The poster boys of aspirational labor: parables of success and failure in The Viral Fever’s web shows

Abstract Aspirational labor has been understood by scholars based in the Global North to encapsulate a form of labor undertaken by social media content creators that is mostly uncompensated for, but is, nonetheless, integral to the functioning of its economy. While this dominant theorization of aspirational labor is sometimes helpful for explaining the precarity of digital media labor in countries of the Global South, its uncritical application could also be severely limiting. I undertake a close textual analysis of select web shows created by the entertainment brand and YouTube content creators The Viral Fever (TVF) to demonstrate how it would be imprecise to see them as just victims of an exploitative economy. My article shows how TVF web shows consistently imagine elaborate cinematic narratives that valorize and embody the neoliberal values of aspiration and individual growth that in turn is complicit in the machinations of platform economy’s extractive affordances.