Introduction
This paper examines the relationship between increasing digitalisation/platformisation on the one hand, and political mobilisation and political change in Southeast Asia on the other. The aim is to develop appropriate concepts to capture the impact of increasing digitalisation and platformisation on political systems. The case of Southeast Asia is particularly instructive as the penetration of social media and platforms into societies is very advanced – actually worldleading – while political systems are undergoing a dynamic process of change.
First, I discuss empirical evidence of the decline of democracy. Earlier conceptual approaches are characterised and assessed according to their explanatory power and explanatory adequacy. Most of these approaches consider the interaction between the political sphere and the mediated public sphere separately. They can be characterised according to the extent to which they pursue an exogenous or endogenous explanatory strategy, i.e. the extent to which distortions within the public sphere can be analysed as either intentional disruption by state-sponsored political actors or as systemic dysfunctionality of the media sphere itself.
In contrast, in this paper I argue that in the context of far-reaching digitalisation and platformisation of the world of material reproduction, consumption and social life, it is not possible to make a meaningful distinction between a societal lifeworld and a public sphere (of political discourse). I propose an integrated approach, which takes working conditions as its starting point — in the sense of a labour turn — and which draws on the concepts and approaches of the school of thought of Operaism in order to analyse current developments.
There is already a rich body of recent literature in this area, which can be divided into two main strands: Post-Operaism and Digital Workerism, each of which highlights different aspects of the digitalised world of labour. It is argued that there is a need to bring together these two schools of thought and to return to classical Operaist ideas in order to develop an integrated approach. The paper proceeds with a discussion of an ongoing empirical research project on Thai influencers in Thailand and abroad, whose work and political positioning serve to illustrate the question of agency. While some appear to follow the systemic logic and calculus of the attention economy, others present themselves as politically conscious and seemingly independent political actors. Yet even their positioning reveals clear connections to the broader working conditions of influencers operating abroad, as well as to the living conditions of their audiences. The text concludes with some reflections on the relationship between area studies and social science theorising. Based on the argument presented here, based on the concept of labour as developed by the Operaist school of thought, and against the background of the findings from Southeast Asia, this text proposes a perspective aligned New Area Studies.
Social Media, Digitalisation and Political Mobilisation
It is now standard commentary that social media have become a decisive political factor. For about the past 15 years, elections have seemed increasingly unpredictable, and almost every unexpected election result is commented on as having been brought about through the use of social media. Thus, Barak Obama’s election was attributed to his use of texting SMS (Carr Reference Carr2008), Donald Trump’s 2016 success has been attributed to his use of Twitter (Deutsche Welle 2021; Küfner and Martin 2021), his 2024 success to the use of TikTok, and Jair Bolsonaro to Twitter and Telegram (Jeantet Reference Jeanet2021; Trevisani and Seetharaman Reference Trevisani and Seetharaman2018). In addition, other major political events are often attributed to the influence and use of social media — from the Arab Spring in 2011 to the Gezi protests in Turkey in 2013 to MeToo, Black Lives Matter and climate protests. (cf. Kurfürst Reference Kurfürst, Hendrich, Kurfürst and Malis2017 on the transnational character of digitally based protests such as Occupy).
What is striking, however, it still seems to be an open question, how the impact of social media on the political system should be assessed — whether social media serve progressive forces and is helpful or harmful to democracy. Analyses oscillate, depending on the event, in one direction or the other. While the Arab Spring was hailed as a “Facebook revolution” in 2011 (Howard and Hussain Reference Howard and Hussain2013), the expulsion of the Rohingya in Myanmar was denounced as a “Facebook genocide” in 2016/2017 (Zaleznik Reference Zaleznik2021; cf. Holst Reference Holst2011 on the ethnicisation of cyberspace in Malaysia). For an empirical investigation of these questions, the region of Southeast Asia is particularly promising (cf. Sinpeng and Tapsell Reference Sinpeng and Tapsell2021).
Social media and contested democracy in Southeast Asia
There is a global decline in democracy (IRGAC 2022). Think tanks such as V-Dem and Freedom House, based on a (contested) interpretation of liberal democracy, point out in their analyses that since 2006, the number of countries in which democratic forms of government are being dismantled has exceeded the number of countries in which democratic rights are being expanded (Freedomhouse 2024, V-Dem 2024). In a longer perspective, the Southeast Asian region plays a distinct and telling role here. Beginning in the 1980s, developmental dictatorships were transformed into liberal democracies though mostly peaceful revolutions and transitions. The Philippines led the way, with the People Power movement toppling Marcos in 1986. In Thailand, protests drove the military from power in 1992. In Indonesia, the Reformasi movement achieved a transition to democracy in the wake of the Asian crisis (Croissant Reference Croissant and Croissant2022; Neher Reference Neher1991).
Since 2006, however, a reverse wave and rapid decline have set in, for which the heuristic concept of democratic backsliding, democratic decline or democratic regression is used (Croissant and Haynes Reference Croissant and Haynes2023; Kasuya and Tan Reference Yoko and Tan2024; Rüland Reference Rüland2020; Weiss and Bünte Reference Weiss and Bünte2023). The processes of decline in Southeast Asia reached a particular climax in 2014-2016— reflecting the overall global trend marked by symbolic events such as the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in 2016, and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2019. In Southeast Asia, the outstanding events were the military coup in Thailand in 2014 and the election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in 2016.
