Unlike YouTube, which was then coming to prominence, afforded synchronous, asymmetric audio-visual communication between a broadcaster and their audience. In both cases, Twitch offers insight into how, and in what ways, surveillance increasingly mediates contemporary cultural economies. For that reason, I position Twitch at the intersection of what David Lyon (2018) calls surveillance culture, the sense that watching and being watched has become fundamental to our customs, habits, and ways of interpreting the world, as well as surveillance capitalism, Soshana Zuboff’s (2015) term for an emergent logic of accumulation in digital spaces built on widespread data collection. Rather than offering a single argument, then, my aim is to suggest what research into Twitch can learn from surveillance studies, a field that offers a perspective that is especially useful for analyzing a platform built, in essence, on seeing and being seen. Even so, while scholars in “Twitch studies” (such as it is) rightly acknowledge the surveillant dimensions of the platform, the specific infrastructures and imaginaries of surveillance on Twitch have not been explored in depth, if only because the field is still establishing its empirical and theoretical terrain. Twitch sits squarely within what David Nieborg and Thomas Poell (2018: 2) call the platformization of cultural production, “the penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the web,” which has significant implications for the production, monetization, and distribution of cultural content.Ī growing body of literature is beginning to situate Twitch within broader political, cultural, and economic currents. While Twitch has relaxed its content guidelines to make space for “lifestreamers” like Gargac, “social eating,” live gambling, and even on-duty sanitation workers, these channels are a small fraction of the 4.6 million regular broadcasters on the platform, which delivered close to 10 billion hours of live video in 2018. This episode is unusual not simply because it poses questions about the legality and ethics of livestreaming, nor even due to the novel collision of two forms of platform labor, but because Twitch is most associated with digital games. Gargac, who reported earning some additional $3,500 on Twitch over a period of several months, eventually deleted his channel, which remains inactive as of December 2018. Under increasing public pressure, however, Uber (and, later, Lyft) deactivated Gargac’s account and instituted a policy banning drivers from broadcasting while on duty (Heffernan 2018b). Initially, Uber offered a five- dollar credit to anyone who complained and a promise that they would not be paired with Gargac again. While this was not strictly illegal-Missouri is a one- party recording consent state-passengers interveiwed by the Dispatch were understandably outraged when they learned that their rides had been streamed to an audience of several hundred viewers, some of whom made disparaging and sexually-charged comments about riders in real-time. Louis area, had been secretly broadcasting a live feed of his passengers to the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform, Twitch (Heffernan 2018a). Louis Dispatch reported that Jason Gargac, a 32-year old Uber and Lyft driver working in the St. I conclude by offering some observations about what Twitch reveals about platform surveillance in general. 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. In all cases, I illustrate how visibility is bound up in a complex, multidirectional web of political economic relations. 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. 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. This paper describes where and how research into the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform Twitch can profitably engage surveillance studies.
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