Platform Workshippers

Platform Workshippers is a research-based project that maps the blurred boundaries between labor, control, and visibility within centralized social media platforms. It explores how users become both subjects and agents of participatory control, blurring the line between peer interaction and systemic surveillance, engaging in invisible forms of free labor while navigating the tension between exposure and self-preservation.

Platform Workshippers merges the compass diagram, a critical tool for mapping user positions, with the mystic Tree of Life, reimagined as a cosmology of the digital world structure and the users' souls. Through a selection of “Workshippers” archetypes, this hybrid symbolic system reflects the ritualized and mystified structure of platform labor, revealing how the pursuit of attention, influence, and monetization often mirrors acts of esoteric devotion.

The neologism Workshippers, a fusion of “worship” and “work”, highlights the emotional and spiritual dimensions of digital labor, where personal life becomes indistinguishable from productivity, and the self is continually offered up to the algorithm in a cycle of exploitative rituals.

Platform Workshippers was developed within the framework of the AMRO Research Lab 2023, organized by servus.at.