Performative Productivity: Digital Self-Surveillance, Status Signaling, and the Commodification of Hustle Culture Among Remote Knowledge Workers

This new, normalized way of working remotely, since 2020, has created a unique social format: the self-surveiling worker who is constantly working for a dispersed audience, by means of several platforms at once. Using a methodology of forty semi-structured interviews with remote knowledge workers ranging in age from 25 to 40 from the Global North and West Africa, this paper proposes the notion of performative productivity: the need to publically and compulsively produce a sense of work effort as a mode of self-presentation of identity and the building of reputational capital. We claim that the spatialization of work/life has not erased surveillance, but has internalized it and made the worker the object and the agent of surveillance. These four dynamics – a visibility imperative, an anxiety–surveillance feedback loop, the commercialization of professional identity, and performative resistance that paradoxically serves as a reproduction of the very logics it challenges – have been uncovered through informed analysis of the themes in the interviews that emerged from this research. The results build on current theories of entrepreneurial self into the context of the particular architecture of remote digital platforms, with implications for labour policy, platform design, and the well-being of workers.