While work in the media and cultural industries has long been considered precarious, the processes and logics of platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such insecurity are platforms’ algorithms, which structure the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural content in capricious, enigmatic, even biased ways. Accordingly, cultural producers’ conditions and experiences are increasingly wrought by their understandings—and moreover their anticipation—of platforms’ ever-evolving algorithmic systems. Against this backdrop, I urge fellow researchers of digital culture and society to consider how this mode of “algorithmic precarity” exacerbates the instability of cultural work in the platform era. Considering the volatility of algorithms and the wider cross-platform ecology can help us to develop critical interventions into a creative economy marked by a profoundly uneven allocation of power between platforms and the laborers who populate—and increasingly—power them.

长期以来，人们一直认为媒体和文化产业的工作pre可危，但平台化的过程和逻辑却为创造力的劳动经济注入了新的不稳定因素。这种不安全的根源是平台的算法，该算法以反复无常，神秘，甚至有偏见的方式来构造文化内容的生产，流通和消费。因此，文化生产者的条件和经验越来越多地被他们对平台不断发展的算法系统的理解（以及他们的期望）所困扰。在这种背景下，我敦促数字文化和社会的同行研究者考虑这种“算法不稳定”模式如何加剧平台时代文化工作的不稳定。