Place the abyss in the abyss
Caitlin Dewey, in a recent article for OneZero, announced the passage from the "gig economy" to what she dubs the "hustle" economy — selling noncommodifiable goods and services (stuff you alone can make or provide) through platforms like Patreon.
The Covid-19 pandemic crushed vast swaths of the economy, slashing consumer demand, closing businesses, and vaporizing millions of jobs. But it’s been good to the nascent sliver of the digital economy that helps people channel their existing skills into sellable services and products.
Such products range from ebooks and meal plan templates to online classes, podcasts, membership clubs, newsletters, and porn. They proliferate on platforms including Patreon, Twitch, Substack, Etsy, Teachable, Knowable, Podia, Thinkific, Supercast, Lulu, Smashwords, Outschool, OnlyFans, and Gumroad.
This puts a decided emphasis on the "products" customers can get through these platforms, as though these were online marketplaces. They are more like busker's rows. The services are typically organized around sponsorship or subscription models — patrons agree to pay some amount every month to support the work of some "creator" that they admire; hence the name "Patreon." To lure sponsors in, the creators have to commodify their work in particular ways and allow for its distribution to be limited and controlled by the platforms. You could call that "channelling their existing skills into sellable services," or you could call that alienating people from their labor so that someone who owns the means of production can profit by those commodities.
The hustle economy is a pupa gig economy just emerging from its cocoon. The distinction Dewey draws between them — that individual workers are not interchangeable and can market themselves as individuals in terms of their brand — doesn't hold up from a macro perspective. The platforms standardize creators' "unique" offerings and put them in fiercer competition with a larger pool of competitors until their singularity is extinguished. The underlying model is the same: exploit a vast pool of labor without having to offer benefits or job security — turn all of lived experience into spare capacity, into "content."
The "hustle" platform seems like a mere means of distribution for the "creators" or "entrepreneurs" who own the means of production (their own bodies). But in fact the "hustle economy" scenario is not so different from working in a factory. The creators have labor power, which they effectively sell to the platforms, which control the means of producing the "things" that matter here: reaching potential customers at scale, sustaining a means of limiting access to goods, maintaining the business infrastructure that facilitates exchange, aggregating the supply of "creators" to create a sort of network effect that subordinates the value of individual creators to that of the entire catalog that a platform owns. Maybe the simpler way of saying that is platforms make markets. That is their product. They serve neoliberalism's tendency to marketize any aspect of existence that has hitherto resisted it in the name of bringing the market's "discipline" to wayward aspects of sociability.
In submitting to a platform, whatever "existing skills" a creator has are reformatted, warped to fit the scheme devised to exploit them for profit. I think Marx calls that "formal subsumption," when a capitalist organization of production appropriates pre-existing skills and reshapes them so as to primarily valorize capital. Then, when the existence of Patreon, etc., is taken for granted, the new skills that can be acquired take the shape demanded or anticipated by those platforms, on their terms and to their benefit and for their continued survival ("real subsumption"). The platforms begin to produce the sorts of creators they need to profit. (See "influencers" or "creators" on Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and whatever user-generated-content platform comes next, and on and on. "User-generated content" = generating the users who can be content.)
In the "gig economy," particularly when it was known more perniciously as the "sharing economy," this process took the form of monetizing aspects of individuals' time and belongings — forcing people to turn their spare capacity into a kind of capital for Airbnb and Uber and so on. The existence of platforms drove up capital costs for those individuals (your rent went up) and the value of their labor down (all that "spare capacity" is worth less in being aggregated). Those processes tended toward making participation more compulsory (all jobs become gigs; all rents are so high that everyone's home must also be an Airbnb). Then eventually, apartments and jobs are designed from the outset to be platform-able: Airbnb-ready buildings, ghost kitchens, TaskRabbits, etc. The world is remade on Amazon's terms.
Work itself, when organized through platforms, is no longer "skilled," but just abstract spare capacity that capital can take or leave when it needs it, dipping into the pool of reserve labor on its own terms. Patreon et al. bring that model to forms of work that otherwise seem resistant — the kinds of things contingent on one's reputation or personal brand. “Anyone with noncommoditized skills can do this,” venture capitalist Li Jin tells Dewey — anyone can sell themselves on/to a platform. It's no accident that VC types champion these models with deceptive rhetoric about inclusion and empowerment; the models are designed to line their pockets while impoverishing the world, and they work better when every possible person is exploited. That's the beauty of scale.
Being aggregated on the platform means you become one of many, many options; customers eventually discover just how interchangeable everyone is and learn to comparison shop, seek bargains. The personal connection between customer and provider that might have sustained a less "rational" exchange (where you support someone because you appreciate them or care about them) is subsumed by the platform, made into a form of direct exploitation and expropriation. The more you "care" about specific people, the more Patreon makes at both of your expenses.
As Dewey's article suggests, workers are driven to these platforms by a loss of leverage, a loss of opportunities to distribute their work themselves. They then surrender even more leverage, having to produce on the terms and via the affordances of the platforms. Their noncommoditized skills get commoditized by virtue of being platformed, and the creators become progressively proletarianized. But it is wrong to suggest that "hustle economy work offers a safety net," as Dewey does in the first half of the article; they do the exact opposite, as she notes in the second half. Platforms take advantage of the absence of a safety net to extract more surplus value from people's work. As she notes, "Workers ... bear enormous up-front costs and risks to produce their work. There is no such thing as a minimum wage. There are no benefits. Should the platform choose to change anything — from a payment processing fee to a recommendation algorithm — workers have no real power to influence those decisions."
In other words, platforms like Patreon seek to mobilize people as human capital that the platforms ultimately control. You don't own your own human capital; the platform that is capable of utilizing it does. You just become a worker in the factory that your own body has become. Your social connections, your capacity to connect, become corporate resources for tech companies. If you improve the value of that capital, you become more profitable for them — your quality of life moves in the other direction.
Social media platforms pioneered this personal-branding racket a decade ago, which I tried to write about in these golden oldies: "Social Media, Social Factory" ; "Facebook in the Age of Facebook"; "The Primitive Accumulation of Cool". Those pieces were all influenced by post-autonomist ideas about "free labor" and "immaterial labor" and "virtuosity" in the work of Tiziana Terranova, Maruzio Lazzarato, Paulo Virno, and others, but now people tend to talk about these things in terms of neoliberalism. The upshot is that "entrepreneurship" is celebrated so that various forms of risk can be individualized, represented as matters of strictly personal responsibility. Part of that is dissolving the barrier between work and life — everything is work, and surveillance helps make it so. Everything you do can be potentially monetized and you are responsible for it all, not morally or legally so much as economically. You may as well "do what you love" or find a way to pretend that you love what you do, because part of what everyone must produce is affect — attention, approval, connection, enthusiasm, reaction, conflict, "hustle," etc. etc. These are all resources for platforms that instrumentalize and monetize human relations at scale in ways that no individual can.
In short, all platforms are labor platforms. They turn "life" into "work" wherever possible, for "creators" and consumers alike, tracking and redistributing user behavior on the platforms' terms. Commodification makes inroads in more and more aspects of everyday life and comes to dictate more and more of social relations. Why make friends when you can have followers? Why speak from outside a company's paywall? The platforms are not offering a way to survive in a crisis; they are exploiting a crisis to introduce a regime that makes immiseration a permanent condition. The tides rise but never recede.