CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Kozak, Dmytro |
|---|---|
| Title | Spatializing Digital Economy: TikTok Houses as Agents of Labor Reterritorialization |
| Summary | In the academic literature, data is widely recognized as the crucial element in theorizing the operations of digital capitalism, while digital labor itself is mostly considered deterritorialized and space contingent. However, this vision places the production process exclusively within the realm of the digital, undermining the importance of space within which such production occurs. In the thesis, drawing on Ukrainian TikTok houses, I show that even in the digital economy the physical place can never be transcended. In fact, TikTok houses provided a strong case to argue for the reterritorialization of digital work, put at the very forefront of current capitalist development. First, I explored how the economic, political, and spatial particularities of a certain locality condition the workings of allegedly space-detached digital immaterial labor. Then I described how the digital labor of influencers came to be shaped by the positionality of a worker within the house, the positionality of a house within the cultural market, and the position of that market in relation to foreign markets. Reintroducing a somewhat outdated notion of a “workplace,” allowed me to unravel the organization, maintenance, and control over the digital production within the houses, while an empirically informed analysis of it revealed that site-specific productive norms, schedules, and systems of control were developed and deployed. Concluding chapter of the thesis stressed the high sensitivity of organized and re-centralized digital labor to the local conditions that structure it. The story of TikTok houses clearly testifies that digital capitalism needs the very material infrastructural base that sustains and reproduces it. This angle tends to be overshadowed by the prevalent framework which privileges the immateriality of deterritorialized labor. However, by shifting the perspective, I was able to show that the place still matters fundamentally and the rise of TikTok houses — i.e., facilities which reconcentrate previously disseminated workforce for accelerated immaterial labor — reflects the tendency towards the reterritorialization of labor. |
| Supervisor | Sopranzetti, Claudio; Kowalski, Alexandra |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/kozak_dmytro.pdf |
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