by Hannah Wohl, University of California, Santa Barbara
Lindsey Cameron, University of Pennsylvania
Ride-hailing drivers, gig workers, and content creators join their respective industry for the same reason: autonomy. It allows workers to do their thing how and when they want for the most part.
Photo: Yusuf Gündüz/PEXELS
On a porn set in California’s San Fernando Valley, a performer we’ll call Jake explains why he joined the industry after dabbling in escorting. He says he was drawn to porn work because of the freedom he finds as an independent contractor.
He works 10 to 15 hours a week on average and spends the rest of his time home with his wife and son. The best thing about his job, he says, is that he can leave any time he wants: “I have nobody in charge of me.”
Jake – in keeping with standard research practice in our field, we’ve referred to everyone in this article by pseudonyms – is far from the only worker in his field who likes being his own boss. With the rise of subscription-based platforms such as OnlyFans in recent years, the porn industry has transformed into a hybrid labor market: Performers often produce their own content for online subscribers while also working for traditional studios.
Across the country, near Detroit, a strikingly similar conversation takes place with a ride-hailing driver, Jamir. In contrast to traditional office workers, whom Jamir describes as “being in a Matrix type of situation … stuck to their jobs, stuck to their time,” he views himself as “seeing the whole world.” Emphasizing the flexibility and earnings potential of driving, he says, “If I need $1,000 in one week, I can get it. … At a job, I couldn’t do that without tons of overtime and approvals.”
While Jake’s and Jamir’s daily work is different, the incentives, risks and pressures of their jobs are surprisingly alike. We know this because, as a sociologist and an organizational theorist, we’ve spent years researching the porn industry and the ride-hailing industry, respectively. We’ve studied OnlyFans and the studio-based porn industry, ride-hailing platforms such as Lyft and Uber, and other gig platforms, including TaskRabbit, Instacart and DoorDash.
As independent contractors, both workers lack many of the protections of salaried employees; the next gig is never guaranteed.
And by “studying,” we don’t just mean the kind you do in the library. To pay homage to one of the forefathers of sociology, Robert Park, we got the seat of our pants dirty by directly speaking with, observing and even working alongside people like Jake and Jamir. We’ve interviewed hundreds of workers and observed these industries up close, from helping film OnlyFans shoots in performers’ bedrooms to ferrying ride-hailing passengers around town.
One of our most interesting findings is that porn performers and ride-hailing drivers often join their industry for the same reason: autonomy. While autonomy can have different meanings, for these workers it usually entails flexible scheduling, the ability to set their overall earnings and the freedom to turn down bad work offers.
OnlyFans and other gig platforms promise autonomy for workers. An OnlyFans ad exhorts prospective creators to “Earn money doing what you love while making use of our features” and “Set your own price,” while Uber and Lyft ads entice drivers to “Be your own boss” and “Earn money on your own schedule.”
But do these platforms make good on their promise?
The illusion of worker autonomy
When Jake is asked whether he has ever actually walked off a porn shoot, he admits that he hasn’t.
Similarly, Jamir concedes that he accepts basically any ride request and is “here to make money.”
While Jake and Jamir could theoretically decline work or quit a gig, it would be a costly move.
As independent contractors, both workers lack many of the protections of salaried employees; the next gig is never guaranteed. In the porn industry, where people move daily between different studio sets and independently produce shoots for OnlyFans, reputations spread through gossip. Declining or quitting a gig can damage a performer’s prospects. On other gig platforms, workers’ reputations are often rendered visible through ratings on apps that affect their likelihood of being matched to future gigs.
Workers often report feeling frustrated because they don’t understand how the algorithms that manage them make decisions that affect their livelihoods.
Jake and Jamir face the same illusion of schedule flexibility: They’ve escaped the dreaded 9-to-5 and, as independent contractors, can ostensibly turn down any gig. But if they do, platforms and others involved in their work have mechanisms with which to punish them.
