Vulgar livestreaming spectacle? Wanghong urbanism,digital platform and precarity in Laojie,Shenzhen

Abstract

This study examines how Wanghong urbanism, the mediated and circulatory digital-urban spectacle along with digital platforms, reconfigures public life and cultural practices through street livestreaming. In Shenzhen's Laojie Street, a huge number of livestreamers and spectators are drawn to and sustained by Wanghong imaginaries and the Douyin platform. Navigating between online and offline, public and private, bodily and digital, aspiration and precarity, streamers develop various performances of vulgarity as aesthetic practice and survival strategy. Through street and online ethnography, the study reveals how livestreamers resist, endure or utilize vulgarity under platform capitalism. The analysis demonstrates how digital workers, coping with algorithmic oppression and survival insecurity, degrade their bodies into symbols of vulgarity and become entangled in cycles of self-exploitative labor. This work advances Wanghong urbanism with vulgar aesthetics and precarity in everyday life by exposing the parasitic survival strategies enforced within platform economies.

Keywords

aesthetics China Douyin livestream labor platform precarity vulgarity Wanghong urbanism

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