Thailand had been experiencing political polarisation since 2006, with mass mobilisations of the royalist-conservative middle classes increasing and putsches or the undemocratic legal removal of elected politicians from office (Prajak Reference Kongkirati2024). In 2014, General Prayuth Chan-O-cha staged a coup, became prime minister and, through a new constitution, consolidated a system in which the rule of a royalist-conservative elite is secured for the long term. Like Trump and Bolsonaro, he tried to legitimise himself through populist discourses and made a name for himself through misogynistic language. Duterte’s election in 2016 as president of the Philippines marked the end of the liberal period that began with the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Duterte consolidated his power through populist and misogynistic rhetoric, a massive crackdown on press freedom, the curtailment of basic rights and excessive political violence, with more than 30,000 people killed in the streets in extrajudicial killings (Thompson Reference Thompson2021). In the other countries of Southeast Asia, too, there has been a decline in democratic norms and governance, with the result that the entire region, which at the turn of the millennium was considered a model of global democratisation, will be classified as unfree by around 2020 (Croissant and Haynes Reference Croissant and Haynes2023).
Juxtaposing these developments with an overview of social media penetration reveals a striking correlation: overall, Southeast Asia is the region of the world in which societies are most permeated by social media (Wearesocial 2024), a tendency that accelerated after the Covid-19 pandemic and through large infrastructure investments and integration in the wake of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (Rowedder et al. Reference Rowedder, Wilcox and Brandtstädter2023; Sidaway et al. Reference Sidaway, Rowedder, Woon, Lin and Pholsena2020). The very countries that have made a spectacular turn towards authoritarian governments are also the ones that are world-leading in social media penetration. The Philippines is by far the world leader in the amount of time people spend on social media (Wearesocial 2018). The same goes for Thailand, whose capital Bangkok had the most Facebook profiles in the world in 2018 (Suchit Reference Leesa-Nguansuk2018; Wearesocial 2018). Together with the finding that Brazil, Thailand and the Philippines share a top position in the global rankings, this suggests that the decline of democracy correlates with the penetration of social media.
At the same time, the Southeast Asian region was the scene of major pro-democracy protests. In April 2020, in response to Chinese censorship, a transnational movement emerged on Twitter and other social media platforms under the hashtag #MilkTeaAlliance (Schaffar and Wongratanawin Reference Schaffar and Wongratanawin2021). This was a spontaneous, unorganised mass movement of netizens from Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan who engaged in what became known as meme war on Twitter and other social media channels with Chinese netizens from mainland China. This was triggered by a tweet from a Thai actor and influencer who was accused of questioning the one-China policy and was subsequently subjected to mass attacks from nationalist mainland Chinese netizens. Such concerted campaigns, which can also be interpreted as signs of moral panic, are a common phenomenon on social media (Liu Reference Liu2019) and especially among K-pop fan groups. In this specific case, however, netizens from Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan spontaneously joined forces to defend the influencer under attack and used the occasion to address fundamental issues of censorship and democracy. The resulting internet traffic, however, was so high in the first few days that Twitter spoke of a movement whose intensity could be compared to the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements (BBC 2021; Twitter 2021).
Other examples of recent pro-democracy movements are indirectly related to the Milk Tea Alliance, as they can be seen as a reflection of the meme war in the offline world.Footnote 1 In June 2020, a broad movement of students and university employees emerged in Thailand to openly question the role of the monarchy in politics for the first time since 1932. In Myanmar, in the immediate aftermath of the February 2021 coup, students, university staff and hospital staff engaged in the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) against the military regime. Thousands were shot dead by the military and police in nationwide strikes and demonstrations, and the protests led to a civil war that continues to this day (Chambers and Cheeseman Reference Chambers and Cheesman2024; Chambers and Saw Ner Dhu Da Reference Chambers and Da2024). These examples show that there are strong movements for democracy in the countries of Southeast Asia. However, these movements are not succeeding in changing the status quo. The findings of the Freedom House and V-Dem indices therefore only reflect the actual state of these systems — not the anchoring of the idea of democracy in the societies.
Exogenous versus endogenous patterns of explaining the coincidence between increasing digitalisation and authoritarianism
Explanations of the relationship between the penetration of social media and the tipping of a system into authoritarianism can be divided into two broad categories. Liberal think tanks and authors, for whom the V-Dem or Freedom House Index or Castells (Reference Castells2008) and Diamond (Reference Diamond2010) can be taken as prominent examples, follow a techno-utopian assumption. Social media, so the idea goes, are, by their technical specification, instruments of democracy: They can hardly be censored, provide easy access to mass exchange and non-hierarchical communication, and are therefore inherently democratic — and thus shape the democratic character of a new (digital) public sphere. According to this logic, undemocratic effects occur when governments intervene in this digital public sphere. Freedom of the Net’s 2018 report points out that, globally, online freedom is threatened above all by the activities of state-funded trolls and highlights the cases of China and the Philippines (Freedomhouse 2018).
I would classify this approach as exogenous insofar as it conceptualises the digital sphere as an autonomous and separate domain that either constitutes, or possesses the capacity to become, a democratic public sphere, yet is disrupted by external state-sponsored intervention (Roberts and Oosterom Reference Roberts and Oosterom2024). In fact, such a view is supported by empirical evidence. Han (Reference Han2015) and MacKinnon (Reference MacKinnon2011) show that in China there are sweatshops of bloggers who send out masses of messages and thus shape opinion formation on social media along predetermined political lines. As they are paid per message — as if on a conveyor belt — they are known as the “50 cent army”. Some studies on large platforms such as Twitter show that large groups of accounts are active at characteristic times, indicating that they are paid users who are active at fixed working hours. Such characteristic features are sometimes used to identify and delete troll accounts (Mazza et al. Reference Mazza, Cola and Tesconi2022). After all, some of the mainland Chinese accounts that mobilised against Bright’s social media account in April 2020 and triggered the MilkTeaAlliance meme war appear to have been paid trolls, as we argue in Schaffar and Wongratanawin (Reference Schaffar and Wongratanawin2021) on the basis of the origin of some memes.
