Becoming precarious playbour: Chinese migrant youth on the Kuaishou video-sharing platform

Abstract

AbstractThis article investigates the practices of precarious playbour on Kuaishou, a short-video platform embracing the idea of ‘recording the lives of ordinary people’ and attracting massive numbers of migrant youth to produce creative content as free labour. It examines how young migrants from rural areas in China engage in Kuaishou as a means of realising upwards socio-economic mobility by producing a tuwei (earthiness) culture which has a large fan base. It also examines the way in which they collaborate to cope with precarious conditions lacking guaranteed working time and income, and labour protection. The article attempts to build a conversation with existing scholarship that addresses the ‘exploitation vs. empowerment’ dialectic of labour production. Instead, we address the complexity of digital labour production characterised by a collaborative and symbiotic relationship between social media platforms and users. Through ‘play’ with their followers that generates profit for the digital platform, migrant youth voluntarily accept the uncertain, unpredictable, and risky conditions of digital labour production. They are, however, not passively subjected to platform exploitation but can instead reclaim agency by actively seeking to collaborate with other users to cope with increasing precariousness.