Platform Capitalism and (Sex) Worker Cooperatives: Digital Sex Work in the Contemporary Platform Economy

Introduction

Adopted in 2022, the European Union's Digital Services Act was intended “to create a safer and more open digital space for users and businesses” (Directorate-General for Communication, 2022), holding all online intermediaries or anyone who offers a service that distributes information—including e-commerce marketplaces, social media networks, and search engines—accountable for identifying and handling harmful or illegal content or services. Particularly, those designated as “very large online platforms” (reaching 45 million users, or approximately 10% of the Union's population) are required to conduct risk assessments, implement measures to mitigate systemic risk, appoint compliance officers, allow external audits, and provide access to their data in cooperation with the European Board for Digital Services. Serving among the largest global media audiences (Transparent Market Research staff, 2025), many of the major platforms of the adult entertainment industry fall into this category, necessitating changes in platform governance that would reverberate across the world.

Most prominently, in accordance with these sprawling changes in international legislation, Pornhub—the most visited adult entertainment platform in the world (Ceci, 2025)—revised its compliance standards to provide creators with “a streamlined experience that is more in line with processes they may be familiar with on other content monetization platforms” (Turner, 2024b). In practice, these changes in compliance standards resulted in smaller creators—often outside of the bounds of heteronormative expressions of sexuality—buckling under the weight of the platform's heightened moderation (Gorissen, 2024b), eroding creators’ trust and disrupting audiences’ engagement with content created by anyone not representative of the pornographic mainstream; disrupting their consumption of content from further margins of the adult entertainment industry.

While the Pornhub platform's response to the European Union's Digital Services Act serves as a fascinating case study exploring the international legislation of sexual content creation and consumption, it similarly serves as a lens through which we can trace, contextualize, and critique the contentious relationships among capitalist platform corporations, (marginalized) laborers, and the forms of legislation and moderation challenging (sex) work on the internet. By extension, as persistence in platform capitalist systems is undermined by corporate and legislative (over)regulation, sex workers’ movements of negotiation, organization, and survival may well serve as a canary in the coalmine that is content creation on the contemporary internet. The Digital Services Act, thus, does not solely serve as background context; rather, this legislation serves as a pivotal institutional variable affecting life and labor on the internet.

The online platform economy has fostered a ceaseless, on-demand global marketplace, promising increased levels of productivity, innovation, sustainability, and growth. Ushering in novel forms of algorithmic control (Kampouri, 2022), these labor platforms typically favor customers over laborers, reinforcing unequal power relations (Hunt & Machingura, 2016). Platforms’ affordances are foundational to the constitution of their labor cultures and, thus, are essential to understanding the contemporary processes of platform work. Often, laborers negotiate and subvert platform constraints to achieve their personal, social, and professional goals, and “researchers in this field must pay close attention to the cultural and relational aspects of affordances to fully understand their significance in the platform labour context” (Vilasís-Pamos et al., 2023, p. 415). The deregulation of labor relations and the erosive individualization of social protections have weakened the power of workers, amplifying labor competition and ushering in novel forms of exploitation. This has resulted in workers’ decreased physical and mental health. Always already existing at further, intersectional reaches of marginalization, sex workers are faced with compounded precaritization due to the Digital Services Act.

It is, thus, not difficult to understand why certain workers may feel their needs are not being met by labor platforms: “platform capitalism removes any accountable mediator between capital and labor: there is no management to petition, no corporate structure to organize against, just the platform with its built-in discipline of user ratings and a contingent labor pool fathoms deep” (Hoover, 2016, p. 110). To mitigate the negative implications of the platform economy—“a digital version of capitalism built upon online platforms to facilitate the commercialization of goods and services for the purpose of profit maximization” (Papadimitropoulos, 2021, p. 246)—workers’ rights groups have worked to formulate legislations and impose regulations on technology companies contracting freelance labor, encourage peer production outside of these platform markets. Emerging as an alternative, platform cooperatives—“where the platform is owned by the stakeholders or workers of the given platform, shifting away from the current extractive practices and business model of tech companies and the gig economy” (Beer, 2022)—promise the alignment across workers’ needs, managerial imperatives, and distributed markets, while centering labor benefits as their reason for being. Labor cooperatives, thus, promise domestic workers access to economies of scale, voice, and representation amid hostile legislative changes, formalizing their labor relations and ensuring their labor rights and security (Scholz, 2016a).

The concurrent movements of corporate capitalism and worker cooperativism are vying for laborers’ support, working to reconcile the platforms’ growth imperatives with increasingly hostile (international) legislation and content moderation like the Digital Services Act. This finds workers—particularly, sex workers—at a crossroads, encouraged to choose between two potential futures; a choice which may well impact the broader futures of content creation and precarious labor on the internet.

Research Question

The digital economy cannot be reduced to simple sectoral analysis. Recent platform labor scholarship has explored how the platformization of labor is changing work activities, processes, and organizing, as well as the identities and collectivities of laborers (Poell et al., 2022; Van Doorn et al., 2023). While scholars have touched on the interrelationships of (social) media and communication in platform labor (Woodcock & Graham, 2020), there is still much to be researched around these networks; scholarship on platform capitalism has long emphasized the politics of emerging technologies, the inhumanity of venture capital, or individual digital labor case studies, yet most studies have struggled to “[recognize] the diversity of economic forms and the competitive tensions inherent in the contemporary economy” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 9). This study takes such a higher-level perspective, tracing the repercussions of intersecting international legislation, capitalist imperatives, and marginalized laborers’ movements of resistance.

