Watch Me Pay: Twitch and the Cultural Economy of Surveillance

Abstract

This paper describes where and how research into the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform Twitch can profitably engage surveillance studies. It argues that Twitch sits at the intersection of what David Lyon calls “surveillance culture,” a culture in which watching and being watched is fundamental to individuals’ customs, habits, and ways of interpreting the world; and surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff’s term for an emerging logic of accumulation built on data collection and hoarding. I draw attention to three different actors in the Twitch ecosystem—the viewer, the streamer, and the platform owner—to articulate the different modes of seeing and being seen each position affords. In all cases, I illustrate how visibility is bound up in a complex, multidirectional web of political economic relations. In order to resist technological determinist narratives about platform effects, I consider Twitch as a “boundary object” in order to identify how social, geographical, and cultural context influences actors in each position. I conclude by offering some observations about what Twitch reveals about platform surveillance in general.