In addition to the case of the Chinese 50-Cent Army, Thailand’s CyberScout programme constitutes another example of state-sponsored trolls. In 2008, the Thai government began recruiting and training young people in schools and army boot camps to identify and report online postings critical of the monarchy (Janjira Reference Sombatpoonsiri2017; Janjira and Carnegie Endowment Reference Sombatpoonsiri and Youngs2018; Saksith 2014).
Despite the cases cited here, over the past few years, an alternative explanation of the distortions on social media has emerged. Based on an empirical study of the internet campaign that brought President Duterte to power, Cabañes and Cornelio (Reference Cabañes, Cornelio and Curato2017) and Ong and Cabañes (Reference Ong and Cabañes2018) have developed a system-inherent, endogenous theory. Prior to the elections, Rodrigo Duterte did not rank high among the likely winners of the Philippine presidential election — clearly behind other candidates (Holmes Reference Holmes2016). Nevertheless, towards the election campaign his popularity was boosted by so many influencers and bloggers that there was talk of a troll army that helped him into office. Ong and Cabañe’s (Reference Ong and Cabañes2018) research picks up on this, analysing the social and economic backgrounds of pro-Duterte bloggers through biographical interviews. One of their central findings is that the lower ranks of what appeared to be a troll army were not paid ‘soldiers’, nor were they necessarily acting out of political conviction, but rather driven by an economic dynamic embedded in the system of social media itself.
At the bottom of this hierarchy were influencers and precarious workers in the creative industries in Manila and other cities who generated supplementary income through click-farming. In doing so, they capitalised on the economic logic of digital media platforms, which function as advertising infrastructures and generate revenue in proportion to the attention they attract. These Philippine micro-influencers leveraged the momentum of the election campaign by creating websites designed to maximise visitor traffic and thereby generate income through Google AdSense. As Duterte drew considerable attention through his violent and misogynistic remarks, his statements were prominently featured on these sites. Rather than reflecting ideological alignment, influencers circulated and amplified such content primarily to increase their share of advertising revenue.
A similar effect has also been documented for the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Here, a teacher at a private academy for internet marketing in the town of Veles, Macedonia, apparently disseminated the expertise to his students about the possibilities of generating income via Google Adsense. As a result, taking advantage of the heated election campaign in the US, those entrepreneurial students began producing fake news for their websites on a massive scale. As the school’s director now puts it, he had accidentally made Trump president (Balzli Reference Balzli2018). As a secondary result of our own research on Thai vigilante groups on Facebook (Schaffar Reference Schaffar2016, Reference Schaffar, Chachavalpongpun, Hewison, Streckfuss, Chambers and Sopranzetti2019; Schaffar and Naruemon Reference Schaffar, Thabchumpol and Toscano2018; Wongratanawin Reference Wongratanawin2019), we found in our interviewsFootnote 2 with activists opposed to the monarchy a few cases pointing in the same direction. Some of these activists did not appear to have a firm political opinion on the monarchy, but rather ran a relatively high number of individual websites discussing this taboo topic, presumably to make money through click-farming.
These findings challenge the dominant exogenous explanation that distortions in the digital public sphere – such as fake news — are brought about by external state-sponsored actors. Rather, the internal economic logic of social media – namely the fact that the business models rely on the advertising industry and on attention economy dynamics – triggers and brings about effects like mass production of fake news. Building on his work on the Philippines, Ong has further sharpened this endogenous perspective and developed it into a research programme (Grohmann and Ong Reference Grohmann and Ong2024).
Critique of the approaches
Both approaches — the exogenous and the endogenous — show some shortcomings. Concerning the properties of the digital public sphere, the exogenous approaches start from far-reaching theoretical assumptions — drawing on an abstract analysis of the technical qualities of social media and idealistic (liberal) assessments of human nature — that social media create an inherently democratic new space (cyberspace). The approach of attributing all undemocratic features to state intervention reinforces a predefined fundamental suspicion against state structures and immunises a (neo-)liberal worldview.
The analysis of Cabañes and Ong (2018) and Grohmann and Ong (Reference Grohmann and Ong2024), on the other hand, is characterised by an empirical and deductive approach, in which, however, very far-reaching generalisations are derived from an empirical sub-area. It appears that their theoretically elegant generalisation is slightly oversimplifying the picture. It rests on a conception of human beings as interest-seeking actors, close to the assumptions of rational-choice theories.
