{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","uuid":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","normalized_title":"curationintheageofplatformcapitalismthevalueofselectionnarrationandexpertiseinnewmediacultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","isbns":["9781032023007","9781032023014","9781003182801"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":177,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Curation%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Platform%20Capitalism%20%20The%20Value%20of%20Selection%2C%20Narration%2C%20and%20Expertise%20in%20New%20Media%20Cultures","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/search"},"page":{"printed_page":61,"pdf_page":71,"physical_index":71,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2bdd4b2e9b3e5d635bc66d0c3a6c8806eeca9a903a30ee958501ac1e236a4558"},"chapter":"CURATION IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM","content":"3.4 The Gig Economy and Aspirational Labor\n\nIn the following two sections, I explore the material-ideological assemblage of platform work and platform consumption and discuss the ways they shape entrepreneurial subjectivities and aspirational class membership. As stated, digital platforms are typically mediators of multisided markets which connect workers and consumers in site-specific encounters. In these encounters, the curatorial imperative extends from the micro-entrepreneurial establishment and maintenance of services (e.g., drivers, instructors, guides, hosts, bloggers, and so on) to informed and aspirational consumption (e.g., acquiring selfvision, finding your “real” self, eating healthily, or familiarizing yourself with art). It is now common to say that some of the platforms that typically stage these encounters own no infrastructure (Srincek, 2017) calls them “lean platforms”, (e.g., Uber owns no taxis, Airbnb owes no hotels) but capitalize on this platform capacity to bring supply and demand together; it is in these encounters between supply and demand that new productive and consumptive identities are formed.\n\nIn terms of production, which is the focus of this section, platform strategies contribute to the emergence of a new labor paradigm, the so-called gig economy, which refers to platform-dependent casual, piecemeal, and flexible forms of work that are typically underpaid and lack security guarantees (Woodcock and Graham, 2020; Vallas and Schor, 2020; Morgan and Nelligan, 2018). The term “gig” in the music industry refers to music performances and a pay-by-task system, as well as temporary, irregular, and casual forms of work (Woodcock and Graham, 2020). The notion of “the gig economy” highlights a pattern in which more and more people around the world, who only need to have internet access and computer hardware, are independently contracted to carry out specific tasks or irregular work through the mediation of platforms. The gig economy is an umbrella term for various types of work contracts with minimal (if any) security guarantees. In its capacity as an intermediary rather than an employer, the platform bears no (or very little) responsibility for the worker’s security and usually does not pay for the equipment or operating costs needed to carry out the work.\n\nBefore looking at how platforms subjectivize workers as self-curators (Table 3.1), let us briefly discuss the variations in platform work. Woodcock and Graham (2020: 6) distinguish two types of such platform work: “geographically tethered work” and “cloudwork”. The workers in the first category exist in a specific geographical location, such as the courier who delivers food or supermarket items, the Uber driver, the Airbnb guide and the host, or the care worker, mover, or a technician in a services marketplace platform.8 This work is organized through platforms, but it takes place in a physical space, so the worker is “tethered” to a location. In contrast, cloudwork occurs remotely and without requiring physical presence. Cloudwork involves two types of work depending on the skills required: online freelancing (highskilled) and microwork (low-skilled). Online freelancing refers to activities that require more advanced skills, such as web development, translation, and proofreading, for instance on sites like Upwork or in online course platforms like Udemy. This work is usually better paid and mostly involves a global middle-class workforce with educational capital, often IT skills, and emotional and communicative abilities to navigate customer and market needs. Unlike online freelancing, the second type of cloudwork—microwork or micro-tasking—is the lowest paid and least skilled platform work, including repetitive tasks such as labeling and annotating data, participating in surveys, or following and reposting material from social media accounts. This is typical of the services provided by platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Clickwork, or Microwork, which are typically marketed as crowdsourcing marketplaces and where employers crowdsource tedious micro-tasks to a global workforce. This work can be shady or borderline unethical; on the site Microwork, for example, they reach out to employers willing to pay for fake likes, reposts, comments, and trafic (“whether you need trafic for your website, comments or a fresh post for your blog, bookmarks or likes for a video you want to be popular…” [Microworkers, nd]). Much of this work entails socially paralyzing tasks, such as clicking and annotating data, that rely on basic human intelligence that feeds AI and machine learning to make algorithms smarter. While workers performing these tasks may theoretically reside anywhere in the world, the majority live in low-income countries of the Global South, as the extremely low payment is not enough to survive in higher-income countries. Phil Jones (2022: 13) mentions how such microwork is outsourced in refugee camps around the world, so that refugees can live in subsistence conditions, resulting in the creation of a racialized “refugee industrial complex” knitted to the demand of technological-economic progress, for example, the improvement of AI and machine learning.\n\nCurating and Platforms\n\n61","previous_page":60,"next_page":62}