Although platforms’ increasing of labor market efficiencies has been proposed to create more widespread employment opportunities in the form of micro-entrepreneurialism (Sundararajan, 2016), critics have dismissed these “micro-entrepreneurs” as a “new precariat” subject to risks of exploitation and precarity as a restructuring of labor relations shifts risks from employers to employees (Kuttner, 2013). As anticipatory compliance with the European Union's Digital Services Act saw the adoption of practices that shifted risks from adult entertainment platforms to sex workers, we are similarly seeing resistance from within and outside of the adult platform economy; some content creators are seeking to pacify the algorithms, as others are launching cooperative alternatives. The Digital Services Act, thus, actively works to tighten policies and intensify labor exploitation by compelling platforms—in self-preservation—to cascade compliance burdens downward. As an institutional variable, this legislation exacerbates reactive maneuvers by (labor) platforms confronted with concerted countermovement, affecting content moderation, governance architectures, and broader digital economies.

Aspiring to create an alternative to capitalist platforms without rigorous study is unrealistic, however, as the cooperative model in the United States “has been faced with many challenges, including competition with multinational corporate giants, public awareness, self-exploitation, and the network effect” (Scholz, 2016b, p. 25). The value of analyzing the movement of platform cooperativism is, thus, derived not necessarily from the size of these platforms, but rather from their potential for prefigurative politics regarding the organization of work, the development of technologies, and novel ways of survival in a capitalist (platform) economy. The relatively limited research attention given to platform cooperatives continues to hinder our understanding of their social benefits and values (Zhu & Marjanovic, 2021), and much existing scholarship in the area has been descriptive, rather than critical, in exploring the tensions at the heart of cooperative platforms’ operation and governance. Capitalist systems—and the monopolies and oligopolies they encourage—constrain the operation of cooperatives by determining the market prices of goods and services as well as their cost of production (Sandoval, 2016). While cooperatives’ engagement of their workers sets them apart from their capitalist counterparts, “there is a lack of in-depth studies into how platform cooperatives impact workers’ attitude. We need to look into how workers are affected because the worker is central to how a cooperative functions” (Saner et al., 2019, p. 5). Indeed, there is a dearth of research focusing on how regulatory environments are enacted, obstructed, or distorted through (capitalist or cooperative) platform operations, and platform cooperatives remain a nascent, underexamined phenomenon. Scholarship on platform cooperativism is lacking direct comparisons of cooperatives alongside their capitalist counterparts.

To this end, this article studies emerging capitalist and cooperative platforms announced in the wake of the adoption of the European Union's Digital Services Act, regardless of their long-term commercial viability, based on the solutions they promise to provide to the concerns characteristic of the contemporary platform economy. This study, thus, works to illuminate how laborers within platform environments are expected to meet the obligations imposed by the legislation and how capitalist or cooperative platforms variously position themselves as providing evasion or exemption from compliance. I begin by charting platform monopolies’ emancipatory promises, recognizing two competing responses to the externalization of risks characteristic of contemporary adult entertainment platforms: the embrace of platform capitalism and the call for platform cooperativism. I work to answer the primary research question at the heart of this study: How are corporate adult entertainment initiatives and sex worker cooperatives positioned to address the increased precaritization of adult content creators in the contemporary platform economy's global regulatory ecology, and how do these divergent promises indicate distinct futures for digital media production and distribution?

Methodology

To come to a closer understanding of the ways in which adult entertainment industry news coverage situated these novel platforms, websites, and services within their (inter)national legislative, social, and cultural contexts, this study is rooted in a critical discourse analysis of the adult industry news coverage of all novel adult content platforms, websites, and services, launched between the October 19, 2022 adoption of the European Union's Digital Services Act and December 31 of 2024. Critical discourse analysis posits the production, consumption, and interpretation of texts and images as a social practice foundational to the creation and understanding of our world (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002), recognizing the political, bilateral relationship between discourses and social structures in creating, supporting, or subverting power dynamics (Gee, 2011). Analyzing the linguistic, semiotic structures of the news coverage of these promised labor innovations, this study examines the power relations constituting—and constituted by—these discursive framings (Van Dijk, 1993).

Two of the largest-circulation news outlets in the contemporary adult entertainment industry served as the basis of analysis: Adult Video News (AVN) and XBIZ. The AVN articles were obtained from the news outlet's online archive, which, from October 19, 2022 to December 31, 2024, published approximately 125 reports, editorials, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor that detailed newly launched adult entertainment platforms, websites, and services. XBIZ published approximately 100 articles that mentioned such endeavors during the same timeframe. Newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor were included in the sample (Loker, 2018), as were the media artifacts they reference, such as social media posts and press releases. Most of these articles focused on specific corporations’ or individual's efforts, yet some focused on broader trends in the adult industry. Since novel platforms, websites, and services are the focus of this study, only articles that mentioned these endeavors in more than a passing reference were included in the analysis. The analytical procedure consisted of the systematic coding of rhetorical constructs—including the lexical choices and tonality of news articles—exposing platforms’ underlying ideologies, emphasizing the differing development trajectories of capitalist and cooperative models. Particularly, news coverage was categorized according to the rhetorical construction of the (promised) labor relations and compliance practices afforded by these novel initiatives, with particular analytical attention paid to the various discursive constructions of worker agency, content moderation, and legislative precarity in the texts.

Next, I will problematize platform monopolies’ emancipatory promises by outlining the precarity of gig labor in digital environments defined by surveillance and behavioral control. I recognize two competing responses to the externalization of risks characteristic of contemporary adult entertainment platforms: the embrace of platform capitalism and the call for platform cooperativism. The platforms, websites, and services launched in the wake of the adoption of the Digital Services Act respond—explicitly or implicitly—to the changing realities of (sex) work on the internet.