Indeed, for both perspectives it can be said that they grant the actors very little agency. In the exogenous approach, they are conceptualised as compromised state agents. In the endogenous perspective, they are agents subjected to the logic of the system. In the empirical field, however, examples can be found that indicate that the intention and political position of the actors do play a role - perhaps even an important one. In Thailand, right-wing vigilante groups, such as the Rubbish Collector Organisation (Schaffar Reference Schaffar2016, Reference Schaffar, Chachavalpongpun, Hewison, Streckfuss, Chambers and Sopranzetti2019), have formed around the government-sponsored CyberScouts (Saksith Reference Saiyasombut2020), which pursue right-wing, conservative-royalist agendas and attack people who express criticism of the monarchy on the internet. These vigilante, paramilitary groups were formed and are working without being commissioned by the authorities. They are created in the digital sphere — they do not exist outside it — and they operate there. And they are motivated by their political convictions. Nizaruddin (Reference Nizaruddin2021, Reference Nizaruddin and IRGAC2022a, Reference Nizaruddinb) presents findings which point in the same direction at the example of what she calls the ecosystem of hate. With this concept, she captures a complex amalgam of ideological conviction, and state-sponsored and private income opportunities. These examples indicate that the digital public sphere created by social media is a place of ideological and political struggle. In this struggle, depending on the political convictions of the actors, even fundamental rights and democratic norms themselves are sometimes attacked. No democratic structures and rules are written into the digital public sphere. Rather, this sphere can and eventually does become an arena of fascist mobilisation and political violence (Schaffar Reference Schaffar2016, Reference Schaffar, Chachavalpongpun, Hewison, Streckfuss, Chambers and Sopranzetti2019).
Another example of the importance of political conviction and agenda is click-farming in Myanmar (Min Htin Kyaw Lat and Lieke Fröberg Reference Lat and Fröberg2025). The authors show how pro-democracy activists use the algorithms and structures of advertising finance to generate income to support democratic resistance. In doing so, they show that the economic logic of click-farming, as emphasised and generalised by Grohmann and Ong (Reference Grohmann and Ong2024), is used and applied by actors purposefully and not as actors subject to blind systemic material logics.
Against the backdrop of such examples, it needs to be stated that the existing literature has not yet arrived at convincing insights regarding the relationship between platformisation and the rise of authoritarianism — particularly with respect to its political consequences. Grohmann and Ong (Reference Grohmann and Ong2024) have opened up a new dimension of the debate and go so far as to argue that authoritarianism emerges naturally from the hidden forces of the market and the conditions of material reproduction on social media. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s powerful concept of the “banality of evil” (Arendt Reference Arendt1963), they characterise how the actions of individual users may be opportunistic, yet collectively can give rise to a form of totalitarianism. The question of whether the logic inherent in the conditions of production automatically — that is, structurally —produces totalitarianism or authoritarianism is repeatedly overlooked in most other studies (Roberts and Oosterom Reference Roberts and Oosterom2024).
Moreover, many debates on the relationship between social media and authoritarianism can be characterised by their tendency to take the offline world, with its political institutions, for granted and then examine the penetration of social media to determine whether and to what extent it authoritatively transforms these institutions or — more commonly claimed — hybridises them. This perspective remains dominant today, for example in Simpeng and Tapsell’s (2024) assessment of the influence of digitalisation. Such a view normally assumes a high degree of agency and political responsibility on the part of individual influential actors, while overlooking the systemic nature of authoritarianism, which does not derive from individual responsibility but from the cumulative effect of many small actions. It is also evident in very recent contributions to the debate in Thailand, such as Pavin’s (2025) intervention, where he appeals to influencers not to allow themselves to be guided by platform mechanisms.
Ultimately, this debate is both highly relevant and deeply contested in light of the broader question of how to curb the ever-growing influence of authoritarianism. Policies that see the responsibility on the side of platform companies emphasise strong content moderation — such as deleting hate speech according to defined standards or deactivating entire profiles. Such policies stand in tension with calls for stronger state regulation, including proposals such as banning social media use for younger users (Strömel and Watzinger Reference Strömel and Watzinger2025). This debate has become increasingly complex due to the rise to power of libertarian-minded owners of major technology companies in the United States. Against this backdrop, and in light of accusations from the US administration directed, for example, at the EU accusing it of censorship and the suppression of the emancipatory potential of free speech on social media, the question raised here has re-emerged with renewed intensity and controversy.
However, there is little indication of regulatory approaches that address the systemic logic of social media itself and seek to intervene in fundamental structures, such as the advertising-financed business model.
Platformisation as a Link between the Material World of Life and Reproduction and Political Discourse / Public Sphere
In addition to the limitations discussed above, both perspectives have in common that they conceptualise the political system and social media as separate systems/social spheres. Social media are conceptualised as external tools that people engage with in their leisure time or for political purposes — similar to the media such as newspapers read in the café or television watched at home, where political opinions are assumed to be formed. This perspective follows Habermas’s seminal work on the public sphere (Habermas Reference Habermas1962). Within this framework, the sphere of material reproduction, the world of labour, in which individuals are embedded in economic and social relations, struggle over income and life chances, and form political positions through these everyday struggles — this world of material reproduction is conceptualised as distinct from the sphere of (digital) public discourse.Footnote 3
The central thesis of this paper is that it is no longer possible to separate the world of material reproduction and the world of public discourse shaped by social media, and conceptualised the two worlds as different spheres. Social media and platforms are no longer just media — they have themselves increasingly become a means of work and production. In large sectors of the economy there has been a structural change in recent years, which can be described by the term platformisation (cf Amsterdam School, Poell et al. Reference Poell, Nieborg and van Dijck2019; van Doorn et al. Reference van Doorn, Fabian and Graham2022). The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this development considerably. In the service sector, large platforms such as Uber have transformed taxi services, Airbnb or booking.com have revolutionised the hotel sector, and numerous platforms compete in organising delivery services for the distribution of consumption goods or food. In the countries of South-East Asia, this development is even more advanced than in Europe, and has also taken hold of large parts of the informal sector: in Bangkok, for example, motorbike taxis are now organised by platforms (Sopranzetti Reference Sopranzetti2021). Large transnational platforms like Alibaba and Amazon have conquered the market for consumer goods and the provision of all kinds of services.
