There is a third category of platform workers not included in Woodcock and Graham’s classification, which is likely the most relevant to the curatorial apparatus, namely content producers (Vallas and Schor, 2020), or what we can call platform curators. These workers typically perform contractless, aspirational labor, giving away their time for free in the hope of achieving future success and recognition. While content workers are not conventionally contracted workers, their work is profitable from the perspective of the platform, because by spending time and deploying communicative skills they facilitate trafic, network efects, and connectivity. The main goal of platform curators is to launch themselves as personal brands and microexperts on a specific topic and establish a consistent revenue stream. As a result, they would ideally become self-suficient workers who can maintain themselves by working on their own terms, adopting “the maxim ‘DWYL’ (Do What You Love)”, where “pleasure, autonomy, and income seemingly coexist” (Dufy, 2016: 442). This is why, in contrast to other microworkers, content producers may gradually invest in their means of production, such as cameras, microphones, or stage design for bloggers, education for life coaches and instructors, traveling, dining, buying followers and likes for aspiring or actual influencers, and so on. These are fundamentally aspirational workers who strive to become “independent workers” and eventually earn a stable income, for example, through advertising, mentoring sessions, seminars, and product promotions. In this case, the content producers should aesthetically curate a version of themselves, which can be ideally monetized at some later stage. This aspirational labor, as Dufy suggests, is “a highly gendered, forward-looking, and entrepreneurial enactment of creativity” and represents a new and ideologically charged paradigm of labor in the era of platforms (2022).9 Aspirational labor, can also progressively turn into what Wang calls in reference to exploitive forms of online sex work “desperational labor” as anxieties, insecurities, and life uncertainties gradually stack up (2021).
Curating and Platforms
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