Platform Capitalism and the Gig Economy

While the prospect of disintermediation was foundational to the emancipatory promises of the World Wide Web, the internet was colonized by capitalist platforms following its evolution into its “Web 2.0” iteration around the turn of the century (Codagnone et al., 2019). Proponents heralded the emergence of platform capitalism as a natural transition toward greater autonomy, deregulation, and market flexibility (Pasquale, 2017), in which independent contractors can achieve and sustain improved labor freedom and a more balanced private life. As capitalist platforms function as intermediary matchmakers in multisided markets, “[extrapolating] value creation and exchange primarily by enabling direct interactions between two or more customer or participant groups” (Papadimitropoulos, 2021, p. 249), these platforms expand the monetization of goods and services by orchestrating a network of producers and consumers to foreground ecosystem value over customer value (Van Alstyne et al., 2016). Open, decentralized services are being replaced by private, venture capital-backed platforms: “companies whose power and wealth relies on stocks or flows of information, which control either the extensive vector over space or the intensive vector of an archive of commodified information – so-called intellectual property” (Wark, 2016, p. 45). These vectoralist corporations control brands and the networks and infrastructures along which their content is broadcast. As capitalist platforms’ value is intrinsically connected to their ubiquity in their users’ lives, this fundamentally rewards monopolistic tendencies.

Rather than providing workers with the tools to develop into (micro)entrepreneurs, platform laborers are more likely to bear the burdens of capitalist risk without a guaranteed minimum wage, social benefits, or insurance (Newlands et al., 2016). For its detractors, platform capitalism becomes “a technologically advanced form of exploitation, in most cases resulting in a ‘race to the bottom’ with regard to wages and living standards” (Papadimitropoulos, 2021, p. 251). Caught in this spiral, platform laborers’ “off-the-job time becomes a marketing playground that serves the reproduction of commodities. Everything, from leisure, play, and friendship to love and sexuality, becomes a twenty-four-hour commodity market” (p. 252). Consequently, “the less we have a choice about whether to use them, the more we need democracy to step in” (Schneider, 2016, p. 18). As “flexibility for one can be uncertainty for someone else and different platforms may have different time management practices of their own, which can further influence workers’ flexibility” (Anwar & Graham, 2020, p. 241), labor platforms’ promises of autonomy and flexibility cannot be uncritically trusted.

Affecting the level, income, and quality of employment for workers within and outside of the on-demand economy due to labor platforms’ competitive advantages, the overall impact of these platforms on labor cannot be reduced to digital realms alone. While many workers are drawn to labor platforms’ promised short-term benefits, including flexible employment and swift payment, their negative implications are less understood. Platforms, here, function as “[environments] in which extractive or cooperative intermediaries offer their services or content” (Scholz, 2016a, p. 14). Platforms promise creators visibility, yet contributors often face threats of invisibility in their everyday work due to conflicting relationships with platform governance and fears of being blocked or deplatformed (Gorissen, 2023). Workers across capitalist labor platforms have reported incessant workplace surveillance and wage theft, problematizing these platforms’ emancipatory promises.

In a venture capital-backed internet, platform owners are encouraged to pursue user lock-in: “since information technology products work in systems, switching any single product can cost users dearly. The lock-in that results from such switching costs confers a huge competitive advantage” (Shapiro & Varian, 1999, p. 299). Historically, workers in precarious labor positions have relied on their professional reputation to get new jobs: “the difference in the on-demand economy is that workers don’t own their reputations” (Sipp, 2016, p. 59). Workers, generally, lack the ability to transfer their accrued standing: “if Uber drivers want to change platforms and start delivering packages for Instacart, they have to start from scratch to build up a good reputation on the new site – even though they are using skills that are valuable to both sites” (p. 60). Subjection to rating systems amplifies workers’ subordination to the platform algorithms in which they operate, undermining the promise that the flexibility of the platform model facilitates greater levels of autonomy for workers (Bustelo et al., 2019). This arbitrariness amplifies the precarity of gig labor. Due to network effects, platforms evolve toward monopolization: the more users interact with a platform, the more valuable the entire platform becomes for each user.

The competitive dynamics of data extraction and the generation of network effects resulted in certain tendencies that would spread across our broader economic system: “expansion of extraction, positioning as a gatekeeper, convergence of markets, and enclosure of ecosystems” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 58). Historically, “[most] peasants tugged the forelock and did what they were told, silently cursing the lord under their breath. Most workers settled for some job security and a weekend” (Wark, 2016, p. 46). In the platform economy, job security comes at the cost of a weekend. Monitoring users’ experiences and workers’ activities, the “algorithmic panopticons” presented by labor platforms foreground the continuous surveillance and control of workers, deepening heteronomy, subordination, and social inequities rather than delivering their promised autonomy (Köhler, 2020).

