“Are We All Porn Workers Now?”: Gigwork & Radical Flexibility with Heather Berg & Michelle Chihara

Resonate Recordings

This is the second episode of “The World’s Work,” a series on the “tiresome history, exasperating present, and potential futures of work,” as Matt Seybold put it in the first episode. To see the full lineup for this series, scroll to the bottom of this post.

Today’s episode focuses on gigwork, which has emerged at the dominant mode of labor under the regime of platform capitalism. But, as Seybold outlines in his intro, gigwork isn’t new, and it further proliferation is not inevitable.

To get a sense of why gigwork has reoriented U.S. labor relationships, Seybold speaks with two scholars who have been studying the experiences of workers in industries at the vanguard of the platform economy: porn and ridesharing. How did these industries get colonized by the platforms? And what can the workers in them teach us about how they make gigwork work for their interests?

Heather Berg is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, & Late Capitalism (UNC Press, 2021). In 2021, she also edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “Reading Sex Work.” (Twitter: @DrHeatherBerg)

Michelle Chihara is Associate Professor of English at Whittier College. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018) and the Economics & Finance Section Editor at Los Angeles Review of Books. Most recently, she has published a study of ridesharing in California – “Radical Flexibility: Driving For Lyft & The Future of Work in the Platform Economy” – in Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. Dr. Chihara has also appeared twice before on The American Vandal Podcast. (Twitter: @thisblueangel)

This season also includes special theme music, “Work Song” by Dan Reeder, courtesy of the artist and Oh Boy Records. Please check out Dan Reeder’s extraordinary catalog of music on Apple & Spotify. (Twitter: @DanReeder)

“The World’s Work” is hosted by Matt Seybold, who is executive produce of The American Vandal Podcast and resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. (Twitter: @MEASeybold)