Managerialism in digital platforms: the fallacy of success narratives and social disease

This article examines the emergence of platformised multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes as a significant, yet understudied, phenomenon in the ongoing transformation of work and labour on digital platforms. Promising wealth, freedom, and community, platformised MLMs organise individuals into cycles of value extraction by leveraging aspirational narratives of financial independence and entrepreneurial success. Through a case study of iGenius, a global MLM firm working through local recruiters, the article analyses the strategic and progressive embedding of individuals into the MLM. The article focuses on the cyclic character of recruitment operations, and identifies three stages of the process, namely recruitment of customers on social media platforms, the commodification of customers through complex and obfuscated brokerage relationships with affiliate trading platforms, and, finally, the embedding of individuals into the MLM organisation as recruiters seeking new prospects, starting the process over again. Throughout the analysis, we show how the nature of work, the value extraction methods, and the control mechanisms intensify as people move from merely subscribing to engaging in financial trading and in the end, turning to recruitment for the MLM. In the concluding discussion, we situate the analytical findings in the broader discussion of precarious work relations and atomisation of the workforce as well as the broader context of investment schemes and online scams. Thus, the article contributes to the study of labour relations and data extraction relationships on platforms and in the digital economy more generally.

ABSTRACTThe memory of loss in Asia's leading global cities has been shaped by recurrent projects of urban renewal, which have sought to deliver economic prosperity and social order at the expense of longstanding spaces and practices. Singapore's Golden Jubilee in 2015, which commemorated its triumphant postcolonial development, was accompanied by the proliferation of public expressions of nostalgia across a variety of media platforms. Amid the rise of the participatory culture of media convergence, this article examines how nostalgic longing is no longer necessarily articulated as an antagonistic critique of the precarious present of neoliberal capitalism, which withdraws into a timeless image of a congenial past. Departing from this conventional understanding of nostalgia in the scholarship of Singapore, it explores how the ruling government since independence has reconfigured its dissemination of historical and cultural knowledge to manage its transition from a global city defined by rapid growth to a smart nation reliant on perpetual adjustment by cultivating a form of citizenship centred on entrepreneurship and innovation. Through immersive spatialization, commissioned mobile video games oblige players to internalize the protocols of knowledge and agency of the Singapore Story, the official narrative of economic success and national progress. Two other state-run interactive digital platforms, the National Library's online archive the Singapore Memory Project and the National Museum's art installation The Story of the Forest, are designed to cultivate a new openness to the inevitability of iterations in urban informatics. Helping to assuage popular anxiety over the constancy of change and the failure of risk-taking, the latter frames perpetual adjustment as a vital component of the cosmic cyclicality of deep time, in which vanished realities are recreated with different permutations.