Platformisation has led to a situation in which the same media channels that we use for communication and social exchange are also increasingly shaping our world of material reproduction, and thus a logic of algorithmic control is shaping and revolutionising our working life. This is why it is no longer possible to maintain a separation between the world of material reproduction and the public sphere. The platform has become the workplace — it replaces the factory and the office. It is here that material reproduction takes place and that economic exploitation is experienced, e.g. in the form of anonymous algorithms that dictate working time. Platforms are therefore the place where economic questions and questions of reproduction come to a head, and at the same time they are the arena of social exchange where friendships are cultivated, and a decisive part of the public sphere, political positions are negotiated and political mobilisation takes place. With platformisation, the world of material reproduction and the (digital) public sphere have become interwoven through labour and effectively.
Operaist Approaches
The emergence of Operaism
Operaism is a school of thought based on similar considerations. It emerged in Italy in the 1960s, partly as a result of the dissonance between the theoretically and ideologically founded expectations regarding social and political developments and the social struggles that could actually be observed (Rudolph Reference Rudolph2012; Wright 2005; Götz Reference Götz2020). The founding generation of Operaist intellectuals, like Raniero Panzieri, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti and Romano Alquati took this dissonance as a starting point to engage more directly with workers involved in social struggle workers again and to renew their diagnosis of the times and analysis of the political situation. The thesis was that those working in factories possess the most direct understanding of the central functions and mechanisms of exploitation within the capitalist system.
The thesis of this paper is that the current situation of platformisation of the world of material reproduction confronts us with challenges similar to those that led to the emergence of the Operaist programme in Italy. A technological revolution — namely digitalisation and platformisation — has led to a change in labour and management regimes. The term platfom fix — referring to platformisation as a reaction to the 2008 crisis and the Covid-19 crisis — is used by Wang et al. (Reference Wang, Xu and Liu2022), Kuang et al. (Reference Kuang, Yeung, Wang and Tong2024) and critically discussed by Schaupp (Reference Schaupp2022), Van Doorn (Reference van Doorn2022) and Kassem and Piletić (Reference Kassem and Piletić2026). These authors show that in the wake of the crises, investments were channelled into managerial techniques instead of technical innovation, leading to increased exploitation of workers. Robles (Reference Robles2024) and Franco and Robles (Reference Franco, Robles and IRGAC2022) point to the entanglement of platformisation and authoritarian neoliberalism. At the same time, we are witnessing political mobilisations emerging within the world of platforms whose organisation, ideological orientation and specific goals continue to elude existing knowledge and analysis — for which we still lack adequate conceptual tools (and therefore election outcomes appear increasingly unpredictable and political protest more eruptive and volatile — as mentioned above). Against this background — and together with the recognition that the sphere of material reproduction and the public sphere have become increasingly intertwined through platformisation — it seems only logical to turn empirically to the workers and investigate these developments using methods of empirical social science.
These considerations are not new. In fact, Operaism already underwent a renaissance at the turn of the millennium — especially in relation to digitalisation developments. Post-Operaism and digital workerism are particularly noteworthy here.
Post-Operaism and immaterial labour
Post-Operaism emerged in the aftermath of the suppression of the radical workers’ protests and strikes of the 1960s and the criminalisation of central thinkers of Operaism in Italy after 1977. Rather then focusing on factory labour, Negri and others now expanded their analysis to include other forms of labour, such as affective labour and knowledge labour. This shift provided concepts and theoretical resources for feminist, autonomous and other social movements of the 1970s and 1980s and contributed to the development of a theoretical framework for a comprehensive analysis of social reproduction. Through this extension of economic analysis to encompass wider spheres of social action, and particularly through the concept of immaterial labour, Post-Operaism became a central source of inspiration for analyses of the globalised and digitalised economy of the unipolar world that emerged after the collapse of socialism (Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2003, Reference Hardt and Negri2004).Footnote 4
Hardt and Negri’s argument that communication, knowledge, and affects are becoming increasingly important for contemporary capitalism at the expense of traditional industrial labour leads to a rather optimistic prognosis. According to this perspective, the erosion of the separation between producers and means of production, together with the integration of the workers’ subjectivity into the production process, results in a socialisation of production and an increasing empowerment of workers. This utopian perspective draws empirically on phenomenona such as digital nomads and knowledge workers. These forms of work appear to demonstrate that labour has become increasingly independent of the means of production, as computers are widely available at relatively low cost and internet access enables near-costless communication. In this view, workers’ dependence on the means of production would gradually diminish and quasi-communist conditions could emerge.
By contrast, Sözen’s (Reference Sözen2024, Reference Sözen and Kubicek2025) research on affective labour and emotional landscape of activism arrives at a more pessimistic and nuanced assessment of the emancipatory potential of platformisation, care work and self-determination. Negri (Reference Negri, Chandler and Fuchs2019), however, reaffirmed this expectation in a recent article, arguing that fixed capital may be appropriated through processes of far-reaching digitalisation. Here, he refers to the functioning of algorithms, which learn only through the mass participation of users and can therefore – according to Negri – ultimately be controlled by the masses. The experience of the increasing platformisation of work in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, however, should be incorporated into the empirical basis of analysis and may lead to a less optimistic outlook.
