Platform Workshippers is a research-based project that maps the blurred boundaries between labor, control, and visibility within centralized social media platforms. It explores how users become both subjects and agents of participatory control, alternating between an active peer interaction and subject of wider systemic surveillance, and engage in invisible forms of free labor while navigating the tension between exposure and self-preservation.
The work merges the compass diagram, a critical tool for mapping user positions, with the mystic Tree of Life, both reimagined as a cosmology of the digital world structure and the users' souls. Through a selection of ‘Workshippers’ archetypes, this hybrid symbolic system reflects the ritualized and mystified structure of platform labor, revealing how the pursuit of attention, influence, and monetization often mirrors acts of esoteric devotion.
The neologism ‘Workshippers’, a fusion of words “worship” and “work”, highlights the emotional and spiritual dimensions of digital labor, where personal life becomes indistinguishable from productivity, and the self is continually offered up to the algorithm in a cycle of exploitative rituals.
The project was developed within the framework of the AMRO Research Lab 2023, organized by servus.at.
✹ Main exhibition @ Esoteric Ecotechnics. Irrational Computation and Conspiratorial Networking
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S()fia Braga is an Italian transmedia artist based in Vienna. Her work investigates the uses and misuses of new technologies to craft speculative fabulations that explore themes such as human and non-human collaboration, non-human agency, and transhumanism. In parallel, Braga’s research examines the concept of Interveillance, uncovering the hidden power dynamics embedded in the operational structures of centralized social media platforms and their sociological implications.
