Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

In music streaming services, for instance, curated content provides platforms with additional “gatekeeping powers” (Bonini and Gandini, 2019). Robert Pray (2020) goes further to argue that the power of a music streaming platform like Spotify, which has to stitch together diferent markets—such as the music, advertising, and financial markets—in order to survive and expand, lies principally in its own curated playlists. Pray calls this “curatorial power”, that is, “the capacity to advance one’s interests, and afect the interests of others, through the organizing and programming of content” (2020: 2). For musicians, being included in Spotify playlists means fame and revenue to the point that “record labels have become increasingly dependent on landing on Spotify-curated playlists”; for advertisers, playlists ofer the opportunity for native advertising, while for investors playlists represent the promise that eventually Spotify will become profitable by producing its own music and avoid paying costly copyright fees to record labels (2020: 3). By “unbundling albums and reassembling them into playlists” (2020: 3), Spotify re-places a fragment of the cultural commodity—the song—into a new ordered constellation that promises to advance new regimes of profit. For users, the curated playlist is an added value that distinguishes Spotify from a music torrent site and can persuade them to pay for the service. Apple News+, Apple’s subscription-based news service, is more than just a news aggregator; it is a curated enterprise that reframes news piece as personalized content (Bandy and Diakopoulos, 2020). As Apple puts it, “experienced Apple News editors curate the day’s top stories from trusted sources, and advanced algorithms help you discover stories you’ll find interesting” (Apple News, 2023). Through this service, Apple can position itself as a powerful intermediary between the news sites and the public and reap whatever benefits accompany this role.

In platform capitalism, platforms deploy curation in two ways: on the one hand, they strive to establish themselves as experts, particularly through algorithmic recommendation systems that curate user connectivity and the provision of curated services, such as, the playlist or curated news (van Dijck, 2013; Langley and Leyshon, 2017: 5). On the other hand, they are sites that allow for massive amounts of curatorial/entrepreneurial labor from ordinary users while also attracting consumers who want to curate themselves. The remainder of this chapter focuses on these latter two points.

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3.4 The Gig Economy and Aspirational Labor

In 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.

In 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.

Before 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.

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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).

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All these diferent workers rely on platforms as a socio-technical and accumulation model to perform their labor, and as shown in Table 3.1, they must curate themselves in various ways and to various degrees. Curatorial imperatives are vital for content producers, for example, as they must possess organizational, aesthetic, afective, linguistic, and often technical abilities. An Airbnb cooking instructor, as we will see in Chapter 5, requires advanced linguistic skills to develop forms of storytelling that convey authenticity and originality, afective skills to create a friendly and hospitable cooking environment, and organizational skills to set up pricing and timetabling. A life coach needs aesthetic skills to design an inspirational persona for their fans and organizational skills to monetize this persona, whereas a Deliveroo courier would need some basic afective (politeness, friendliness) and technical skills (signing up and using the platform/app) to get positive customer reviews. At the other end of the spectrum, cloud microworkers would only need to have some basic linguistic abilities in order to complete micro-tasks and have their employers approve of them. In this classification, the general rule is that the more aspirational the labor, the more inventively an entity should be curated. In other words, the curatorial imperative grows stronger when there are opportunities for upward mobility, whereas in contrast to when an individual is aware that no upward mobile career can come out of their labor (such as couriers and microworkers). Of course, aspirational work is heavily ideological as the promises of work independence and flexibility are often not met, amidst labor hardships and aborted visions (Gregory and Sadowski, 2021).

Platforms must also establish what Langley and Leyshon (2017: 20) refer to as “ostensibly stabilizing reputation economies” in order to coordinate network efects and engender audience trust, and these economies must be supported by quality control and evaluation mechanisms in order to appear legitimate. The five-star and occasionally written review system, where the customer and the worker exchange evaluations, is the most dominant evaluation mechanism ranging from driving and hospitality to educational and microwork platforms. These evaluations reflect the reputation of each component and are especially essential for workers because poor ratings and reviews may mean less income and, in the case of repeated poor ratings and reviews, possible ostracism from the platform, which can lead to unemployment. These are the tools for disciplining platform workers; the customers are, in a sense, their bosses, and thus the worker should self-perform in a way that is consistent with the customer desire in the “consumer-centric environment” (Barile, 2023: 7). Platform work has a biopolitical component because its coding architecture is designed to require workers to develop specific types of skills and human capital that correspond to this environment (Gregory and Sadowski, 2021). This includes not only the review system, but also the overall performance of employees. Gregory and Sadowski (2021) examine the labor conditions of Deliveroo couriers, arguing that platform work frequently commands bodily and psychological conjunctions under the platform mandates of flexibility (being ready for work), vitality (being fit for work), and legibility (being machine readable). The platform workers here develop what they call “perverse virtues”, which correspond to the numerical metric systems’ disciplining of labor and the rewards of the “biopolitical platform” (2020: 10).

