1. This essay stems from research funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation’s Dissertation Improvement Grant in Sociology (Award Number 1636662).
2. I report a range because YouTube’s “users” may not discuss their exact payment rates, less they violate the platform’s user agreement.
3. E.g., Tarleton Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘platforms,’” New Media & Society 12, no. 3 (May 1, 2010): 347–64.
4. E.g., Dallas Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3 (1977): 1–27; Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle, eds., The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2014).
5. See Trebor Scholz, ed., Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (Digital Labor: Routledge, 2013).
6. Michael Siciliano, “Control from on High: Cloud-Computing, Skill, and Acute Frustration among Analytics Workers in the Digital Publishing Industry,” Research in the Sociology of Work, Research in the Sociology of Work, 29, no. 1 (August 19, 2016): 125–53;
See also, Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger, “The Market as an Object of Attachment: Exploring Postsocial Relations in Financial Markets,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (April 1, 2000): 141–68.
7. Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).