Platform labor, sachet economies, and the reintermediation of everyday transactions
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Speaker
Dr. Cheryll Ruth Soriano, Professor, Department of Communication, De La Salle University
Dr Cheryll Ruth Soriano, PhD is Professor in the Department of Communication, De La Salle University. Her research explores the embedding of labor platforms in local cultures and economies along with how platformization reshapes conditions for work and workers' organizing practices, particularly in majority world contexts. She is active in global, regional, and national research networks, including Fairwork (as Principal Investigator for the Philippines), Digital Transactions in Asia, and FutureWORKS Asia. Her books are Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube (with E. Cabalquinto, Amsterdam University Press) and Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (with S. Lim, Routledge). Cheryll is founding co-editor of the journal Platforms & Society and the book series, Power Currents: Asian Media in the World (University of Pittsburgh Press). She is visiting the NUS Department of Communications and New Media under the Isaac Manasseh Meyer Fellowship.
Abstract
This talk examines the cultural economy of everyday micro-transactions surrounding and sustaining platform labor, where the boundaries between production and consumption collapse, and labor, FinTech, and social platforms converge. Drawn from research on work and life in the platform-based ride-hailing and delivery sectors in the Philippines, I propose sachet capitalism as lens to analyze capital accumulation in the platform era, exploring three points: first, that labor platformization digitizes and legitimizes familiar sachet economies, rendering gig work culturally legible and materially viable; second, that sachet transactions act as key sites of capitalization, sustaining and being sustained by platform labor; and third, that these socio-technical relations oscillate between care and extraction. Ultimately, the ambitions of big tech is built on and maintained by countless micro-exchanges grounded in the transactional cultures and agential practices of marginal populations.
