Thread by @katerhardy

"Hustling the Platform: Capitalist Experiments and Resistance in the Digital Sex Industry" by myself & Camille Barbagallo. Out now in South Atlantic Quarterly edited by @DrHeatherBerg

(Not yet OpenAccess, so a thread below. DM me for a copy) (1/8)

We argue for a clearer distinction to be upheld between 'online sex work' & 'digitally mediated direct sex work'. This is vital since direct in-person sex work differs in involving significantly greater physical & health risks & risk of criminalization (2/8)

Rather than viewing platforms as passive advertising sites, we propose they extract value from sex workers in multiple ways. Visible labor oversupply negatively impacts on safety; requirements to refresh content & respond to reviews intensifies & extends the working day (3/8)

The technological infrastructure of the platform is central to transforming clients' desire, changing their subjectivities through visibilizing and increasing the availability of certain services & "innovations" such as reverse bookings, which are simultaneously devalued (4/8)

Websites build up large platforms partly on the back of sex workers. In this way, sex workers have provided significant amounts of free labor to major Silicon Valley platforms, but their accounts are then deleted or shadow banned when it becomes commercially risky (5/8)

Many analyses of 'digital sex work' erase sex workers' agency. Like @drjonessoc we are pessimistic about the possibility for liberation via a simple shift to online work, but we find optimism elsewhere: in sex workers’ agency, their hacks, hustles & collective organizing (6/8)

Academic research on #platformwork & non-standard employment can be enriched by closer dialogue with accounts of the growing collectivization of sex workers, which offer the potential for understanding labor dissent, conflicts & power from the margins of the labor market (7/8)

The analysis here is really that of sex workers' themselves, we just wrote it up. Article inspired by tireless and inspiring work of sex worker organisers in @SexWorkHive @xtalkproject & across the world. Thanks to @LydiaCaradonna for her ever astute insights & analysis (8/8)