Lumpen utopia: money, livestreaming, and labor in emerging media worlds

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hengdian – China’s largest film and television studio—this article engages with recent scholarship regarding converging media and payment platforms. Thousands of unemployed people travel to Hengdian to find work as background actors in the production of historical dramas. But low wages lead many to seek monetized gifts by livestreaming as broke hengpiao, or Hengdian drifters, who encourage their audience to send them gifts and move to Hengdian to work in an alternative to waged-labor. Hengpiao construct alternative experiences of work through the animation of generic historical and livestreaming characters in exchange for payment. This alternative arises from performances, payments for activity, and gift exchanges that create contrasting chronotopes of labor, or mediated conceptions of time, space, and personhood entailed by payments for work. I describe the way these experiences are constructed and monetized in relation to revenue generation schemes that fuel the expansion of the platform economy. I argue that producing experiences of place, personhood, and class plays an important role in both creating payments that generate revenue for livestreaming platforms and forming the subjectivities of those who produce the platform economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• China
• media
• payment
• labor

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Lily Chumley and Yijie Zou for commenting on multiple versions of this article. Thanks to Faye Ginsburg, Angela Zito, Bruce Grant and Erica Robles-Anderson for very useful comments on a late draft, and thanks to Amy Zhang and Fred Myers for important feedback on earlier drafts. Two anonymous reviewers provided valuable comments on an earlier submission. This work was supported by the Association for Asian Studies' CIAC Small Grant and NYU's Andrew Sauter Fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A clip from my film can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/user127158331/hengpiao

2 Twitch introduced their own platform currency (‘Twitch Bits’) to circumvent other payment platforms and charge a thirty percent interchange fee on all donations made using Bits (Johnson and Woodcock 2019).

3 See Naughton (1995) for a detailed economic history.

4 The CCP describes this process as ‘lifting people out of poverty’ (脱贫 tuopin).

5 Subdivisions of background actors: qunzhong (background actor) teyue (‘role’ background actors with abilities like performing physical comedy), texing (‘special characteristic,’ for those who seem ‘fat,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘tall,’ ‘skinny,’ or ‘old’), and qianjing (foreground actor).

6 Bourgeois intellectuals peddling ideological naturalizations of capitalist relations repulsed Marx (see Marx [1873]1992 for a criticism of political economists who celebrate Robinson Crusoe). But he wrote that it is ‘quite natural that the actual agents of production feel at home [in these conceptualizations], for these are the configurations of appearance in which they move [and are] daily involved.’ (Marx [1894]1993, p. 969).

7 See Anagnost (2006).

8 Clashing chronotopes of labor: a lack of work ethic is a sign associated with both carefree hengpiao and failed nongmingong.

9 Guo told me he usually makes less than 300 RMB a day from streaming.

10 Popular folk songs like ‘Dagong ku, dagong lei’ are less celebratory: ‘Dagong is bitter exhaustion / Containing tears I can’t describe’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by New York University: [Grant Number Andrew Sauter Fellowship]; Association of Asian Studies: [Grant Number China and Inner Asia Council Small Grant].

Notes on contributors

Shayan Momin

Shayan Momin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University.