“The Always-Deferred Promise of Exposure”

Professor Brooke Erin Duffy on social media’s aspirational-labor economy.

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“Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

That’s the advice we get from pop stars, business leaders and commencement speakers. And it sounds great. We spend the bulk of our waking hours at our jobs—might as well devote that time to something that brings enjoyment and meaning.

But setting your sights on doing work you love means that you’re also competing with throngs of others seeking fun and fulfilling careers, and many of those people are willing and able to forgo compensation in pursuit of their passion projects.

This has always been a challenge for people working in the arts or for nonprofits that serve worthy causes. But now, the problem is no longer confined to people performing experimental music or serving the unhoused. Social media content creators are promoting the products of multinational corporations for little or no pay. This is what Cornell University Professor Brooke Erin Duffy calls “aspirational labor”—work performed in the hope of future payment—which she writes about in her fascinating book (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work.

Brooke was kind enough to talk to me about her research on aspirational labor, as well as her current research for her forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Visibility Bind: Creators and the Perils of Platform Labor. That book, drawn from several years of interviews with creators across the platform ecology, investigates the risks of being invisible—from shadow banning to economic exploitation—as well as the challenges of being too visible and subject to hate, harassment and surveillance.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Paid subscribers can listen to the full interview.

SE: What is aspirational labor?

BED: I offer the term to address the kinds of very productive activities that people engage in that are uncompensated, independent, and largely in anticipation of future work. I think of aspirational labor as the activities that many of us do in preparation for a dream job, one of these much-venerated positions where we can get paid to do the work that we love.

SE: What got you interested in this topic?

BED: I came to the topic from both an academic interest and a personal interest. Academically, when I first began researching the digital media economy back in 2009, 2010, I noticed that a lot of the academic writing framed the activities people were doing online in this kind of polarizing framework where it was either empowering—the idea that anyone could go on then-Twitter or online blogs and create content that they weren’t getting compensated for and seemingly have a voice and a way to talk back to the big power players, namely media.

Other academics were much more critical of this perspective and said, “No, the work that people are doing online when they’re not getting paid is exploitative, because people are essentially engaging in value-generating activities that advertising economies, media economies are benefiting from without compensation. It wasn’t until I actually started talking to people about their lived experiences that I realized that it was a portfolio-building exercise; people were engaging in activities that they thought would help them gain future employment. They started thinking about it in very strategic ways, the role of their self-brand. Today’s workforce is predicated on the notion that what you do on social media can get you fired, but it can also get you hired. I was really interested in capturing the lived experiences of what people were doing in ways that I didn’t think the academic literature was capturing at the time.

But there was also the personal element of it, where I saw the activities and the work and the labor that I had done, both in my pre-college days as an unpaid intern and much later in my years as a junior academic, mirroring the activities that people were doing online. And this very future-generated notion of the always-deferred promise of exposure.

SE: You were studying Instagram influencers, YouTubers and fashion bloggers. Were those the main people you covered?

BED: At the time, yes. This book came out in 2017, so I was doing the interviews from 2014 to 2016. But since then, I’ve done about 80 to 100 other interviews with social media workers, as part of my latest book project, and as part of some research interviews. The work that I’m doing now is a broad overview of the creator economy and includes everyone from influencers and content creators to live streamers and gamers to individuals who are engaged in online journalism or other independent categories of creative work.

SE: There has always been the aspirational labor of people hoping to be artists of some form—writers, musicians, etc. Is there something different about what’s happening now?

BED: Yes and no. What I appreciate about the question is the fact that you acknowledge that this has a much longer history, and I think there’s a tendency to fetishize the new and say, “This is completely novel and unprecedented.” But as you point out, many of these activities can be situated on a much longer cultural timeline. Think of unpaid internships; think of the spec work that people who have been trying to work in Hollywood or trying to publish a novel. There are a lot of precursors to aspirational labor. I see this as something that is very foundational to the cultural and creative industries.

But what’s different to me is the size and scale and the fact that it is being pitched so widely. I think if you went back in time, a few decades ago, people were doing unpaid labor as part of this, but it was a niche segment of people who actually saw this as a viable career outcome. Whereas now, we see all these very curious hybrids of jobs, where everyone is an influencer; everyone is a creator; everyone is expected to have a side hustle.

So I think part of this is reflective of the larger job economy and what people want from work. But I also think what’s different is the fact that platform companies are encouraging all of us to do this. Platform companies 10, 15 years ago were courting us as ordinary users because they wanted us to join their sites and enlist us so that we could provide data. But now I think the platform economy is so saturated that Meta, X and Snap are all getting in the creator game. These platform companies are hyping their own sites as this kind of entrepreneurial promised land that feels different to me than Hollywood where, yeah, there was a pipe dream that you could become the next big producer or actor or screenwriter. But Hollywood wasn’t necessarily telling all of us to join in and start writing.

SE: So they’re more interested in those big-ticket influencers and less in the rest of us, the people posting pictures of our dogs and babies, etc.?

