Abstract

Once a peripheral phenomenon on the Web, sexcam platforms have been gaining social and economic importance, attracting millions of visitors every day. Crucial to this popularity is the technical and economic model that some of those sites use. Sexcam platforms combine the practices of labor and user-generated platforms. As platforms, they mediate between users and providers, becoming the field where those operations occur. Sexcam platforms, however, are more than intermediaries, and their structures incorporate and reproduce discriminatory conventions.

Sexcams in a Dollhouse: Social Reproduction and the Platform Economy is a research-creation project exploring digital labor through the American sexcam platform Chaturbate.com. Rather than treating this platform as an exception, this project invites the consideration of Chaturbate as a paradigmatic instance of work in the context of platform capitalism. Sexcam platforms, this research argues, illustrate recent changes in the notions of what is work and what is leisure, what generates value, or the shifting nature of social relations through social media.

Using a made-up dollhouse as an interface and stage, this project set up a series of performative interventions on the sexcam platform. Through humorous yet critical play, these pieces asked about the situation of social reproduction on the platform economy, the role of maintenance practices in the generation of value, and the incorporation of new technological infrastructures into daily life.