Digital Pyramid Built by Datafication: Take Bytedance’s Corporate Culture Text for Example

Abstract

ByteDance is a giant Internet company that abruptly expands to the world with TikTok as its mainstream media product. TikTok was even metaphorically called Pandemic Objects as a consequence of its rapidly increased usage during COVID-19. But behind the prosperity is capital’s reinterpretation and shaping of social life and the extra bonus extracted from repression upon digital labor. In the process of transforming abnormal domination into “taken for granted” daily life, corporate culture text plays a core role. Based on the concept “datafication” and “data relations” put forward by Nick Couldry, the authors conducted textual analysis and participatory observation on ByteDance’s propaganda video, slogans of corporate culture, and the sensory lived experience to explore the cultural and ideological paths for ByteDance to establish the myth of a digital pyramid in the digital age. The main results were: 1) The form of extraction of surplus value is changed from the employment relationship to the capitalization of social life. 2) The reality of social life is constructed by informing and hiding. 3) The redundancy of pan-entertainment information forms a verisimilitude sphere, dominating social lives by data streams. By summarizing the results, the authors concluded: ByteDance as a Giant Internet company is using “datafication” and “data relations” to construct a pyramidal structure, and the material to fill up this structure is the pan-entertainment data redundancy obtained by squeezing digital labor and compressing social lives.