First, like traditional gatekeepers such as agents and directors, gig platforms can blacklist workers by making them appear unavailable or less available for work. Platforms may downgrade those who decline rides or orders, assigning them to lower-paid or lower-quality matches. For example, Salvatore, a New York City driver, blames a ride-hailing company for robbing him of income by matching him only with rides going outside the city during high-demand times.
On other gig platforms such as Upwork or TaskRabbit, the search engine algorithms can make these workers’ profiles less visible to customers. Workers often report feeling frustrated because they don’t understand how the algorithms that manage them make decisions that affect their livelihoods.
OnlyFans draws an implicit contrast to these gig platforms and social media platforms in its marketing: “OnlyFans has zero algorithms. Your fans see everything you post.” But OnlyFans doesn’t set porn performers free from algorithms. Due to its limited search function, performers must rely heavily on other social media platforms and their algorithms to drive traffic to their OnlyFans accounts.
Nor are porn performers free from blacklisting. Porn performers who juggle work across OnlyFans and studios use agents for studio bookings. Performers frequently report that agents blacklist those who decline shoots or prove otherwise noncompliant by telling directors that the performer is unavailable to work on requested days.
Second, gig platforms can “deplatform” workers by removing content and workers from their app. Ride-hailing drivers regularly complain of being blocked from the app while the company “investigates” customer complaints, which are often customer scams, and have little means of input, let alone recourse, in this process. (Asked about this issue, an Uber spokesman noted the company had recently taken steps to make its deactivation processes fairer.)
Another driver, James, tells us that he was blocked without notice when the app notified him that a customer accused him of sexual misconduct. Three days of lost income later, after countless unanswered messages and unhelpful phone calls, he was reinstated. The platform said it had made an error, intending to flag another driver’s account.
OnlyFans may present itself as an ally to content creators, stating that it is unlike algorithmically mediated gig platforms, but it and other social media platforms similarly remove specific content and content creators who supposedly violate policies regarding explicit and obscene content, often providing vague reasons for doing so.
In extreme cases, platforms can deplatform entire classes of workers. In 2021, OnlyFans notoriously announced that it was removing all pornographic accounts in what was widely seen as an attempt to convert the platform to a mainstream social media company. After widespread backlash from its content creators, the company reversed this decision five days later.
Citing the “scare,” Sasha, a porn performer whose earnings of over $400,000 USD per year put her in the top 1% of OnlyFans content creators, says, “I realized I shouldn’t put my eggs all in one basket.” She tried to reduce her financial dependence on OnlyFans by making accounts on competitor platforms, such as Fansly, which marketed itself as a porn-worker-friendly alternative. But Sasha estimates that over 90% of her income still comes from OnlyFans, while her Fansly earnings peaked at around 3%.
Workers join these labor markets to escape “the man,” only to find the man replaced by the often opaque logic of platforms and their algorithms.
OnlyFans’ monopoly over subscription-based porn platforms leaves even performers like Sasha, who have found lucrative earnings on the platform, in a precarious position.
Platforms can further marginalize workers
The unfulfilled promise of autonomy affects the most marginalized and vulnerable members of the workforce.
In the ride-hailing industry, drivers are often men of color, many of them first-generation immigrants. Dependent on the platform’s income, and with limited outside options, these workers are more hesitant to make waves and challenge the platform’s authority, even if they could navigate the byzantine call-center trees and robo-support messages.
Similarly, in the porn industry, female performers are especially vulnerable to the risks of being blacklisted or deplatformed. Porn consumers, most of whom identify as heterosexual men, view male performers as mere props for a scene, yet demand a constant turnover of “fresh faces” of female performers. We found that this means male performers can work more often for the same studio and rely less on agents for networking. In contrast, female performers see agents as essential to gaining connections to new studios.
Female performers can become less dependent on their agents by simultaneously creating content on OnlyFans. But in doing so, they become more dependent on a platform that is liable to make capricious and arbitrarily enforced policies concerning acceptable content.
Our immersion in the porn and ride-hailing industries brought us to a Kafkaesque conclusion: Workers join these labor markets to escape “the man,” only to find the man replaced by the often opaque logic of platforms and their algorithms.
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