Proponents of the platform economy argue that these forms of labor provide marginalized workers flexible, autonomous, and creative stepping stones toward better employment or entrepreneurship, ushering in an online, flat world meritocracy boosting labor markets’ efficiencies (Codagnone et al., 2019). Their detractors see these markets as amplifying precarity, exploitation, and deprivation of workers’ labor rights and protections. Arguing that the piecemeal tasks traded on these markets devalue labor and come to supplant full-time jobs, opponents of the platform economy recognize a new class of networked precariat working under steadily eroding labor contracts (J. Berg, 2016). As media and cultural workers are increasingly faced with labor outsourcing and normalized flexibilization, freelance work is becoming an imposition dictated by markets, rather than an agentic choice (Cohen, 2012). Leading to greater uncertainty, an accumulation of functions, and changes in required skills (Fígaro et al., 2014), these developments have required more and more creative workers to become entrepreneurs (Cohen, 2015); to become an “entreprecariat” (Lorusso, 2019). The externalization of risks through laborers’ expected economic dependency on their platforms without enjoying the protections and benefits of employment has made workers’ income, labor autonomy, and scheduling even more precarious. The complexity of the framework that makes up platform work is, thus, intrinsically related to contemporary capitalist economic systems, intertwined with the communication, consumption, and sociological behavior patterns characteristic of these new forms of work (Van Dijck et al., 2018); forms of work diluting workers’ rights and worsening workers’ labor conditions (Poell et al., 2022).

Unsurprisingly, the precarity of gig labor in these digital environments defined by surveillance and behavioral control is exacerbated for those laborers located at intersectional margins. Sex workers, in particular, shoulder increasing amounts of externalized risks amid worsening legal and social ostracization across the contemporary internet. The moderation of risqué content has long affected adult content creators (Chapkis, 1997). While their labor may yield economic success (and the capitalist status that entails), most media representations of the field—and the corporate and governmental legislations that govern it—reify reductive, sex-negative representations of sex work; indeed, the labor of pornographic performers functions as “a microcosm of the tension so many workers have found in the transition to late capitalism: we flee traditional employment in search of more autonomy but find that work that looks less like work can be all consuming” (Berg, 2021, p. 127). If “economic security is the precondition for the possibility of pleasure and a modicum of sexual agency” (Walters, 2016, p. 8), “one is rarely off the clock from the labors of self-making” (Berg, 2021, pp. 132–133). Labor invariably bleeds into life for adult entertainers wishing to reproduce themselves as workers. However, operating as a flexible and itinerant workforce bereft of basic benefits and protections, sex workers’ expectation to describe their work as a personal identity, as a form of self-expression, or as an altruistic social responsibility is unrealistic, reductive, and serving only to extract more labor power from these workers (H. Berg, 2016). Answering the call to move “toward a more nuanced and grounded assessment of the negotiations of sexual subjectivity in worlds not conducive to it” (Walters, 2016, p. 9), this study explores the structural, institutional barriers to sex workers’ life and labor on the internet and the initiatives launched with promises of thriving in, or sidestepping entirely, the resultant rat race.

The commercial platformization of the adult entertainment industry both democratized the means of pornographic distribution—platforming amateur expressions of (nonheteronormative) sexuality heretofore underrepresented in the adult studio system (Paasonen, 2010)—yet centralizing power within capitalist corporations providing direct-to-consumer platforms (Gorissen, 2024b). Gifting platform YouPay's 2024 Spring Creator Survey, including over 200 responses from creators in 23 countries, highlights the ways in which “the creator economy is shifting and evolving rapidly; however, what's clear in all of our engagement with creators is that privacy, security and professionally run platforms are key to gaining trust for both creators and their fans” (in Parkman, 2024h). In the contemporary platform landscape of adult entertainment, this evolution is characterized by the ubiquity—and dominance—of major emergent monopolies, such as the MindGeek consortium of streaming sites and the direct-to-consumer platform OnlyFans (Gorissen, 2024a). Novel adult ventures may be recognized as a response to these emerging monopolies.

To win content creators’ allegiances, many recently launched platforms, websites, and services promise their users novel ways to capitalize upon—and stay ahead in—the contemporary corporate landscape of digital adult entertainment. For example, the FansCity platform foregrounds creators’ collaborations across major platforms with other performers, offering a comprehensive, centralized solution for distributing their content (Warren, 2024c). ¹ These centralizing platforms, thus, promise creators that their fealty to major corporations is the most reliable way to earn a living, limiting their entrepreneurial agency in exchange for the consistency of a wider audience. Emerging corporations justify their surveillance and governance of users (and their created content) by positing their efforts as shielding their communities from regulatory or legislative interference. Speaking to OnlyFans tackling compliance with the United Kingdom's new Online Safety Act, CEO Blair recognizes the “constantly moving landscape” of online safety: “we’re already being regulated by Ofcom under the video-sharing platform (VSP) regulation. That means we’ve got a jump-start on, frankly, a lot of other people, because we’ve already got a 100 per cent verified creator and user base and we’re already an over-18s platform” (Turner, 2024a). Similarly, seeking to provide “cutting-edge security measures and unwavering commitment to regulatory compliance” (Warren, 2024h), new creator platform Real Adult Fans identifies and moderates potentially problematic content and transactions to stay ahead of governmental and payment procedural regulatory (over)reach.

To negotiate capitalist platforms’ governance and the payment processing discrimination to which adult content creators are subjected, for example, sex workers’ efforts to sustain their careers in an often-hostile platform economy have seen them embrace many of the promises made by sundry blockchain applications, including cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens. Certain performers launched their own crypto token, such as Chloe Amour's $AMOUR (AVN staff, 2024b), and CatHouse, an adult entertainment “metaverse nightclub and live events venue” (AVN staff, 2024c), launched its own meme coin cryptocurrency, CatHouse (CAT). ² Functioning as a pornographic Dave & Buster's card, these initiatives work to foster and maintain the user loyalty that capitalist platforms necessitate. ³ Developments in the adult platform economy may, thus, be recognized as promising creators the opportunity to capitalize on monopolistic platforms’ network effects. Promising premium messaging, calling, and media sharing with top adult industry performers, “Mynx will deliver an unmatched experience and become the go to platform for A-list performers and their biggest fans” (Warren, 2024a). ⁴ Similarly, short-form adult content platform Fantasi seeks to make users’ consumption experience more enjoyable, efficient, and engaging: “[instead] of spending time searching for porn, users can simply swipe to the next video if they don’t like what they see” (Parkman, 2024i). These initiatives position integrated platforms—or, rather, creators’ integration within platforms—as the solution to laborers’ precarity.