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Content producers on social media platforms are not usually subject to an evaluation system in the form of stars and reviews, but their performance is measured by metrics and publicly reviewed by audience responses. In the first instance, the performance metrics of a business account on Instagram would include statistics such as engagements per follower, follower growth, and referral trafic over time—the higher these indicators, the more likely a content producer is to monetize their activity. The metric system disciplines the activity of content producers because they should be optimizing their posts and stories to achieve better results, they may need to post, for instance, in the ideal posting time, which is the time of the day that their posts will receive the most likes. For example, during critical stages of the war in Ukraine (such as the start of the invasion in late February 2022 or Putin’s announcement to mobilize reserves in late September 2022), several Russian Instagram micro-celebrities would avoid posting inspirational content; as the audience’s attention was drawn to much more urgent news, this would have a negative impact on their overall metric performance or could lead to negative audience reactions. Responses are likely the most important factor for content producers to capitalize on, and they entail what Dumont refers to as “relational labor”, which is involved in the “creation and management” of ongoing relationships with the audience, mainly in social media (2017: 122). In this regard, this type of work is disciplined similarly to other platform work in the sense that the (aspiring) micro-influencer must tailor their behavior and responses to optimize metrics and to the whims of their audience.

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3.5 Curated Consumption and the Aspirational Class

At the other end of the platform, there is the consumer, who either directly purchases a service, or simply spends their time on the platform’s content. In the former case, consumption is a straightforward act of monetary exchange; in the latter, to return to the communicative capitalism thesis, the consumer may be scrolling through Facebook or watching YouTube videos and is exposed to advertising. From an economic standpoint, any platform user is a consumer as they generate value for content producers, including bloggers, influencers, and others, by expending resources, namely, time, attention, and communication skills. For the platform economy, everyone who uses the internet is a potential customer whose resources can be exploited.

Consumer engagement with various activities online and ofline is frequently the result of psychological manipulation, such as clickbaiting or algorithmically recommending content which would engage the consumer with the platform for as long as possible. Yet the consumptive engagement with certain practices is also formative for one’s identity. In the context of a consumer society, expenditure of money, time, and resources are inextricably linked with who one is and what one does. This consumer identity is not independent of the actual conditions surrounding it, rather, individuals act as consumers against the backdrop of social representations, discourses, and values that shape “consumer subjectification” in specific ways (Schmitt et al., 2022: 76). In an economy of abundance of choice and diference, where everyone is supposed to “choose” what they want to be, the engagement with specific goods and services over others shapes social perceptions about identities (Skeggs, 2013). Crucially then, consumption not only reflects the consumer’s class background (e.g., “they eat in an expensive restaurant because they are rich”), but it also creates perceptions of class as through that consumers assume social positions and navigate values (“they eat in an expensive restaurant because they value quality”). Curated consumption, or consumption that is based on the guiding authority of experts, is a way to claim a consumer (and larger social) identity which is culturally refined. This refined identity can be shared, exchanged, and communicated, thereby constructing more uplifting perceptions of classed personhoods.

