The birth of Baokuan: Human-machine “gambling games” between villages and algorithms

Abstract

Since 2009, rural China has gradually developed a new livelihood model in which families produce goods in small home-based workshops and sell them via online stores on e-commerce platforms. This article explores how rural e-commerce merchants in Daiji Town engage with platform recommendation algorithms to promote “Baokuan” (explosively popular products) for high sales. In this process, rural networks, local entrepreneurial cultures, and informal theories of algorithmic behavior are mobilized in collective attempts to manipulate digital visibility and platform rankings. Drawing on the conceptual framework of algorithmic imaginaries and folk theories, I argue that algorithmic capitalism’s extraction over digital laborers in e-commerce villages is sustained through cultivating sellers’ algorithmic imaginaries that they can manipulate algorithmic outcomes with their knowledge of e-commerce operation. It drives sellers to constantly invest labor, capital, and attention in platform-defined success metrics, reinforcing their dependency on opaque algorithmic logics and deepening their dispossession within the digital economy.