In other words, to help navigate, negotiate, and negate this precarity, these ventures promise laborers the opportunity to maximize their growth within the capitalist platform economy. For example, offering “innovative tools and community features that empower creative professionals to connect, collaborate and succeed in the digital age,” premium creator platform Lemon Social comprises a content management system, an analytics dashboard, and privacy controls supplemented by “regular webinars and workshops led by industry experts to assist creators in honing their skills and understanding market dynamics” (Parkman, 2024c). ⁵ This optimization extends beyond the broadcasting of adult content, as services have emerged promising tailored Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) solutions to creator agencies to counter piracy (Parkman, 2024k); the monetization of behind-the-scenes content (Warren, 2024i); and the listing and selling of performers’ worn clothing items and collectibles (Warren, 2024e). The maximization of creators’ opportunities within the system is, thus, predicated on their shouldering of offloaded responsibilities.

As major adult entertainment corporations are consolidating into monopolies, however, movements are emerging with the express goal of pushing back against their alleged exploitation of precarious platformed labor. Adult entertainment cooperatives are launched with the explicit goal of counteracting the hostile, antisex work environment of the platform economy.

Countering Platform Capitalists’ Lobbying

Problematically, “energetically projected myths about employment suggest that working as an employee means that you have to give up all flexibility and that working as an independent contractor somehow inherently means that your work is flexible” (Scholz, 2016a, p. 5). As these laborers do not operate in a vacuum, however, this promised flexibility for low-income freelancers must be questioned; these workers bear the burdens of precarity and lessened benefits while at the beck and call of their virtual employers. These levels of exploitation and wealth concentration characteristic of the platform economy are not just continuations of predigital capitalism but, rather, represent a discontinuity; this “crowd fleecing is a new form of exploitation, put in place by four or five upstarts, to draw on a global pool of millions of workers in real time” (Scholz, 2016a, p. 4). Nonconforming to the normative commitments of typical employment relationships, digital labor platforms offer precarious positions, excluding workers from benefits, including paid leave and union representation (Berg et al., 2019).

Platform capitalists’ lobbying efforts have, thus, sought to consolidate two contradictory rhetorics: “that of disruptive innovation typical of neo-liberalism ideology together with the positive normative discourse about grass-roots and bottom-up revival of community, trust, social capital, and the moral economy allegedly enacted by exchanges between peers” (Codagnone et al., 2019, p. 1). The sharing economy—“the peer-to-peer-based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing the access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services” (Hamari et al., 2015, p. 1)—emerged as an alternative to life-long employment with a paternalistic corporation or organization. This sharing economy is posited paradoxically as part of the capitalist economy and as an alternative to it, riding the waves of social optimism regarding crowds characteristic of an earlier internet and promising greater problem-solving abilities and new efficiencies (Gehl, 2011).

Many social technologies share systematic rhetorical themes regarding the unlocking of hidden wealth, the enabling of more equitable distributions of benefits, the fostering of resilient communities, authentic and moral economic relations, the “invisible hand” of capitalism, and the effectiveness of self-regulation (Dredge & Gyimóthy, 2015). Importantly, “[while] it is true that platform capitalism might have helped decentralize economic activity, by no means does this point to a truly decentralized economy” (Papadimitropoulos, 2021, p. 250). Controlled by centralized back-end server infrastructures and black-boxed algorithms (Scholz, 2016b), platform capitalism is founded on centralized authorities leveraging the market power of network effects to extract fees from participants. Platform capitalism, thus, amplifies the commodification of the use value produced by the sociability of internet users in a networked society (Castells, 2010). In this (digital) labor context, “[businesses] large and small, whether in the traditional economy or the sharing economy, are gradually distancing themselves from any enduring relationship with the workers they hire. ‘Fissured’ work is an increasingly common feature of our outsourced economy” (Hill, 2016, p. 51). Operating in a regulatory vacuum outside of most national labor laws, these platforms increasingly perform government-like functions (Agrawal et al., 2013). Workers, here, operate within an “algocracy” (Aneesh, 2009), a novel form of algorithm-based governance for labor markets and hierarchies in which algorithms (rhetorically) promise greater “objectivity” (Gillespie, 2014). Despite platforms’ evocation of the self-regulating “invisible hand” of capitalism, these social technologies perform a normative function through centralized back-end server infrastructures and black-boxed algorithms designed with little oversight at the whim of four or five metaphorical upstarts; those few with the power to write, launch, and revise algorithmic governance and moderation mechanisms all-too-often hold all the power, necessitating laborers’ (anticipatory) compliance work or the foregoing of their built audiences and networks.

