Online Fiction Writers, Labor, and Cultural Economy

Abstract

This paper explicates a new form of cultural economy, namely individual cultural economy, with the case of online writing platform. Critical studies of creative workers on online platforms have revealed the capitalist manipulation and exploitation in this new technologized cultural economy, and among those, online fiction writers are one of the fashionable occupations for slash youth in China. Based on survey and interviews, this paper elucidates why some youth in China chose to commit to taking online writing jobs, despite the precarious conditions. This paper argues that online fiction writers, besides deriving satisfaction and pleasure from their work, tag on are able to take advantage of the cultural logic of these capitalist-manipulated platforms, and create for themselves an individual, single person cultural economy between themselves and the platform. Different from the collective, organized cultural economy in most of the social networked platforms, such an individual economy encourages youth to create an alternative lifestyle from that of the mainstream socialist economy.