BED: I think they’re interested in both. But they’ve reached a saturation point in encouraging new entrants to join their site. And so now, as a platform company, how do you remain competitive in this hyper-saturated moment where people are spending their time not just on two or three platforms, but across four, five and six? You encourage people to come who furnish a built-in audience.

So a few weeks ago, there was a lot of attention to Mr. Beast going over to X to see what sorts of income he could get. And the platform companies seem to be doubling down on the promises of the creator economy. If you go on Meta, they have a Meta for Creators program, and one of the first buttons is “Click here to learn how to get paid doing what you love and establish a community.” That to me feels like a very big shift. It reminds me of what happened about 20 years ago amid the writers’ strike in the TV industry—not the most recent one, but the one that was around the aughts. We saw the emergence of reality TV because the industry had to find ways to produce content that relied on unpaid labor.

And I feel like something similar is happening now where platform companies are in some ways being dethroned—or at least experiencing a lot of criticism and a lot of economic turmoil—and so they seem to be doubling down on hyping the promises of the creator economy for all of us.

SE: So it’s another way to get us more involved in these platforms: Become creators ourselves and think that we’re going to make an income from it.

BED: Exactly.

SE: Obviously, this is a huge business. These social media platforms are making a lot of money trying to continue to harness that talent for their profit. I was really intrigued in your book by the way that creators, female creators in particular, felt the need to say that what they were doing was just for fun. You use the term, “accidental entrepreneurship.” “I was just putting up these pictures of my friends and we were just goofing around and then I woke up and had a million Instagram followers!” Why do women feel like they have to say this, if it is just women? Why do they feel like they have to say it’s “just for fun?”

BED: It’s absolutely a gendered component, and it ties into the larger norms of decorum that unfortunately continue to structure the treatment of women in society and the economy. I think it is changing even since the book came out, but to be too strategic, to be too unabashedly in your pursuit of audiences is to defy the ideal of authenticity that this is all predicated upon. This notion of getting discovered suggests that you’re not performing—though of course, it’s a performance. The media and creative industries and celebrity industries have always been performance.

But this notion of “I was just doing what I loved. I was pursuing my passion and the audience followed” feeds into this larger mythos of a talent meritocracy, where those with raw talent and creative genius will find followers. If you post the best content, then the audiences will come. The reality is, there are so many barriers to success. It’s a hyper-saturated economy; those who succeed for the most part have either been doing it for years and years, or have some in, or else receive a viral bump and then are unable to sustain it. And there’s also a lot of strategy. There’s a huge emphasis on metrics and growing one’s audience in order to seduce more advertisers to work with you, diversifying one’s portfolio by maintaining a personal brand across different platforms, merch, podcasts. So it’s very entrepreneurial. It’s strategic, it’s calculated. But there’s still this projection of “I’m doing what I love. I’m just posting my daily life.”

But I do feel like the pandemic dispelled a lot of this myth because the performances of entrepreneurial femininity were displaced when all of a sudden we saw inside people’s messy, complicated lives. I’ve talked to so many people who have gone viral on TikTok saying, “I could not grow my audience on Instagram. I could not grow them on YouTube.” So TikTok is great for virality. But people have not been able to sustain it. So it’s quite a complicated media environment. And we have seen a shift in that creators—well-known creators, because I think you need to have a certain level of prestige within the business to be able to admit this—are saying, “Actually, this is hard work. This is leading to burnout and exhaustion, and the toll on my mental health is profound.” So there have been some shifts, but it’s from people who are in a privileged enough position to be able to call out the perils of this career.

SE: So part of the challenge is there are different ways to get attention, and they all work differently. And then they also change, right? People get into situations where they find that suddenly no one is seeing their posts anymore. How are people dealing with that?

BED: Yeah, it is such a huge challenge. Nearly all of the interviews I’ve done in recent years have dedicated a significant amount of time to thinking about the algorithms of these different platforms, because that plays a fundamental role in what gets seen or what doesn’t get seen and, subsequently, how much you are valued within this system. I’m thinking about the historical precursors to it. There’s always been a level of unpredictability in cultural content, right? You have a movie coming out, you have a book coming out, you don’t know what’s going to do well. You don’t know what else is at the box office that week. You don’t know what the competition is. You don’t know how audiences are going to respond to that unpredictability. It’s something that cultural workers have always had to reckon with.

But I argue that the level of volatility and instability hitched to these algorithmic systems is really unprecedented in a lot of ways because creators are forced to think about not just what the audience wants and what advertisers want but also what they think the platform wants. So, you’re thinking about appealing to the perceived expectations of the different social actors, which makes for a perfect storm of exhaustion and stress and so forth. The creators I’ve interviewed, both for the last book and for the new one, spend so much time thinking about to how to garner attention within this ecosystem. How can I play to the algorithm? And conversely, how can I make sure that my content doesn’t get seen by the quote-unquote wrong audience? I’m interviewing a lot of historically disadvantaged groups that range from creators of color to queer creators to creators in the disability space. And, on the one hand, they have to think about how to play to the algorithm, but also about ensuring that their content doesn’t end up being shown to hostile or antagonistic audiences.

SE: Are there audiences that actually look for stuff to hate? And look for stuff to amplify, because it’s what they want to take down?

