Alienated labor in mukbang on short-video platforms: a Marxist perspective

Mukbang is a popular genre on short-video platforms, yet it has increasingly given rise to aberrant practices marked by excessive eating, fake eating, and other unhealthy dietary behaviors. Twenty-first-century capitalism has found an efficient organizational form: the platform. Platforms monopolize data, a core factor of production, and mobilize them to serve capital accumulation. For streamers, eating becomes digital labor; for audiences, viewing becomes playbour. From a Marxist perspective, labor dominated by capitalism is inevitably alienated labor. Streamers experience a dual estrangement from their bodily instincts and creative autonomy, whereas audiences experience alienation through data-producing playbour. The aberrations of mukbang are rooted in platform capital’s profit-seeking logic. Mukbang distorts the most basic human activity of eating, and its harms extend beyond food waste and cybersecurity to human dignity itself.