Before moving on, let us consider the broader relationship between consumption and identity through an aspect of curated consumption: the case of “ethical consumption”, which supposedly represents a distinct form of self-fashioning from the mainstream, if not a form of resistance to dominant values (Adams and Raisborough, 2010). By purchasing “ethical” brands and boycotting “unethical” ones, the ethical consumer can incorporate moral values into their purchasing decisions, such as veganism, environmentalism, anti-discrimination, and other tropes pertaining to some idea of justice. By consuming justly, the ethical consumer can tell themselves and others morally uplifting stories about their shopping habits given that there is a social space that afirms the significance of these stories (in certain social contexts a space for moral consumption is limited or may not even exist). These stories would make a claim to what Bourdieu famously theorized as “distinction”, that is, the privilege to be distinct in some way from the masses, which is a marker of social class (1987). As ethical consumption is embedded in commodity relations and new markets, it is also a target of market-based ideological encoding. For Sobande, this can entail “woke-washing”, or the appropriation of social movement ideals by corporations, which occurs when companies adopt “social justice rhetoric and representations in pursuit of profit”, capitalizing on diferent sorts of demands for justice (2019: 2724). This technique of value extraction can commodify social struggles, making their causes a sign of moral superiority in society’s competing perceptions of class belonging (Kanai and Gill, 2020: 2). The same is true for the greenwashing, queerbaiting, and pinkwashing campaigns of corporations, whereas the very same corporations may otherwise rely on cheap labor, lobbying, and exploitative relations of production. The ethical consumer legitimizes new consumptive identities by placing value on the ethical, and thus on the “right” over the “wrong” consumption practices. In this regard, apart from potentially activist, ethical consumption is also an ideologically ridden practice, insofar as it allows the consumer to hypothetically assert a morally superior self against other, inferior “functional” consumers. Thus, consumption ideology are the “ideas and ideals related to consumerism that are manifested in consumers’ social representations and expressed in their communicative actions in the marketplace”, where this ideology is expressive of broader perceptions of class, status, and identity (Schmitt, Brakus and Biraglia: 2022: 2). Whether it challenges capitalism or not, ethical consumption is capable of shaping these perceptions.

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Overall, these perceptions are shaped in the process of cultural exchange, where consumer taste and preferences are negotiated in various hierarchies of prestige and where culture is deployed as an economic resource that creates understandings of class (Skeggs, 2013). For Beverly Skeggs, class is not just an objective category but is expressed in symbolic struggles; the middle class, as a desirable ideological apparatus for hailing working class and subaltern populations into the system of consumption, has therefore “no frontiers other than those continually produced and transformed through struggle, and these cannot be defined abstractly” (2013: 5). This is an important insight in terms of ethically or generally curated consumption because the symbolic frontiers of class-making are constantly reshaped and rearticulated. For example, as we will see in later chapters, in curated consumption there is a strong emphasis on the authentic, the genuine, and the meaningful. To be authentic, therefore, in what you choose to buy is a trope for both performing middle-class values and for mediating contemporary understandings middleclassness (see Chapter 5).

There is also a valorization of the “genuine”, which is opposed to both pretension and restraint and which is seen as a real moral value, rather than simply as fun; hence the middle-class interest in the authentic object and the authenticity of the other.

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(Skeggs, 2013: 23)

Speaking about such contemporary perceptions of middle-classness, Currid-Halkett classifies this new consumer ideology as that of an “aspirational class”, an elite yet widespread grouping of mostly middle- and upper middleclass urban dwellers who value informed over conspicuous consumption (2018: 18). Aspirational consumption, like aspirational labor, is a way to inscribe oneself in social relations through ideological fantasies of class belonging. The aspirational class views consumption as a future investment for becoming an improved person and moving up the social ladder. It crafts itself primarily through symbolic and cultural capital rather than income, as it is the where of money spent that counts instead of the money itself.

The aspirational class is motivated by self-confident values and is actively choosing a way of life through an excessive process of information gathering and forming opinions and values, some of which involve money but many of which rest on cultural capital instead.

(Currid-Halkett, 2018: 19)

Curation provides the aspirational class advanced opportunities for storytelling, which is a typical means for negotiating forms of symbolic capital. Storytelling is a trope attached to the originator of the story and it “appeals to humans’ demand for a meaning in life as stories engage emotions, stimulate fantasies, and thoughts” (Mei, Hågensen and Kristiansen, 2020: 94); the more unique the stories, the more captivating the originator of the story appears. To use our initial example, a curated sock that is local and authentic ofers a story to tell the self and others, and thus shapes (perceptions of) identity. As we will see in Chapter 5, an Airbnb cooking session with an Italian grandmother provides a story that is authentic and shareable, it is not “random” cooking, but rather a recipe based on the experience of a historical community. The luxury fashion brands in Chapter 4 tell quirky and ofbeat stories, and the life coaches in Chapter 6 encourage their clients and trainees to curate their identities based on their “true” selves. Curation, in this sense, is a cultural and economic rationality that occupies a structure of feeling, to use Raymond Williams’ term (1977), in contemporary capitalism by expanding the imaginary of self-aestheticization and the ideal of the self as a work of art (Featherstone, 2021; Skeggs, 2013). In the post-2010s of digital abundance, socks with personalities function as what Lury refers to as “prothesis”, marking an inscription of the self that operationalizes one’s personality in the marketplace of identities (Lury, 2013).