Digital workerism
Separate from this somewhat metaphysical line of thought, which places the concept of immaterial labour at the centre, another strand of Post-Operaism emerged that — in a more classical sense — returns attention to concrete labour and focuses on a different set of empirical developments. Platformisation has led not only to a reorganisation of knowledge work, but also of more material and concrete forms of labour, such as the delivery of goods and food as well as other forms of low-skilled work. In their analyses, Schaupp (Reference Schaupp2022) and van Doorn et al. (Reference van Doorn, Fabian and Graham2022) argue that the algorithms used by the platforms to organise work and replace personalised forms of management result in intensified worker surveillance and a significant increase in exploitation. In this respect, based on their empirical findings, they arrive at a different diagnosis from Negri (Reference Negri, Chandler and Fuchs2019), who identifies in algorithmic systems such as these employed by Google the potential for an appropriation of the means of production and an empowerment of workers. This perspective also forms the starting point for studies in Digital Workerism, which, in the spirit of classical Operaism, employ transdiciplinary empirical social research to investigate the effects of platformisation, algorithmic labour organisation, and labour intensification as well as struggles that emerge in response to these developments (Englert et al. Reference Englert, Woodcock and Cant2020; Woodcock Reference Woodcock2021).
The two lines of development of Post-Operaism — the strand centred on immaterial labour and the appropriation of fixed capital, and the more classical orientation of Digital Workerism with its focus on sites of intervention — provide concepts and analytical tools for understanding the forms of political mobilisation in a platformised economy.
Empirical Examples
One example that demonstrates both the agency of political actors and the embeddedness of political decisions and positions within complex life contexts and processes of material reproduction is the world of influencers.
When examining influencers, we can follow Ong and Cabañes (Reference Ong and Cabañes2018) who analyse the key role played by influencers in the creation and dissemination of polarising political messages and identify the logic of the attention economy as the driving force behind this process. Similarly, in Ong and Cabañes (Reference Ong and Cabañes2019), the authors argue that the logic of monetising one’s own profile — following the reasoning of homo economicus — created incentives for the production of polarising content. Taken together, these individual economic decisions contribute to a machinery of political polarisation and may facilitate the emergence of authoritarian regimes. The agency of the individual lies in the seemingly banal decision to retweet or publish a radical or inflammatory post; the resulting authoritarian deus ex machina reflects the “banality of evil” (Grohmann and Ong Reference Grohmann and Ong2024).
Thailand offers an interesting and instructive field of investigation, due to the processes and developments discussed above: The saturation of society with social media has led to entire economic sectors emerging on these platforms. With YouTube, TikTok and Instagram now serving as the primary platform for film consumption, traditional media such as television and radio have largely lost their function as advertising spaces.Footnote 5 This has been replaced by communication through social media, giving rise to a market worth approximately US $1.4 billion for influencers and content creators (The Nation 2025).
There are conflicting reports regarding the number of influencers in Thailand. Conservative estimates suggest that the figure may reach three million in 2025, representing an increase of one million compared to the previous year. Although exact numbers remain contested, analysts agree that the market has expanded significantly and is expected to continue growing. Influencer income typically derives from advertising banners, direct product placements, and other promotional activities. Earnings depend directly on the earned media value (EMV) — a key performance indicator based on metrics such as follower count and sustained and authentic audience engagement . Estimates suggest that so-called nano-influencers with 1,000–5,000 followers earn approximately US$90–150 per post, while macro-influencers (500,000–1 million followers) earn between US$900 and US$3,000 per post (The Nation 2025)
This billion-dollar influencer economy, which has emerged on social media, is also gaining political significance. In the nano- and micro-influencer segments, individuals often seek to increase their market value by generating clicks and subscribers through controversial content and clickbait strategies. Highly polarizing material tends to attract greater engagement, and this economic logic of visibility can inadvertently reinforce political polarisation. The dynamics which are documented in the study by Ong and Cabañes (Reference Ong and Cabañes2018) can be observed in Thailand at the example of recent developments.
The following examples are drawn from an empirical research projects on political mobilisation on social media.Footnote 6
Within this project, several influencers from Thailand have been followed since 2013. Over the years, different individuals emerged within the social media landscape. Some gained only short-term prominence, while others remained influential while moving across platforms and adapting their styles over time in response to evolving technical affordances.
Initially, the project focused on political activists on social media who gained prominence during and after the 2013–2014 protests of the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) in Thailand, and later following the coup d’état in Thailand in May 2014. However, at that time, the individuals we followed — such as Rienthong Nanna on Facebook or several content creators on YouTube — could, to some extent, be understood as influencers avant la lettre. The term influencer, understood as an individual who earns a living by content creation and income generated either through brand collaborations or through the monetisation of followers, only became widely used later, particularly from 2020 onwards (Hund Reference Hund2023). The activities of the individuals we followed were documented through screenshots using the walkthrough method. In addition, approximately ten in-depth interviews were conducted with influencers between 2015 and 2025.
When we examine the influencers who have recently established themselves in Thailand’s emerging market and their role in the country’s political development, however, a complex picture emerges, which illustrates the debate outlined above. The argument is that only a labour turn — in the sense of placing the material reproduction of the influencers and their audience in the centre of analysis — can provide insight to the strong effects, which have recently become apparent.
Particularly striking are those influencers who, similar to the Duterte supporters studied by Ong and Cabañes (Reference Ong and Cabañes2018, Reference Ong and Cabañes2019) or the “hate entrepreneurs” studies by Nizaruddin (Reference Nizaruddin2021) operate according to the internal economic logic of the platform ecosystems. In the current conjuncture, they appear to exert a significant influence on the political situation, which became particularly visible in connection with the Thai Cambodian border conflict.
