The Nested Precarities of Platformized Creative Labor

While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of visibility—likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares—are indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers’ pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators—including Instagrammers, YouTubers, TikTok creators, and those seeking monetization through Pinterest and Twitter—we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with—and departures from—the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, most especially the guiding logic of platform capitalism.