Abstract
Recent scholarship has been critiquing the urban bias in platform research, calling for greater attention to how rural specificities shape rural platformization. Addressing this gap, this article explores how particularities of a rural territory interact with dynamics of platform economies and shape platform labor. Based on a case study in a rural Andean village in southern Chile, DeLanda's assemblage theory is employed to explore the situated interplay between place-assemblages of a rural periphery and incoming platform assemblages. Alongside the labor realities of platform workers, the findings reveal how algorithms and hardware logistics deterritorialize established labor relations, introducing unregulated and hybrid modes of platform labor. Simultaneously, ecological constraints, place-based meanings of livelihoods, and practices of more-than-human conviviality reterritorialize platform labor to fit into situated ecologies. The simultaneity of deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes outlines nonlinear and multifaceted rural platform trajectories, hinging on the diverse interactions of individual components of place and platform assemblages. These findings highlight how human and nonhuman rural components shape platform expansion, framing rural areas as more-than-human networked peripheries that actively navigate their place in the global platform economy. The article contributes a nuanced understanding of the expansion of platform economies as an interactive rather than solely extractive process.
Introduction
With the proliferation of platform economies, digital scholarship has intensified around rural tourism and the sale of rural products facilitated by platforms such as Instagram and Airbnb that combine social media and marketplaces (Li, 2020; Senyao & Ha, 2022; Scolere et al., 2018). In urban studies, platform economies are often framed as tools for rural poverty alleviation and urbanization (Lin, 2019; Peng et al., 2021; Zhan et al., 2020), implicating an even expansion of platform capitalism across diverse and fragmented landscapes (Sadowski, 2020; Srnicek, 2017).
In recent years, scholars have identified an urban bias in platform research, calling for greater attention to how rural specificities shape platform expansion and labor (Vonk & Salter, 2024; Wang et al., 2022; Young, 2019; Zhang & Webster, 2024). This shift is particularly relevant for understanding the implications of platform labor on local labor realms that unfold beyond human–machine interactions (Gregory & Sadowski, 2021; Pettas, 2024; Roelofsen & Minca, 2018), invisibly linking platforms “that can seem placeless” and platform labor processes “that are indeed spatial and place-rooted” (Zhang & Webster, 2024, p. 122).
In the context of Chile, the proliferation of platform economies in remote rural areas assumes a particularly sensitive role. Chile's national state territory consists of 83% sparsely populated and heterogeneous natural terrain (ODEPA, 2021, p. 5), including extensive indigenous lands that remain contested by the state. Since the 1990s, rural tourism and conservation have been promoted as “the primary way to colonize the region and secure sovereignty” (Mendoza et al., 2017, p. 19). As a result, self-employed entrepreneurial relationships between residents and their environment emerged as an agile alternative to large-scale employers (Bustos-Gallardo, 2021). In Latin American discourses, such tensions and shifts are discussed under the market-driven subversion of indigenous and peasant livelihoods, established human–land relationships, and their resistances against these processes (Calderón et al., 2013; Kay, 2009; McCall et al., 2021; Sandoval et al., 2017). Today, platform economies further shape and reconfigure these territorial conflicts.
To shed light on more nuanced rural labor realities of platform economies, this article examines how platform-based tourism and commerce have unfolded in a remote, rural Andean village in southern Chile. Given the blurring conceptual lines between e-commerce and social commerce (Nacar & Ozdemir, 2022) and the use of multiple platforms in the case study village, these activities are referred to collectively as “platform economies.” Drawing on Latin American dependency theory and concepts of territory, the analysis employs assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2016, 2019) to grasp deterritorialization and reterritorialization as material and logistical processes that shape rural platform trajectories. Based on the labor realities of rural platform workers, the study focuses on their labor relations that engage with both platform dynamics and the rural environment. This article asks: How do the material dynamics of a rural territory shape local capacities to afford platform-based tourism and commerce? How is it sociomaterially navigated within the labor realities of platform workers?
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: I begin with a brief overview of the literature on platform-driven labor transformations and the Latin American neoliberalization of rural labor. The following chapter pairs Latin American dependency theory as theoretical framework with assemblage theory as an analytical lens, highlighting their shared understandings of deterritorialization and reterritorialization and how this can be applied to platform economies. This is followed by reflections on the methodology and an introduction to the case study. The analysis next examines three realms of platform labor: platform interactions, platform-generated labor, and residents’ ontological frameworks. These findings show how platform dynamics deterritorialize diverse established affective, material, and symbolic labor relations. Simultaneously, ecological constraints and social practices are evoking processes of reterritorialization through platform labor. Applying assemblage thinking, this paper thus highlights a complex platform–labor–territory nexus that informs larger structural dynamics between rural peripheries and the rest of the world, that has been largely overlooked in rural digital studies.
