I celebrated my birthday this year by presenting some research at the Queerness and Games Conference in Montreal. I’ve been looking at what it means to be doing digital work in the contemporary economy, and what it means for those who make their livings online. In particular, I’ve been looking at Twitch streamers who have been branded as “titty streamers” (or otherwise) with my colleague, Amanda Cullen, and UCI faculty, Bo Ruberg.
Suffice to say that a lot of my time has been spent sifting through vitriolic Reddit comments and YouTube “analysis” videos of what makes a “Twitch thot.” More on that to come, hoo boy. The bright spot in all of this was that I got to share the early stages of this work with the wonderful folks at QGCon — and what better test audience than the radically queer games scene?
Below is my talk, in full, and its accompanying slides are here.
My name is Kat Brewster, I’m a second-year PhD student at the University of California, Irvine. This is the title of my presentation, and here is a joke about it.
Anyway. But for real. What is this presentation about?
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It’s about: Labour models on lean, privately owned digital platforms. Models which have allowed for the gig economy to flourish – or, if you like, the “sharing-economy” and the “on-demand work economy,” and all the other things we call it. The platforms which facilitate these models are often called lean: they rely on users to do the legwork while direct employees maintain and run the platform upon which that labour is sourced. These are platforms like Uber, AirBnb, and Paypal as well as (I believe), YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Snapchat, Patreon, etc. etc.
Those who use these platforms to provide their primary source of income has increased exponentially over the past decade. However, these platforms’ systems of remuneration is often opaque and fragile. It relies on unstable metrics for growth and sustainability, and reinforces fraught relationships of affective labour.
Within recent months, platforms like Twitch and Patreon and PayPal have made significant changes to their terms of service or community guidelines. Several of these platforms have been reacting to – either directly or indirectly – consequences of FOSTA/SESTA. FOSTA/SESTA is an item of legislation which purports to protect at-risk individuals from sex trafficking online. A side effect of this legislation has made for a drastically different internet landscape for those platforms reliant on user generated content. I hope to show how this legislations affects not only sex workers, but anyone involved in work on a digital platform.
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I wish I had hours and hours to discuss this with everyone in this room, but in sharing the stage with my inimitable colleagues, I have only allotted myself ten to twelve minutes to give you a brief overview of the landscape as it stands for further research. For your general interest, or -- for the academics among you – your perusal, here is a brief list of the literature, thinkers, and workers who have served as a foundation for my own work.
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I have tried to approach their work, and my research, with the following huge, glaring, red-alert, Danger Will Robinson questions.
- First, what is a wage, and how do we understand it in the labour we perform? How has this been changed in the contemporary gig/sharing/whatever economy?
- Second, how might our understanding of a wage become alienated or otherwise obfuscated from the labour which supposedly is what produces those wages?
- Thirdly, and most importantly, who is most at risk on these fragile financial models? How? Why? And how, in future, can we protect them?
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Now, the phrase “digital platform,” is likely old hat to us tech-savvy aficionados. But I’ve danced around the phrase, “lean platform” for a good while here, so let me clear some things up: a lean platform, crucially, is one which “attempts to reduce their ownership of assets to a minimum and to profit by reducing costs as much as possible.” A lean platform prioritises a model of growth before profit. Think Uber, AirBnB, YouTube… None of these platforms engage in the production of what they are famous for providing. It is, instead, provided by users, on-demand.
Now, on the one hand, this on-demand model offers ostensibly flexible work hours, a wealth of job opportunities, and the freedom to pursue remote work.
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For employers, labour and transaction costs are significantly reduced when hiring workers on a per-contract basis. On the other hand, this has the potential to lead to a commodification of unregulated labour. In the words of the CEO of CrowdFlower, a company which utilizes this model…
The worker in this labour model is only useful (and only employed) when producing a surplus value – what might be considered the ideal capitalist work scenario. In the perfect gig economy, no work goes unpaid and no nonwork is compensated.
The problem with the hyperbolic “ideal capitalist work scenario,” of course, lies in the historical relationship of unwaged labour in capitalism and the history of unpaid labour – which is closely tied with the wage. In her feminist reconsideration of housework as unwaged labour, Silvia Federici declares that:
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under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his or her relation to capital is totally mystified. The wage gives you the impression of the fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss each get what’s owed; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit.
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So let’s talk Twitch:
Twitch is owned by Amazon. I cannot even begin to unpack that here. Twitch also self-reports that there are 2,000,000+ broadcasts a month, and only 2,000 partnered streamers. And so, there is a very slim chance that anyone who has a Twitch account can even begin to imagine that they are a temporarily embarrassed Twitch Partner. Even for those who apply and are approved to become Twitch partners, a fewer number still can say that their revenue from Twitch pays them a living wage. Twitch does not make these numbers available to the public, or upon inquiry. And yet – Twitch puts this page on every streamer’s dashboard:
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The “Path to Partner,” is a series of achievements, given to every streamer regardless of whether or not they’ve applied to partnership. It is simply assumed to be something they want, and here is how they need to do it. In this way, it is understood that this is how one might succeed on Twitch.
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On Twitch, a “successful” streamer’s work schedule is not simply livestreaming: In addition to the eight-hour days in front of a webcam, streamers self-report additional planning, secretarial work, administrative work, chat room moderation, website maintenance, equipment maintenance, and fan relations. Even for those who maintain this diverse set of skill required to succeed on Twitch, income is a frustratingly opaque system – further obfuscated with microtransactions, on-platform currencies, fluctuating ad revenue systems (which must navigate both seasonality, time of day, views per day, and ad-blocking plugins), affiliate links, donations, merchandise sales and potentially, Patreon pledges. Not to mention all the various layers of nuance and internet grammar which accompany any and all of these revenue models.
