Event Description
Since the reform era, Chinese capitalism has remade women's labor in its own image. The socialist factory demanded their bodies on the assembly line. The post-reform service economy demanded their affects at the counter. Now, platform capitalism demands something new: their faces, voices, and personalities—rendered into data and optimized in real time. This event examines this transformation through China's trillion-dollar live-commerce industry—the global frontier of platform-mediated selling and the largest employer of women in China's digital economy. Behind the glamorous "influencer" label is a vast workforce of 38 million streamers, the majority earning minimum wage while algorithmic systems govern their every move. Jun Zhou opens the black box of metrics. She shows that power has shifted—from the physical discipline of the factory floor, from the managerial gaze of the service counter—into platform infrastructure itself. This event examines how data-driven measurement systems produce new forms of labor stratification, with implications for class formation and social reproduction under digital capitalism.
Event Speaker
Jun Zhou, graduate student in sociology at the University of Michigan
Event Information
Open to Columbia University ID holders; registration required. To receive the Zoom link, please email Yanze Yu at [email protected].
Hosted by the China Reading and Innovation Lab at Columbia University. This event is supported by a Center for Science and Society Graduate Student Interest Group Grant.