In the contemporary adult entertainment industry, major platforms promise workers the entrepreneurial agency to create content however and whenever they desire; however, as these platforms increasingly toe socially conservative lines, which laborers are afforded these liberties is continuously encroached upon as (sex) workers at further reaches of marginalization are easily disavowed. Hesitant to embrace the label of being a “porn site,” OnlyFans CEO Blair defines OnlyFans as “a site that hosts adult content, but we also host a variety of other content. […] Creators are able to create whatever content they choose to, as long as it's within our terms of service” (in Turner, 2024a). ⁶ Due to the contemporary dominance of impression-based advertising, “walled-garden social sharing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat monopolizing app audiences also threatens the viability of the commons and the Open Web” (Carroll, 2016, p. 114). Even content only tangentially related to sex work risks algorithmic moderation and silencing: sexologist Dr Susan Block filed a complaint against Meta seeking arbitration for “wrongful business practices” (Parkman, 2024f), including lack of accountability, algorithmic discrimination, and deactivation of the sex advice accounts she established on the corporation's Facebook and Instagram platforms since 2008. Such disavowal-creep—necessitated by “vice clauses” and puritanical political outrage—affects entire cultures of sex work, disrupting the complacency of those platform laborers previously expecting to remain exempt from policing or moderation. An adult entertainment “algocracy” has emerged, in which those few writing code serve as judge and jury moderating and silencing those workers—and their expressions of sexuality—deemed unfit for (imagined) audiences.

This (overreaching) algorithmic governance has, however, resulted in a cottage industry of service providers selling sex workers solutions to the marginalization with which they are faced in the mainstream platform economy. ⁷ Corporations’ lobbying efforts and deference to legal gray zones to (mis)classify employees as independent contractors, to become exempt from taxes, and to place themselves outside of established legal and regulatory frameworks have resulted in increased labor alienation, exploitation, and precarity (Scholz, 2016b). Nevertheless, as these initiatives are fundamentally rooted within the capitalist platform economy, their “solutions” are predicated on an imperative to game the system, rather than help (sex) workers escape its confines. Following recent developments, including the passing of the Digital Services Act, this imperative has become increasingly untenable. Platform cooperativism is emerging as a conscious countermovement.

Platform Cooperativism as an Alternative

Workers in the platform economy have not remained passive in their resistance to the marginalization and precarity characteristic of investor-owned platforms; as capitalist platforms have proven to elevate shareholder value over the needs of their laborers, “the distrust in the old, extractive model, the economics of surveillance, and monopoly, and the proliferation of the workplace without borders, led many people to revive the spirit of cooperativism” (Scholz, 2016a, p. 11). Presented as an alternative to the sharing economy, the social and solidarity economy—comprised of “cooperatives and other forms of social enterprise, self-help groups, community-based organizations, associations of informal economy workers, service-provisioning NGOs, [an] solidarity finance schemes” (UNTFSSE, 2014)—is characterized by its prioritization of social objectives and its valuation of active, democratic self-management and collaboration. Working to achieve inclusive and sustainable economic development, these enterprises strive to provide decent work to marginalized groups by sharing greater control over resources, means of production, and decision-making (Di Meglio et al., 2011).

As a counter to the extractive tendencies of platform capitalism, platform cooperativism is founded on the principles of collective ownership; the provision of livable and secure wages; data transparency and portability; open channels of communication among laborers and platform operators; codetermination of platform governance; providing a protective legal framework for their workers; fostering a labor environment in which worker protections and benefits are transferable beyond a single workplace; shielding workers from consumers’ arbitrary behaviors; rejecting excessive workplace surveillance; and codifying workers’ right to log off (Scholz, 2016a, 2016b). By lowering the costs of transactions and transferring surplus revenue to the members, a platform cooperative—“an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise” (International Cooperative Alliance, 1995)—responds to the market failures of platform capitalism, bolstering retention and protecting workers from exploitation. Distinguishing platform cooperatives from alternative institutional types of collective action in the platform economy—such as the unionization of gig workers or online forums dedicated to gig labor (Vandaele, 2018)—emphasizes cooperatives’ focus on precarious, nonstandard labor conditions and the economic dependency of gig workers. Consequently, “profit maximizing” initiatives, while touting the advancement of marginalized (sex) workers, cannot be equated to cooperatives, as cooperatives seek to fundamentally change—rather than ease—workers’ precarity and nonstandard labor conditions.

Platform cooperatives provide a potential counter to workers’ unfavorable labor conditions and contracts, and platform cooperativism has emerged as a response of gig workers, rooted in “a belief in the potential of the Internet to ignite societal change. Compared with open and collaborative Internet production, the focus is on improving the workers’ conditions” (Cañada et al., 2023, p. 3). As “jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprises” (International Cooperative Alliance, 1995), the platform cooperative movement advocates for the common economic and social concerns of workers. Platform cooperativism is, thus, not rooted in any specific technology, necessarily, but rather is preoccupied with “the political act of cooperation in a networked, interconnected world, in which collective ownership, democratic local economies, redistribution and justice is more necessary than ever” (Beer, 2022). Cooperativism presents a way of working fundamentally different from platform capitalism, moving away from individualization and competition toward cooperation and social solidarity.

Due to the continued political passivity in protecting gig workers, stakeholders increasingly turn to platform cooperatives to weather the economic and social precarity to which they are commonly subjected (Schor, 2014). In their form as worker-run matchmaking platforms for labor, platform cooperatives are a subset of labor-managed (as opposed to capital-managed) firms. Promising gig workers more equitable pay and job security “because they decide themselves over commission rates and surplus value” (Bunders et al., 2022, p. 1), platform cooperatives move against the hypercapitalist extraction of value characteristic of gig work platforms like Uber and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. However, due to their high infrastructural start-up and maintenance costs without venture capital injection (Lampinen et al., 2018), the high transaction costs involved with democratic deliberation (Belloc, 2019), and their typical risk-aversion (Martin et al., 2017), labor-managed firms remain susceptible to regulatory obstacles and support structures (Pentzien, 2020).

