This paper examines how Latin American third-party sellers internalize and manage risk in their work. Building on Neff’s (2012) concept of “venture labor,” we analyze the strategies and resources that 17 third-party sellers based in Chile employ to deal with risk on Mercado Libre, Latin America’s largest online marketplace. We situate this process of risk privatization within the broader context of recent transformations in labor markets associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our study shows that sellers internalize risk through three interconnected sets of strategies: financial, creative, and actuarial. We then consider the resources they draw on to build networks with other sellers and intermediaries to share knowledge about the platform and its algorithms. By examining venture labor dynamics in a Global South context, we offer new perspectives on risk privatization as a constitutive process of the platform economy.

With the rise of Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs), Chinese digital creative industries are no longer a realm of self-entrepreneurship but are dominated by professional service agencies and platforms. At the same time, the Chinese-style market economy and state-led platformization have spawned a unique platform ecology, shaping Chinese digital creative industries and labor subjectivity in its own unique way.

This study contributes to digital entrepreneurship in a non-Western context by exploring the characteristics and risks of Chinese digital laborers amid state-led platformization. Through a qualitative analysis of 203 recruitment advertisements of major MCNs in China, the finding reveals that Chinese digital laborers are trapped in a state/capitalist duopoly. On the surface, recruitment advertisements posted by MCNs create a low-threshold, flexible working environment. But in essence, they reflect the precarious working conditions of contemporary digital laborers under MCNs’ systematic business model. In a crude way, MCNs transformed digital entrepreneurs who previously relied on self-promotion into aesthetic laborers in front of the camera. At the same time, laborers behind the camera are a group of playful workaholics at great risk of being exploited for free. They are compelled to involuntarily internalize the pressures of hyper-productivity and undertake trivial emotional labor. Beyond the risks of the platformed digital economy, I argue that digital laborers of MCNs have become a form of state labor that is expected to contribute to national development agendas while embodying the national character that the state promotes.

This paper explores how high-skilled technology professionals navigate liminal and unequal experiences of migration and settlement on a question and answer website Expatriates Stack Exchange. It sees their place-making practices as complex, unequal, and shaped by political and societal factors, and yet endowed with a precarious cosmopolitan agency embodying an idea of moral openness, responsibility to distant others, and freedom of movement.

Focusing on narrative aspect of the communicative practices of information technology professionals, we identify the dominant themes in the discussion around the topic of migration and settlement by the members of Expatriates Stack Exchange to further consider power relations underlying these practices, and their connection to online performances of cosmopolitanism as an idea of freedom of movement, moral openness, and responsibility towards distant others.

To do so, we undertake a mixed-method analysis, incorporating a novel computational approach to interactive topic modelling, and a close reading of the identified topical clusters of interest. We identify such narrative tendencies as awareness of constrained mobility, "othering" of locals co-existing with cosmopolitan sensitivities, and prominence of masculine perspective.

This analysis will help us understand whether and how Expatriates Stack Exchange itself emerges as an unequal and restricted place, open for entry and engagement in practices of place-making for some but restricted for others. It will also offer insights into any potential possibilities digital spaces may have for transforming experiences of communities constrained in their transnational mobility.

Global technology startups have followed closely in Silicon Valley’s image, adopting and adapting its norms, values, and practices across oceans and continental divides. As a nascent, geographically distant, and tightly regulated sector, Australia holds the potential to develop into something different. This is particularly the case given Australia’s late emergence, maturing at a time of waning adulation for Silicon Valley and increased public scrutiny of the Valley’s culture and societal effects. Based on three years of ethnographic research (2019-2022) I show how, despite these conditions, prevailing cultural standards infuse and drive the Australian startup domain. This is anchored by a specific value-set—the failure-speed ethos. I delineate and illustrate the failure-speed ethos, trace its path through migration and institutional enculturation, and examine how the demands and costs of failure and speed distribute unevenly between positions within the startup ecosystem. Findings have implications for the nature of innovation work in a globalized society, the context of technological development, and the sociological processes by which culture spreads.

The subreddit r/Antiwork and the eponymous movement it launched has introduced phrases like ‘Quiet Quitting’ and ‘Act your Wage’ into the media lexicon and garnered the attention of businesses from Goldman Sachs to Kellogg’s for its threat to labor force participation. Heralded by some as the successor to #OccupyWallSt, Antiwork is the other side of the Great Resignation for those who cannot afford to leave their livelihood. Yet it differs from #OccupyWallSt in its scope, which critiques capitalism as a whole rather than money in politics; its scale, with 2.7M members globally on Reddit alone; its longevity, ongoing for ten years; and its varied demographics whereas Occupy protesters tended to be educated white men. As Occupy sought collective mobilizations at government buildings, Antiwork fosters individual, less public forms of resistance to capitalism. James Scott referred to such ‘infrapolitics’ as weapons of the weak, as the lack of capital of the oppressed in all its forms often precludes more direct forms of protest. In this paper, drawing from digital ethnography and interviews, I examine the potency of r/Antiwork for impacting workplace behaviors among community members who are managers in their professional lives. In doing so, I explore the possibility of a broader class consciousness with an historically unlikely ally that transcends the traditional Marxist proletariat-capitalist binary and portends greater efficacy for the American labor movement than in the past 50 years.