example, build on it with an analogy from a completely different domain. That’s not redundancy—it’s scaffolding. These lectures are built for people who are listening while they work, which means they might miss something the first time, or they need to hear it in three different ways before it clicks because they can’t stop and reread a paragraph. An editor who doesn’t understand that will see a passage that sounds like something I said twenty minutes earlier and cut it. And they’ll have just cut the moment it was actually going to land. The spiral is the point. The real art is not straightening it into a line but seeing when I land a concept best, finding the stretch where the recursion is tightest and the examples are sharpest, and giving that room to do its work in a shorter clip. I imagine this will be achieved by listening to the lecture through once before beginning to chop bits out (otherwise you end up with 10 clips in the first hour and then realize I said half of it better at other points).
The editing matters too: It should feel alive. Not a static lecture capture with a title card slapped on it. Actually produced. Glitch effects, filters, b-roll, text on screen, used strategically, not constantly. The kind of editing where a well-timed visual punch makes a concept hit harder, where a cutaway to the right image at the right moment does three seconds of work that would take a paragraph to explain. If you’ve watched channels like 1Dime, Kurzgesagt, or other slick video essayists, you know what I mean. The edit itself is part of the argument. It’s not decoration. It’s rhetoric.
But there’s a line. Too much and it becomes noise. Too polished and it feels corporate. The aesthetic has to match the ethos: underground, substantive, a little raw, but never sloppy. Think independent film, not YouTube factory. Think a well-designed zine, not a marketing deck. I can’t give a formula for where that line is, because it’s a matter of artistic taste. I need someone with discernment. Someone who understands that every effect is a rhetorical decision and who has the instinct to know when the material needs a visual exclamation point and when it needs to just breathe.
If you already have a portfolio of work like this, awesome. If you have taste and ambition but haven’t had a project that let you stretch like this, even better. This is a place to develop that range.
Think of it as a residency. You bring the craft. We bring the canon of lectures. Together we build something that reaches the people TU was founded for: workers with earbuds getting into big ideas about what it means to be human, live the good life, and make change.
My teaching philosophy, and the philosophy of everything we produce, is this: never assume knowledge or reading of the subject matter. Always build from basics. Never fail to unpack concepts or contexts essential for finding one’s footing with a theorist. At the same time, never dumb it down or do the thinking for people, but equip them, while at their work, with enough so that they can make an informed decision about where to go deeper, if and when they free up some timenergy to do so.
Whether I live up to that or not is for others to decide. It’s the standard I try to live up to. I share it here because if that sounds like something that excites you not just as a job but as a direction, then you might be the person I’m looking for.
I want someone who wants to change their life. Someone who wants theory and radical grounding, practice, and inspiration. Someone ready to be transformed by the work, not just compensated for it.
If that’s you, or you know someone, here’s how to apply:
Watch this lecture:
It’s the Intro to Heidegger I mentioned at the top. Sit with it.
You can download it directly from THIS LINK.
Then
Tell me what you think are five of the best 12-to-20-minute clips and why. Edit at least one of them. It doesn’t have to be a final product, but it should show me how you think about the material and what you can do with it visually. Include a little about the software and process you used, roughly how long something like that would normally take you, and what you’d consider fair payment if we were to use that clip.
Optional bonus: Rinse and repeat but for a 60 second clip (vertical 9:16 short/reel format).
That last part matters. I’m not asking for free work. I’m asking you to show me your instincts and name your price. If the clip is good, we’ll use it, and we’ll pay what you ask.
Here’s how the process looks after that. If I like what you send me, you’ll be one of a handful of editors I work with over the next couple of months on a piece-rate basis. No long-term commitment on either side. You edit clips, I pay per clip, and we see how it goes. What I’ll be paying attention to during that stretch is the obvious stuff: communication, turnaround times, how easy it is to work together, and whether you’re getting sharper with the material over time. Eventually I want to land on one person and build something real together, with pay that scales as TU grows. That relationship will have to be earned, by me as much as by whoever eventually becomes the editor. The first edited clip is just to see if you are a good fit for the starting lineup.
Looking forward to hearing from you at hello.theoryunderground@gmail.com
Thanks for reading!
David McKerracher and TU