Functioning within a capitalist context where they are forced to compete, cooperatives cannot truly decouple themselves from the exploitative supply chains that fuel capitalism. Nevertheless, the very existence of cooperatives challenges the ideologies of capitalism and corporatism. Cooperatives, thus, “however small, can function as ethical, self-managed counterparts that provide a model for businesses that don’t have to rely on the exploitation of their workers. Cooperatives can bring creativity not only to the consumption of products but also to the reorganization of work” (Scholz, 2016a, p. 13).

So, if “cooperative structures call for collective decision-making, conflict resolution, consensus building, and the managing of shares and funds in a transparent manner,” one of the central questions in this discussion is how platforms’ abuses of power can be kept at bay: “How could the platform govern itself in a distributed, truly democratic way?” (Scholz, 2016a, p. 24). In the contexts of adult entertainment and sex work, these questions become complicated by the various degrees of criminalization under which laborers operate. Decency, here, provides a counter to capitalist platforms’ dehumanizing pursuit of profit maximization. In this latest stage of capitalism, finding themselves marginalized by the status quo of an extractive platform economy, many adult entertainers have followed the call to “craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within” (Benjamin, 2022).

Recent developments in the sex work space have embraced cooperative tenets addressing these common economic and social concerns: responding to “the growing need for a safe and uncensored space for sex and relationship experts to promote their services,” the Sexperts Business Community's platform “offers a haven for diverse voices and unparalleled support [in] a landscape fraught with censorship and limited reach” (Thomas, 2024b). Similarly, organizations have launched smaller-scale initiatives, promising community to laborers at further reaches of marginality of race, age, and mental health, ⁸ and recent initiatives have been launched to facilitate community building and education for content creators. ⁹ Cooperatives in the sex work space have answered the call for the greater democratization of the means of adult entertainment production, promising content creators the ability to weather these marginalizing realities. ¹⁰ In the adult entertainment space, thus, these challenges rear their heads continuously, as the precaritization of marginalized laborers is both a cause of, and hurdle to, the imperative to launch cooperative alternatives to the capitalist labor platform. Sex worker-led initiatives, here, function as such collections of situated knowledges in their imperative to afford minoritized groups decision-making power over their own labor. The small, temporary cooperatives emerging in the digital sex work space since the passing of the Digital Services Act function as (more) ethical, self-managed counterparts to often-exploitative capitalist labor platforms. Even if they are unable to sustain their efforts and unseat their major corporate competitors, these initiatives warrant scholarly consideration for the alternative directions for adult entertainment they indicate.

Platform Cooperatives’ Commercial Viability

Funding and competition present major challenges to achieving greater economic inclusion and long-term sustainability for platforms operating in the digital labor economy. Corporate platforms often rely on venture capital to launch, develop, and maintain their services, striving to reach market dominance through cost reduction and aggressive takeovers culminating in a monopoly position (Bunders et al., 2022). Alternatively, platform cooperatives often seek support from foundations and governments, scaling by creating networks of shareholders large enough to compete with their capitalist counterparts (Scholz, 2022). Either way, the viability and continued success of platforms are affected by the complex interrelations of the (inter)national governance and legislation, the solidarity among workers, and the economic landscape in which the labor is embedded. Problematically, “many well-intentioned people suffer from a misplaced faith in the intrinsic abilities of the Internet to promote egalitarian community and trust, [aiding and abetting] this accumulation of private fortune, and the construction of new and exploitative forms of employment” (Slee, 2015), and “[any] proposal to revamp platform capitalism and launch platform cooperativism is challenged with coming to grips with how technology is changing the nature of work across an astonishing range of occupations and industries” (Hill, 2016, p. 48).

Promisingly novel technical, organizational, and financing opportunities for platform cooperativism are still emerging, and “[by] providing more trustworthy systems for genuine commoning and user sovereignty, these new forms could soon enable digital commons – and hybrid forms of user-driven markets – to surpass the value-creating capacities of conventional open platforms” (Bollier, 2016, p. 74). The value of platform cooperativism is not based on its scale, but on its potential for envisioning alternative futures at the intersection of labor and technology. Cooperatives could become tools that can democratize and rehumanize economies, yet risk being reduced to self-help entrepreneurial initiatives in the context of precarious work—and, thus, should not be exalted as inherently counterhegemonic. Harboring the potentialities to resignify the platform economy away from technosolutionism toward social justice and platform socialism (Schor, 2020), platform cooperativism can be “understood as part of a radical prefigurative political project that aims to bridge the gap between immediate change and radical social transformation” (Sandoval, 2016, p. 104). However, the coexistence of capitalist and cooperative business models affects cooperatives’ social and economic viability, as oligopolies determine the market prices of goods and services and set the cost of production (Sandoval, 2016). Even if cooperatives do not seek to maximize their profits, they need to generate enough income to ensure their sustainability, undermining cooperatives’ ability to compete with international capitalist corporations. Therefore, in pursuit of their goal to build an economy that is more equitable and sustainable, platform cooperatives must move beyond the capitalist growth imperative: “democratically controlled businesses, such as worker cooperatives, could target smaller, local niche markets without having to focus on scaling up” (Scholz, 2016a, p. 25).