At the end of July 2025, minor incidents along the border between Thailand and Cambodia escalated into an armed conflict. Border disputes are not new, however, in the past they had almost without exception been resolved through diplomatic channels. One of the major achievements of ASEAN regional integration—comparable in this respect to the EU—has been that, since its founding, interstate conflicts have generally not escalated into military confrontation. Against this backdrop, the outbreak of armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia represents a seismic shift not only for this specific dispute but for the region more broadly. Influencers are reported to have played a role in the escalation to the extent that the war has sometimes been referred to as an “influencer war” (Keeton-Olsen Reference Keeton-Olsen2025). Numerous influencers addressed the conflict as a central theme and, through their posts, fuelled nationalist debates surrounding the border demarcation. They also expanded the debate beyond this issue, actively mobilising against Cambodian migrant workers. For example, Reels showing Tae Achiwat, an influencer, tracking down undocumented workers and facilitating their deportation circulated widely on social media (Kim and Kamino Reference Kim and Takehiro2025; Siradakul Reference Siradakul2026). These activities—together with the election propaganda of the Phumjai Thai Party—helped make the issue a central topic of the parliamentary election in Thailand in early 2026 and contributed to the unexpected victory of the nationalist Phumjai Thai Party.
Some influencers have placed such a strong emphasis on their activism that they have not only staged anti-Cambodian actions domestically but have also traveled to the conflict zone, had their photos taken with soldiers, and—in some cases—initiated actions that border on active combat operations. Gun Jompalang a prominent example that has received considerable attention. He provided military equipment to the soldiers while circumventing the official command chain, and independently arranged for containers to be installed as a border blockade. He also had loudspeakers set up at the border playing dog and ghost howls (Lamb Reference Lamb2025; Surachanee Reference Sriyai2025).
Influencers like Gun Jompalang and Tae Achiwa have thus become celebrities. Gun’s rise from noodle soup vendor in a street stall to an influencer with more than eight million followers across various platforms is closely linked to his involvement in anti-Cambodian agitation, which is the sole focus of his online presence. Praiwan Wannabut, on the other hand, has over 500,000 followers on YouTube and addresses the conflict alongside other topics with which he is more broadly associated. In his case, it is precisely the absence of a stable alignment with militaristic and nationalist discourses that renders his recent positioning legible as an opportunistic articulation within an emergent discursive trend. This suggests that the circulation of such content is less a matter of ideological consistency than of strategic engagement with attention economies, in which the generation of revenue operates as a structuring incentive. (Chachavalpongpun Reference Chachavalpongpun2025, Thai PBS 2025).
Drawing on Ong and Cabañes (Reference Ong and Cabañes2018, Reference Ong and Cabañes2019), who identify the precariousness of employment conditions as a key structuring factor shaping lower- and mid-tier influencer practices, and on Nizaruddin (Reference Nizaruddin2021), who analyses the petty economic rationality underpinning the ecosystem of hate, it can be argued that influences practices are embedded within the regimes of material reproduction that function as central motivational and disciplinary logics.
These examples, which support the perspective of Grohmann and Ong (Reference Grohmann and Ong2024), initially appear to contrast sharply with other influencers who operate from abroad yet have become highly influential. Among the macro- and mega-influencers, however, there are also figures who remain embedded in the profit-driven logic of platform economies while advancing alternative progressive political agendas. One such example is Nat Klinmalee, known as Farose, who produces podcasts on historical and cultural topics on YouTube from his base in Paris and has received several awards as an educational influencer (Saengchai Reference Saengchai2025). Across his podcast series, which has over one million of subscribers on Youtube alone, he also gives a voice to Thai dissidents in exile and thus implicitly addresses the broader issue of democratic backsliding in Thailand.
Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a former diplomat, professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, and outspoken political activist, extends this approach further. On his YouTube channel, Pavin Official, he combines travel narratives with interviews featuring political activists in exile, who openly speak about their experiences of persecution in Thailand, including judicial injustice and physical violence and torture in custody. By linking the consumerist aspirations of Thailand’s middle class with the appeal of long-distance travel, Pavin connects lifestyle content with political mobilisation, reaching millions of viewers. This popularity also enables him to finance his work as an influencer, effectively establishing a model of a political influencer-cum-scholar celebrity (Panlee Reference Panlee2024).
At first glance, these influencers appear to constitute a counterexample to a systemic perspective, insofar as their dissident political orientations seem to indicate a higher degree of agency and to run counter to the attention economy’s tendency to reward polarisation. However, I argue that they can also be interpreted differently. Rather than existing outside the system, they illustrate a process of co-evolution between an influencer business model and a political positioning, which can be understood through the working conditions and social circumstances of both producers and audiences.
One of the centres where influencers are currently active is Paris and draws on a specific milieu. This milieu consists, first, of young, middle-class individuals who studied European Studies or other humanities and social science disciplines in Thailand and subsequently remained in France during or after their studies abroad. A second group comprises political activists who fled Thailand following the 2014 coup. Both groups occupy relatively precarious positions in the French labour market. They participate in the expanding platformised economy—either in the service sector or, drawing on their academic backgrounds, as content creators in marketing-related segments of the French luxury or tourism industries. In this context, they acquire fluency in social media marketing and platform-specific communication strategies.
These influencers target mobile, consumption-oriented middle-class youth as their primary audience — young people who also constituted the dominant social group in the 2020–2021 democracy protests in Thailand and who now form the core electorate of new liberal parties such as the Future Forward Party, the Move Forward Party, and the People’s Party. The success of influencers like Farose lies in their ability to appeal to the wanderlust, cosmopolitan outlook, global orientation, and intellectual curiosity of middle-class youth. Farose’s academic background in European Studies further enhances his credibility, positioning him as a knowledgeable intermediary.
