Strip mining the intimate: Sex, platform urbanism, and rock & roll

Keywords: intimate, digital, platform urbanism, music, sex work, entrepreneurialism, neoliberalism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

Recently, scholars have explored how digital platforms reshape cities through platform urbanism (Fields, Bissell, and Macrorie 2020; Sadowski 2020; Leszczynski 2020). Further, there is the notion that social media spaces should be seen as spaces of public intimacy at multiple scales, from strangers hooking-up, to the movements of public collectives (Dobson, Robards, and Carah 2018). Instead of exploring how digital platforms unfold in the wider city, this paper turns inward. Engaging a relational view of digital intimacy (Barns 2020), the paper investigates how platform urbanism reshapes the intimate for two types of independent creatives: musicians and sex workers.

Through interviews with Russians and Americans who make money online through music and sex work, the paper traces how digital platforms have infiltrated not just the home and bedroom, but the very mind. This results in an “always on” mentality borne of the relentless need to generate content to feed audiences on an increasing diversity of platforms. For some, this represents artistic and financial freedom, but for others, the content production machine destroys authenticity, spontaneity, and well-being. To understand this, the paper advances the notion of strip mining the intimate, a process by which individuals transform themselves into entrepreneurs not unlike the industrialists who shatter landscapes to extract minerals. Unlike industrialists, however, these platform entrepreneurs capitalizing on their private lives. The paper delineates the features of intimate strip mining to shed light on new potentials and problems, as global digital platforms restructure some of the most intimate practices of daily life.