Challengingly, “a new mode of production that could release the potential for a less alienated, less exploited, less asshole-infested worklife will not prevail just because it seems economically superior. Merely embracing the change will not be good enough. You can’t win by just being better” (Spehr, 2016, p. 54). Cooperative platforms, here, “are poised to thicken the notoriously loose ties that online connectedness normally offers. And as big tech companies continue having difficulty treating workers and users as – well, people – co-ops can offer positive, ethical alternatives that workers and users can turn to” (Schneider, 2016, p. 17). Challenging the platform economy's preoccupation with short-term profits, “platform cooperativism will not come about simply through a few killer apps; it will require a different kind of ecosystem – with appropriate forms of finance, law, policy, and culture – to support the development of democratic online enterprises” (Scholz & Schneider, 2016, p. 12). In other words, the legislative and regulatory landscape in which labor platforms operate needs to change.

Indeed, as investors have been accused of cutting their teeth in the sex work space until they reach critical mass (Gorissen, 2024a), their speculative business model does not provide creators with the sustained investment they require to escape their precaritized working conditions. While cooperatives have historically been started by working-class groups sharing a common culture and history, platform cooperatives often emerge from a different social space, marked by technological savvy and production wherewithal. Consequently, “[if] platform co-ops are to succeed without reproducing their own more privileged class, race, and gender homogeneousness, founders and early participants must be highly attuned to subtle social dynamics that valorize the practices and traits of dominant groups” (Schor, 2016, p. 42); if adult cooperatives are to succeed without (re)producing a hierarchy of sex workers, they need to be sensitive to the social dynamics of these creators and their audiences. In the sex work space, this radical prefigurative political project has taken the forms of cooperative initiatives foregrounding the safety of sex workers in light of content moderation and policy changes. ¹¹

We must not forget, however, that the commercial viability of platform cooperatives is dependent upon the legal and regulatory environments in which they operate; legal and regulatory environments often shaped by the exorbitant lobbying expenditure of venture capital-backed commercial platforms. The absence of a sex worker cooperative that can supplant venture capital-backed conglomerates such as OnlyFans and MindGeek in the adult entertainment landscape does not negate the strides made by cooperative initiatives, nor is the full usurping of platform capitalist endeavors a realistic end goal by which to measure cooperatives’ strides forward. As minor glimpses into what an adult platform economy could be, the successes of contemporary cooperatives may well lie in the symbolic victories they chart.

The Future(s) of Platform Cooperativism

The passing of the European Union's Digital Services Act has had immediate, structural implications for digital sex workers. Coalescing legislative and capitalist pressures exacerbate workers’ labor precarity, and these intersectional dynamics of oppression find their expression in (anticipatory) compliance practices, calls for policy refinement, and worker mobilization and resistance. As major adult entertainment corporations are consolidating into monopolies, initiatives are launched with the explicit goal of counteracting the increased precaritization of (sex) workers in the contemporary platform economy. Websites, platforms, and services have been developed to facilitate content creators’ continued survival in a venture capital-backed digital marketplace. However, the appeasement of conglomerates’ algorithmic governance is not creators’ only course of action. Platform cooperativism is emerging as a conscious countermovement, and the cooperatives emerging in the digital sex work space function as counterparts to capitalist labor platforms. The concept of platform cooperativism is rooted in embracing the technological affordances of capitalist labor platforms with a structural change in ownership model; fostering solidarity among a distributed, and sometimes anonymous workforce; and reframing concepts of innovation and efficiency with an eye on benefiting the laborers, rather than venture capitalists. Casting labor as a creative and productive endeavor—rather than as the alienating, rigid, and for-profit processes imposed on workers—cooperatives bolster workers’ social and political embeddedness by fostering strong ties rooted in solidarity, trust, and reciprocity.

None of the emergent platform cooperative initiatives launched in the wake of the 2022 adoption of the European Union's Digital Services Act has been able to compete with their conglomerate counterparts head-on. No cooperative equivalent of MindGeek or OnlyFans exists yet. However, addressing the increased precaritization of adult content creators may not take the shape of an integrated cooperative platform; rather, cooperative initiatives may provide a decentralized alternative within the same, hostile regulatory space. Seen through this lens, a cooperative future is already here. As a counter to the centralizing, extractive tendencies of the venture capital-backed platforms dominating the contemporary adult entertainment industry, initiatives including the Fantzer referral program and the New Attitude Business Consulting hub are founded on the principles of collective ownership. MintPay and YouPay work to provide their clients with livable and secure wages. The FansCity and Lemon Social platforms promise their users greater data transparency and portability. The Sexperts Business Community and the Live Cam Academy work to open channels of communication among laborers and platform operators. Spicerack offers users codetermination of its platform governance structure. Hazel Grace's membership site provides a protective legal framework for its workers. Endeavors including the Clip Page, the Hevvn platforms, and the Adult Content University foster a labor environment in which worker protections and benefits are transferable beyond a single workplace. Real Adult Fans, Mynx, Fantasi, and Skinfluential Management work to shield their workers from consumers’ arbitrary behaviors. PlayHouse offers a clear solution to excessive workplace surveillance. Wicked Sensual Care's Menopause Hub and Pineapple Support codify workers’ right to log off.

As this (consciously nonexhaustive) sample of novel platforms, websites, and services indicates, we must not neglect these initiatives on the basis of their smaller scope alone. Cooperatives’ successes should not be judged by the extent to which they supplant; rather, their successes may well lie in providing an alternative. Nevertheless, we must not glorify their efforts uncritically as inherently counterhegemonic. These collectives can become democratizing and rehumanizing economic forces, yet risk reinforcing and reproducing capitalist pressures as they fight for market survival. Aiming to further social goals through market mechanisms, platform cooperatives both challenge and engage entrepreneurialism and commercialization.