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

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.