The aspirational class is reflexive insofar as it is expected to think through various consumption practices vis-a-vis opportunities for self-making, or to consume as a means of self-personalization. To “drink almond milk instead of regular milk”, for example, means to engage in consumption that has internalized a certain social awareness of animal rights and assumed ecofriendly knowledge, which in turn becomes a marker of social status (Currid-Halkett, 2018: 22). In this regard, aspirational consumers are the ideal candidate group for buying into the curatorial narrative, as this narrative provides a story about one’s self-image, what the business studies scholars Pine and Gilmore refer to as “purchasing on the basis of conforming to self-image” (2007: 65). Self-image here becomes a craft and quest for the aspirational consumer, who understands that the more uniquely diference is managed, the more possibilities for social distinction. Curated consumption, in other words, serves as the foundation for a new consumer ideology in the disorienting context of communicative capitalism.

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3.6 Conclusions

The new categories which curation inhabits can be endless as micro-expertise covers more and more areas of social life, from skinfluencers (skincare influencers) to petfluencers (pet influencers) to wine and low-calorie cooking experts. This chapter discussed how curation, as a new apparatus of intermediation, emerges in the shift from communicative capitalism, where information and communication are simply valorized as acts of data, to platform capitalism, a socio-technical model that encourages new market encounters and the organization of communication under narratives and metadata. This model amplifies the social imperative to curate and be curated by making use of platform architectures, tools, audiences, and afordances. Thus, while viral animal videos circulate in a disorderly and exponential fashion on the internet, for The Dodo, the example with which we opened this chapter, they are vehicles of channeling specific emotions, such as empathy, fun, and positivity—the narrative of an entrepreneurial initiative. Curated entities, such as that of The Dodo, aim at commodifying shapeless and disorderly communications under such specific narratives. The internet is a machine enabling an incessant production of connectivity and communications, regardless of the content of these communications (Dean, 2009; Andrejevic, 2019), and platformized curating strives to capitalize on these communications by organizing them.

Platforms, as any technology in modern capitalist societies, are “an expression of the economic objectives that direct them into action”—they inhabit the logic of profit and surplus value rather than being a natural outcome of historical development, (Zubof, 2019: 22; Sadowski, 2020b). In the domain of work, digital platforms shape the aspiring imaginary of flexibility and independence by renting their technical capabilities to aspiring celebrities and ordinary users. If we were to give a spatial analogy, we could think of fairs or festivals renting their spaces to diferent sellers where the exhibitors pay a rent to borrow the place for a certain period of time. As such, a remote language teacher in Preply, for instance, has to rent the platform space by paying a commission to the platform for the class they conduct in return for visibility, easier customer reach, scheduling, and trusted transactions. Inside the platform, the teacher becomes a self-entrepreneur who uses the curatorial imperative to appeal to their customers, including the writing of an attractive description and making an introduction video of themselves. Or, for instance, in Airbnb Experiences, the organizers of tours, seminars, or classes pay a commission to the platform per customer booking. This new platform-based entrepreneurialism increasingly compels a middle-class precariat to perceive themselves “as a form of capital to be invested, and of their income as the return on such investment” (Bandinelli, 2019: 5; see also, Bandinelli, 2020). As new landlords extracting wealth from “renting” labor in a neo-feudal regime, platforms intensify the formation of self-entrepreneurial subjectivities in conditions of gig labor (Wansbrough and Dean, 2021; Sadowski, 2020a). In the domain of consumption, if information capitalism brings chaos, curation promises order, packaging information together in narratives and forms of storytelling. In this sense, curated consumption arises when the content of communication for data extraction purposes becomes largely irrelevant, and when the communicative form largely detaches itself from the imperative of the content. Curation promises to emotionalize and rehumanize communicative exchanges at a time when these exchanges are defined by the logics of inhumanity, automation, and computerization.

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