Literature review and theoretical framework
Platform economies and the neoliberalization of rural labor in Chile
While global platforms increasingly enable planetary labor markets, workers remain bound to locally embedded labor frameworks (Graham and Anwar, 2019). This is particularly the case in rural areas, where the boundaries between platform tourism and e-commerce are increasingly blurring with the use of social media in selling rural experiences and products (Li, 2020; Scolere et al., 2018; Senyao & Ha, 2022). Platforms are shown to influence both providers’ and clients’ behaviors to cater to algorithmic requirements (Ahmad & Laroche, 2017; Riemann et al., 2024). Due to their temporally fragmented and supplementary nature, as well as the volatility of an unregulated market, discourses on platform labor in tourism and commerce often intersect with gig work and its labor relations (Solanki, 2024; Stryzhak et al., 2025). Accordingly, scholars of platform labor have been critically exploring the expansion of algorithmic power into place-based labor realms (Gregory & Sadowski, 2021) and spatial labor segmentation (Woodcock & Graham, 2020).
To conceptualize those labor segmentations, Pettas (2024) outlines the notion of platform-generated labor to describe labor realms only indirectly connected to digital interactions. While often outsourced in urban settings, in rural areas, such performative and bodily tasks are commonly performed by the same provider, combining matters of digital visibility with embodied practices (Roelofsen & Minca, 2018; Yu & Cui, 2019). Platforms and their algorithms, through ever-evolving interfaces, thus reconfigure realms of intimacy, such as personal communication and expression into invisible streams of monetized labor (Busalim & Hussin, 2016; Hajli & Sims, 2015). This is particularly documented regarding platform-generated and place-based labor processes, through which affective and reproductive practices are capitalized on within platform economies (van Doorn, 2017). These transformations not only redefine situated labor relations but also intensify “processes of precarisation and informalisation” (Pettas, 2024, p. 2) in rural tourism and commerce.
At the same time, these platform economies contribute to broader structural changes in rural environments that mirror reconfiguring labor relations on individual levels: in urban studies, platform economies are often associated with rural urbanization, industrialization (Lin, 2019), and the expansion of sociotechnical infrastructures to afford streamlined mass production to yield higher outputs (Wang et al., 2022). However, while these observations feed into trajectories of urban development and poverty alleviation, they also fuel displacement, unregulated economic competition, and individualized precarity (Farías & Cancino, 2021; Leong et al., 2016; Pulignano et al., 2024). This is evidenced by escalating land and labor prices, widening power asymmetries between commercial and individual platform stakeholders, and looming environmental degradation (Chen & Kong, 2021), highlighting how the material circumstances of platform labor also exacerbate new vulnerabilities.
In Chilean discourses on rural areas, these trajectories of market-driven encroachment are conceptualized as the neoliberalization of rural areas. This entails a fundamental shift from established lifestyles of communal landholding and subsistence farming to extensive privatization and global market policies (Calderón et al., 2013; Kay, 2015). Here, campesino and indigenous human–land relationships in rural areas juxtapose neoliberal market logistics that decontextualize and streamline labor into commodity chains (Schmidt & Rose, 2017). This has resulted in profoundly changing power dynamics in rural areas, the diversification of labor, and the intensification of rural pluriactivity (Kay, 2009). Since the Chilean government initiated large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors in the 1990s, today, rural areas have become embattled sites. They oscillate between extractivist landscapes of export resources and energy infrastructures (Hernando-Arrese & Rasch, 2022; Manuschevich et al., 2020) and tourism industries (Farías & Cancino, 2021; Serenari et al., 2017) tied to the conservation agendas of Private Protected Areas (Borrie et al., 2020).
