Algorithmic precarity in cultural work

Abstract

While work in the media and cultural industries has long been considered precarious, the processes and logics of platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such insecurity are platforms’ algorithms, which structure the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural content in capricious, enigmatic, even biased ways. Accordingly, cultural producers’ conditions and experiences are increasingly wrought by their understandings—and moreover their anticipation—of platforms’ ever-evolving algorithmic systems. Against this backdrop, I urge fellow researchers of digital culture and society to consider how this mode of “algorithmic precarity” exacerbates the instability of cultural work in the platform era. Considering the volatility of algorithms and the wider cross-platform ecology can help us to develop critical interventions into a creative economy marked by a profoundly uneven allocation of power between platforms and the laborers who populate—and increasingly—power them.