BED: Yeah, absolutely. If you’re a feminist content creator you can imagine how labeling yourself or identifying yourself as such can be weaponized by the far right. So these very important identity-related hashtags, which are essential for ensuring that your content gets seen by the right audiences, can also become fodder for trolls or harassers. So it makes it very challenging. The book project I’m working on now is all about these fraught dynamics of visibility, because today’s job economy—and this goes beyond the creative industries—is so much predicated on being visible, drawing an audience, avoiding the algorithm that can render you invisible. But at the same time for certain groups, this makes you hyper-visible or visible to the wrong audiences.

SE: I want to get back to this idea of feeling like you shouldn’t say that you’re promoting products “for the money.” You mention Avon in your book. There is a long history of companies compelling women to sell products by telling their friends, “I’m just a woman telling you about something I love.” What is the role of the brands in this?

BED: They absolutely have and continue to encourage people to promote their products and brands among their social networks. And so much of my criticism in the Not Getting Paid book was directed at brands who were paying in this always-deferred promise of exposure—“tag your favorite household item,” or “tag the restaurant you’re at, and maybe we’ll send you a gift card.” The promise is that you can perhaps generate attention if you tag the brand or service in your content.

And I think it has only intensified. Now, it has almost become comical, the different scam accounts that are sending people DMs through Instagram, asking them to promote this or that company.

At the same time, what makes the system somewhat more complicated is there are top-tier creators who can absolutely set the terms and receive absolutely staggering amounts of money for posting. But most people—and I continue to see this in my interviews—say, “Yeah, brands reach out and ask me to do a promotion for them saying they’ll pay me in free product. And when I say, ‘Here’s my media kit,’ I don’t hear from them again.” There have been a few studies that have drawn attention to how often this kind of aspirational labor system on the part of brands disproportionately impacts women, especially women of color.

SE: The opposite of not getting paid to do work that you love is getting paid to do work that you don’t love. You mentioned, Steve Jobs’ famous speech about, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”¹ Do you think that’s still good advice? Or should there be at least some amendments or caveats to that?

BED: It has always been problematic advice. A book came out a few years ago by Miya Tokumitsu that argues that there are certain tiers of jobs that no one is going to love but that are essential to the functioning of our society and economy. We think about low-tier service jobs or careers that involve what historically was known as dirty work. These are careers that seem very hard for someone to love. So to love your job is a very privileged position. But when we set the bar for a good job as something that is pleasurable, what does that mean for nonwork time? Is this narrative of doing what you love essentially something that comes from the tech industry mantra of “make work fun so employees never want to leave the office”? And then, as we have seen in the past three or four years, there has been a lot of pushback and a lot of people saying, “Not only is my job unlovable, but it has crept into all hours of the day.” So I think we are at this very interesting moment in terms of finding meaning in our lives and what that means for the workplace. I wonder if even in a few years, this narrative will have perhaps disappeared or been supplanted by the realization that we should find love outside of the workplace because of all the shortcomings and failings that we’ve seen with the traditional work structures in recent years.

SE: I’m engaged in an act of aspirational labor at the moment, creating this Substack, and many of the people who will read this are, too. The theme of my newsletter is the ways that individuals confront systemic problems. So we’re creating our things and putting them out there in the world to try to drive our destinies. But of course, there are a lot of complexities that go along with that, as we’ve been talking about. Do you have any advice for us as we plow forward with our little individual projects?

BED: One of the most successful forms of challenging these structural inequalities is collectively based. As you just said, these are very individualized pursuits. Whether we’re talking about substantive journalism or influencing or academia, it runs on this kind of bootstrap narrative and encourages people to compete and pursue paths of their own making, and it thwarts the ethos of collective activism that the unions have often strived for. I think working to acknowledge the individualized notion without undercutting others. I’m thinking of f*** you pay me; it’s a crowd-sourced platform where influencers talk about how much they’re getting from different brands. It’s anonymous, but it’s a way for individual creators to say, “I’m making x amount of dollars from this brand, and you should be, too.” This isn’t necessarily a union. And this isn’t necessarily collective bargaining. But it does rely upon independent workers to be community-minded. I think that’s one valuable way to think about how to redress some of these structural inequities that seem endemic to so many entrepreneurial sectors.

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In the full interview, Brooke and I discuss her research on Get Off My Internets and the double standard that female creators face, the current pushback against overwork, and what the role of makeup in the Victorian era says about the fraught history of women and economic exchange. Paid subscribers can listen here.

Please tell me about your experiences with aspirational labor, on this platform or others.

GUEST BIO: Brooke Erin Duffy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she is also a member of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty.  Her research interests include digital and social media industries; gender, identity, and inequality; and the impact of new technologies on creative work and labor. She’s the author of two monographs on gender and cultural production, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017), which draws upon research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor. In addition, she is co-author of the newly released book Platforms & Cultural Production (Polity, 2021). She is currently at work on her forthcoming book, tentatively titled, The Visibility Bind: Creators and the Perils of Platform Labor.

1. Misquote from me. Marc Anthony said this. Steve Jobs said, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.”