Many streamers self-report a fraught relationship with income and their mental health simultaneously – feeling a sense of obligation to fans, and not wanting to feel like they are asking for money too overtly, lest their fans feel that they are ungrateful, or money-hungry.
So, how are streamers’ activities mediated through Twitch to generate the wealth they do accrue, and how this is compounded by affective labour – self presentation, chat and fan moderation, domestic labour, sexual labour – and especially that labour which comes from at-risk groups.
Because who is at risk here?
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Here are a sampling of streamers who I have looked at specifically for their larger audiences, affective relationships with fans and viewers, and the charged conversations which have carried on around them – what might otherwise be called “Twitch drama.”
From the top left and going clockwise, the streamers seen here are: Dr Disrespect and Ninja, Kaceytron, ZombiUnicorn, Zoie Burgher, OMGLove, Abigale Mendler, PewDiePie and Alinity. While they are a light smattering of nationalities, they are predominantly white and arguably, conventionally attractive. They are also, insofar as I am aware, cisgendered and heterosexual. They perform in ways which have been read as hypermasculine or hyperfeminine, and often in a way which has been read as sexually charged.
Or, perhaps more plainly, people have been made aware of their own sexuality by looking at some of these streamers, and got angry about it. Or, one of these streamers became aware of their own sexuality and they got angry at someone else about it.
All of them have also, at some point or another, made their primary source of income either from Twitch or other overlapping digital platforms which purport to be primarily focused on the livestreaming of video games. All of them, also, have been subject to questioning about the following:
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The Twitch Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. Now, the Twitch Terms of Service are RIFE – RIFE with affectively charged language. They implore their community, nay, their family to create the “best content” the world has ever seen, because it’s the streamers who make this community great. And this was seen most especially when Twitch updated their terms of service and community guidelines in February/March of this past year.
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As a brief aside, when looking at the blog post Twitch wrote to address the new community guidelines, we can see some pretty significant comingling of affect and labour here, while those streamers who literally are Twitch report having a wage so confusing and obfuscating, they aren’t quite sure what their income will be each month.
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You ARE Twitch. Yikes!
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The largest changes to Twitch’s ToCs were to deal with Nudity, Pornography, and other sexual content, with special consideration given to Nudity and Attire.
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Nudity and attire, Twitch claims, relates to the “public nature” of livestreaming. The way that you self-present, these guidelines suggest, determine how people were interpret your stream. They emphasise how people would interpret your clothing in “the real world.” They emphasise that you must wear clothing which would be contextually appropriate – fitness clothes for a workout stream, a swimsuit for the pool… But the bedroom – where many streamers perform – is left out of the conversation.
Other changes were to encourage cross-platform enforcement of these rules, so that streamers would be expected to uphold the values of Twitch on other digital platforms and social media sites, like YouTube or Twitter.
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These changes came to mixed reviews – especially those rules for sexual content and harassment. This is a conversation had on Reddit, that bastion of internet etiquette, following a Twitch town hall about the community guidelines change. Calling streamers “camgirls,” Twitch said, may (or may not) qualify as harassment on Twitch. I emphasise “may not” here, because there still remains a confusing system of reporting harassment on Twitch -- but the specific word, “camgirl” and its more weaponized counterpart, “camwhore” definitely qualifies as harassment on the Twitch subreddit. Which, while not officially affiliated with Twitch, enjoys a heavy overlap with the platform, and is moderated heavily.
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While we’re on the subject of camgirls, I would be remiss if I did not talk about camgirls. There is a heavy and prolific history of webcamming and sex work. “Camming” as a verb carries with it the connotation of performing sex work. Although, as Kacetron so eloquently puts it, everyone on Twitch is camming. Yet, As Twitch beats around the bush every year with moral-panics and crackdowns obsessed with their streamers’ attire, there are parallel crackdowns on digital platforms.
Four Chambers is an independent porn production company run by Vex Ashley. Vex has been very open about her recent frustrations with Patreon, a privately owned subscription service which allows creators all over the world to be directly supported by individuals. Unless, of course, they’re engaging in sex work. Or suggesting that they might be supporting sex work.
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And so, they have been asked not to be on Patreon anymore due to Patreon’s relationship with conservative banks and payment processing servers, like PayPal – which has also removed sex workers from their system, keeping them from being able to receive payment safely and securely.
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And they’ve been kicked off of Instagram, multiple times, due to Instagram’s unclear, uncommunicated, and conservative terms of service. Deplatforming sex workers in this way keeps them from achieving a safe and secure level of visibility which they control and offers them a level of agency and validity. It keeps sex workers from a legitimized income, because the platforms by which work is validated in contemporary contexts are privately owned, privately regulated.
People who turned to precarious labour models for any number of reasons: an economic recession left more traditional labour models no longer viable, or their identities are not in line with those who control or benefit from traditional labour models.
Those people are punished and exploited for their reliance on privately owned digital platforms which offered them that work in the first place.
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And how is it happening now? FOSTA/SESTA Y’ALL. FOSTA/SESTA is a piece of legislations which encourages platforms to eradicate purportedly sexual content, and makes platforms more liable for the content which users publish on those platforms. Oh, and it was passed just before PayPal, Patreon, and Twitch’s guidelines were also changed – with their increased focus on sexual content and cross-platform behaviour.
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So. What happens next? God, I don’t know. First of all, let camwhores play video games. Then, stop FOSTA/SESTA. Then, ask questions: ask these questions. And most importantly remember the following:
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Protect sex workers.