Influencers such as Farose engage their audiences on multiple levels. They repackage academic knowledge in an informal and accessible style that contrasts sharply with the hierarchical structures of the Thai university system — hierarchies that were a central target of criticism and a key catalyst for the 2020–2021 democracy protests. In addition, protesters frequently criticised the economic incompetence and conservative provincialism of the military government. Influencers’ travel narratives resonate with the unfulfilled cosmopolitan aspirations and sense of economic stagnation experienced by many young people in Thailand. Finally, these influencers often include portraits of political activists who have fled the country — frequently individuals from their immediate social circles. This personalisation transforms travel reports and lifestyle content into implicitly political statements, and ultimately into a form of political manifesto.
From this angle, the political positioning of progressive, pro-democratic influencers who are active from abroad can be explained in relation to their working and living conditions, as well as the aspirations of their audience. What emerges is the formation of a political subjectivity among online content workers shaped by precarious labour in a foreign country. These actors learn to appropriate the tools of marketing and repurpose them strategically to align with both audience tastes and political imaginaries. This perspective lends support to Post-Operaist expectations regarding influencers, understood as knowledge workers within the digitalised economy.
Conclusion
Empirical work in the Southeast Asian region is the starting point of the conceptual considerations here. This region was chosen because its penetration of social media places it among global leaders in this regard. It shows a steep decline in democratic practices and at the same time strong pro-democracy movements. This makes it a centre of precisely the political phenomena at issue here.
However, the thesis, namely that labour relations and the conditions of material reproduction should be placed at the centre in order to conceptualise the relationship between digitalisation and democracy/authoritarianism, is based on a culturally and regionally independent concept of labour. In our understanding, specific labour relations in Southeast Asia are primarily characterised by increased exploitation, the degree of informality, and the impact of digitalisation on these dimensions of the labour relations. This is not something specific to Southeast Asia, but a characteristic of labour relations in the Global South in general. Through platformisation, such labour relations have also become the norm in many countries of the Global North — especially for migrants from regions like Southeast Asia, who are working in European cities.
Starting from labour relations suggests that the concepts we develop here are not regionally localisable or culturally specific. We are not taking a post-colonial perspective and juxtaposing findings in Southeast Asia with studies and concepts from Europe or other global centres, or from other regions of the Global South. Nor should our work be understood as an emic reconstruction of local perceptions of democracy and authoritarianism in the sense of an anthropological or cultural and social-anthropological approach.
To begin with, our perspective leads to a specific reading of the concept technoenvironment. Following the core ideas as summarised in Kurfürst and Padmanabhan (this volume), the public — in the political science sense of the concept — can be perceived and reinterpreted as such assemblages of technical artefacts and humans, whose (political) subjectivity is the result of a co-constituting process. From this angle, digitalisation and the penetration of society with social media appears not so much as a revolutionary technical innovation, but as a process of co-evolution — also related to the constructivist strands of science and technology studies (Bauer et al. Reference Bauer, Heinemann and Lemke2017). However, this line of argumentation does not necessarily lead to the de-democratisation anticipated by Swyngedouw (Reference Swyngedow2010). Introducing the central notion of labour into the equation and identifying it as the anchor of the entire process of co-constitution of political subjectivities, digitalisation and plaformisation is not predicted to lead to a depoliticisation, but to a new constellation and articulation of the political.
Rather, the examination of phenomena in Southeast Asia — on the basis of the concept of labour proposed here — promises interesting insights from a regional studies perspective in other respects. On the one hand, it can be observed that the particularly high penetration of Southeast Asian societies with social media and the high degree of platformisation of the economy has given the region an avant-garde role, or that of an experimental laboratory. The study can bring to light developments and structures that we can expect to see in the industrialised ‘Western’ world, albeit with a time lag. In this respect, studies in Southeast Asia can sharpen our view on certain developments in Europe and understand them as ‘Southeast Asian’ developments in our region. This perspective draws on the critical use of the term ‘Global South’, which rests on a deterritorialised conceptualisation of political economy (Mahler Reference Mahler2018). It is inspired by approaches like Benedict Anderson’s (Reference Anderson1983) seminal work on nationalism, who developed the concept of “imagined communities” on the basis of data from Southeast Asia as a strong concept to understand European nationalism. On a secondary note, this perspective could possibly create points of intersection with the project of “provincialising Europe” (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2008).
On the other hand, a second perspective also opens up, which points into a different direction. The particularly strong penetration of social media, in combination with informal working conditions and weak regulatory capacity of the state, may result in a special form of labour relations and political regimes in Southeast Asia, which reproduce and reinforce global inequality. From this perspective, the concepts discussed here promise insights into the articulation of global inequality relations that were established in colonial times and are further reinforced by modern technological developments. Such discussions are oriented towards approaches of Global History — or those that, in the spirit of World Systems Theory or post-colonial theory, understand specific social formations as the articulation of peripheral or subaltern positions vis-à-vis the economic and political centres. Both perspectives discussed here can be understood as part of a New Area Studies project (Derichs and Schaffar Reference Derichs and Schaffar2025; Houben Reference Houben2020).
Declaration on the use of AI
I have used AI tools in the writing process of this text solely for proofreading purposes such as spellcheck, finding alternative stylistic expressions and checking grammar. No part of the text was generated by AI tools. The final proofreading was done by the author him/herself.
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