The transcript.

Welcome to Behind the Curtain: The inner workings of digital labor! In this animated video we are going on a hero’s journey of perilous and precarious work. While on our adventure, we’ll touch on aspects of digital labor such as time, efficiency, and the cost of putting a human face to it all.

Let’s start with defining digital laborers more generally as including people who work in and around large-scale computation (Crawford, 2021). Our focus is on a subset of that group, the heroes of our story, the public-facing digital content creators on blogs and live streams.

In the ordinary world, our digital laborers begin their quest to carve out a space for themselves on the Internet. The Internet is a massively power tool for labor that has changed the nature of content creation in that digital content creators are beholden to its algorithms and whims in their successes and failures. As they heed the call to adventure and begin to catch onto working within the machinations of the Internet, they adapt to its ‘rhythms and cadences’ (Crawford, 2021, pg. 60). This is especially evident in the scheduling demands of Twitch streamers who broadcast for extremely long, continuous periods of time, performing multiple tasks live throughout (Woodcock & Johnson, 2019).

The internet as a de facto employer indeed views employees as material resources. Bloggers and streamers are caught in how users, and companies on the internet configure work. There is an appropriate ‘culture’ to follow in this new factory and if in the past culture was a tool in the tension over time, on the internet it holds its own tension of what works, what is appropriate, and what has to be conveyed to be popular. Many bloggers find this cultural tension too consuming to navigate and leave this form of employment effectively refusing their call to adventure (Duffy, 2017).

At this point in our adventure, we might meet with a mentor. There are no shortages of examples on the internet of bloggers and streamers configuring themselves to suit their respective internet platforms, however, to be truly original, one needs to be ahead of the curve as seen in some bloggers regrets about not showing more of themselves on camera, while that mode of content creation was still original and Twitch streamers adoption of new, original identities and characters to make their streams more entertaining (Duffy, 1027; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019). There are no mentors on the internet.

As we cross the threshold into monetization, wages in Twitch are crowdsourced in the beginning until the streamer is popular enough to attract corporate sponsors (Woodcock & Johnson, 2019). In the blogosphere, wages for highly successful bloggers might have been topped-up by substantial familial support (Duffy, 2017). In these ways, work on the internet upholds and reinforces existing class structures, much like in the shape of labors past (Crawford, 2021).

Now we are coming into the second act of obstacles, challenges, enemies, and allies. We get scared, overcome our fear to confront the big boss, and receive our reward. Behind the Potemkin-like facades of our public-facing digital content creators lies further tensions in this form of labor’s reliance on affective labor. Bloggers search for the right balance of authenticity and realness balanced with their own lives and privacy, while Twitch streamers struggle to stay on for the duration of the stream, behaving positively and generating appropriate emotional responses to both the game that are playing and comments in the chat (Duffy, 2017; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019). Both are aiming to cultivate closeness in the weak ties of the internet. The reward for accomplishing the perfect outward countenance? More followers, more sponsors, but not a more sustainable mode of work.

Act three is our heroes’ return to the ordinary world. Our digital content creators compete against each other for the chance to gain a bigger slice of the subscriber-pie while the internet, and the platforms that host or heroes on the internet exploit this competition to generate more views and more shares. Our road back to the ordinary world might be smooth for a while if we’ve successfully outcompeted our peers. But, in the wise words of Smith, this work holds little value yet as the cost of the labor that went into it is completely invisible and as a result incalculable. Like this wisdom. The resurrection comes if our heroes can somehow recapture their worth in an extractive system before falling further into the trap of untenable hours and infringements on privacy for the sake of authenticity. If we don’t interrogate this system, our laborers may never return safely back with the elixir. We’ve simply set the rate too high.