Lu Wang, MA Data, Culture, and Society at University of Westminster
Since the start of the pandemic, some platforms in digital industry have accelerated again, for example online meeting platform Zoom, e-commercial platforms Amazon and Alibaba, digital connect consumption platforms TikTok and Kuaishou. But as the UNCTND stressed, some benefit, others fall behind. The divide is not only between developing and developed countries, but also between the beneficial platforms and low-paid/non-paid labourers of these platforms.
Moving the eyesight to the time of February 2021 mainland China, Kuaishou, the primary competitor of TikTok in China, launched itself on Hong Kong Exchange Stock and come to be the first public video-sharing giant. From the lens of political economy, I am going to argue the precarious playbour of video producers on Kuaishou in the age of platform capitalism.
Precarious playbour of game modders
The development of digital technology creates massively significant digital cultures, computers, mobile phones, websites, online games, and videos, and so on. Meanwhile, it brings out a count of digital giants and monopolies as well, especially after the late 2000s, for example, the founders and cofounders of GAFAM, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Kuaishou, and so forth. While digital companies monopolise human daily lives and people completely depend on these platforms to deal with our everyday life. We need to reconsider and redefine the relationship between these platforms and us.
Seventeen years ago, Julian Kücklich demonstrated the term “precarious playbour” to clarify the condition of modders who worked voluntarily for the video games in the modding community. These programmers, 3D-artists and animators played and modified their loved games in their leisure time without any training, intellectual property rights, payments, although their labour obviously extended the shelf-life of the game and conducted distinct profits for game-owned company. Furthermore, as a non-contrast-oriented activity and a member of the collaborative but loose community, modders seldom bargained about their labour and production with highly profit-oriented digital game companies because of the unequally political and economic status.
Precarious playbour of Zhubos on Kuaishou
In the age of social media, precarious playbour is becoming much more common. People follow enormous tactics of Meat and TikTok to keep highly frequent activity on these social media, then these platforms utilise these data and activities from platforms’ users to get advertising investment and make big revenue. However, the major users and content creators always get no or less income through their labour.
Posting day-to-day lives to audience isn’t a new phenomenon, the reality television stars keep a constant stream to maintain their fame and achieve money. But most streamers and video creators of video-sharing platforms can’t obtain comparable results of income and status as these celebrities. Zhou and Liu reported in their journal that “Zhubos (video creators and streamers) on Kuaishou wanted to achieve upwards mobility and economic success, then these rural migrant workers played and performed on Kuaishou to produce content precariously and endured long work hours without social security or stable income”.
The famous label of Kuaishou is tuwei (Chinese) culture, which is interpreted as an earthy, lowbrow, and vulgar visual and video content. These videos are created by the people who come from rural, undeveloped, and ethnic minority area in China. Generally, these young people take a breather on Kuaishou to relieve job burnout and boredom, and because of low-paid of their formal job, some of them perform and stream online to obtain audience’s virtual gifts as income. They exhaustedly livestream every day and more than 8 hours per day to keep their fans’ attention and like, but Kuaishou takes 50% out of zhubo’s earnings. Moreover, as tuwei and vulgar character of these videos, Zhubos are often criticised and discriminated against by urban citizens and official media outlets.
Mark R. Johnson, the researcher of digital media, had shed light on the off-camera labour of game streamers on Twitch and emphasised that all streamers engaged in the off-camera labour to practice and prepare for presenting as a professional or semi-professional streamer. After examining the labour of video streamers from diverse perspectives, we may understand the efforts and achievements of these creators in the age of platform capitalism. As the above research, not only the game modders produced precarious playbour, the zhubos on Kuaishou also conduct precarious playbour.
While the Q4 financial report of Kuaishou shows its Q4 revenue is 24.4 billion (Chinese currency) and the annual revenue in 2021 is 81.1 billion (Chinese currency), but one of the interviewees in research of Zhou and Xin, LC, is a successful influencer who has 4.5 million followers on Kuaishou, he still exhausted himself to perform on Kuaioshou for ensuring to earn several thousand yuan per month (Chinese currency).
precarious playbour | Kuaishou | zhubo | creator | modder | video-sharing platform |digital capitalism