Departing from trajectories of neoliberal usurpation, Latin American discourses interpret these dynamics through the lens of territorial formations, in which “territorially-anchored” groups navigate and resist “global forces” (Sandoval et al., 2017, p. 56). In southern Chile, the mountainous morphology of the Andes has been historically linked with obstructing infrastructural settler–colonial expansion (Nouzeilles, 1999). These perspectives also intersect with indigenous ontologies of more-than-human conviviality that shape human–land relationships and entangled livelihoods. Scholars of Andean studies critiqued the academic exoticization of such indigenous and peasant ontologies, ridding them of their transformative agency (Manuschevich et al., 2020; Rojas Bahamonde et al., 2020; Skewes, 2016). Concurrently, Chilean rural scholarship has identified the existence of particularly rural modes of digital engagement. Existing empirical evidence emphasizes place-specific strategies of digital disconnection to manage outside influences (Pavez et al., 2017) or the strategic use of social media platforms to assert territorial claims and cultural continuities (Durston et al., 2016; Maquera et al., 2022).
Globally, rural modes of engaging with platform economies reveal patterns that resist conventional neoliberal trajectories of urbanization (Lin, 2019). Rural platform workers do not necessarily seek to grow or professionalize and operate rather informally as a way to cope with the pressures of platform capitalism (Leick et al., 2024; Solanki, 2024; Stryzhak et al., 2025). This also speaks to how rural platform workers strategically leverage the decontextualizing and volatile logistics of platform economies and their interactive nature for flexible, supplementary income (Leick et al., 2022). Here, it is important to note that the very qualities that platform workers leverage are simultaneously associated with the stressors and precarities of platform labor (Riemann et al., 2024; Solanki, 2024; Xu et al., 2021). Founded on these tensions, scholars have been outlining the need to explore place-based components and agencies that shape distinct rural platform trajectories (Young, 2019; Zhang & Webster, 2024). To do so, it is necessary to look beyond sociotechnical and socioecological binaries toward situated interactions among platform dynamics, platform-generated labor, and human and nonhuman dynamics of a rural territory that unfold within the labor relations of platform workers.
Networked peripheries as assemblages
To grasp the logistical and material relationships between place- and platform-based dynamics, I draw on Latin American dependency theory and its understanding of territory (Kay, 1989; McCall et al., 2021; Quijano, 2000; Sandoval et al., 2017) as theoretical framework and assemblage theory as an analytical lens (DeLanda, 2016, 2019). Ultimately, I mobilize their related concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to explore nuanced labor processes amid platform expansion and their structural implications for rural areas.
Latin American dependency theory conceptualizes rural areas as peripheries and “spatial fixes” as a relative outcome of the exploitative capitalist logistics that affect the periphery differently than the core (Kay, 1989; Quijano, 2000). Building on this, Chan describes a distinctly peripheral mode of digital engagement in rural Peru, noting that “the dispersal of ICT has given actors at the periphery new capacities to pursue their own means to global connection and networked agency” that “take their own, unpredictable contours” (Chan, 2014, p. 19). Shifting the focus to materialities, however, Datta argues that “the digital has a territoriality that impacts the periphery” (Datta, 2024, p. 128), which unfolds at a logistical level. Drawing on research in India, she outlines informational peripheries as sites of policed access to digital information. These are operationalized as infrastructural landscapes that are vital for service provision in (urban) core areas. They therefore hinge on the fungibility of labor and territory to afford hegemonic infrastructures while simultaneously exerting exclusion and exploitation. Other scholars have highlighted how infrastructural disruptions in rural landscapes reveal tensions between global market logics and place-based practices that navigate one another. Lifestyles of “irrational consumption” (Arboleda, 2016, p. 238) exceed ecological limits and encounters with “irrational land” in rural Greece do “not allow someone who comes from afar to understand, to manage, to buy, and to sell it” (Markaki, 2023, p. 222), as human–land relationships are rooted in place-based practices of care.
Reflections on the territorial fungibility of peripheral landscapes and their ability to resist external logistics extend to the affordances of platform economies and also resonate with Latin American understandings of territories (Blanco et al., 2015; Haesbaert, 2013; Jaramillo, 2014; McCall et al., 2021). Recognizing territories as spaces in which “territorially-anchored” groups navigate “global forces” (Sandoval et al., 2017, p. 19), scholars noted that “the continuous cycles of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation constitute the basic rhythms of globalized capitalist society” (McCall et al., 2021, p. 21). Deterritorialization refers to externally driven transformations that decontextualize place-based material and cultural practices (McCall et al., 2021, p. 21). This equally mirrors how platform-generated labor mobilizes peripheral labor and materialities into global commodity chains (Arboleda, 2016; Datta, 2024; Pettas, 2024). Thinking through the periphery, “reterritorialization” can then be understood as auto-reterritorialization, in the sense of local resistances to externally driven transformational forces. Rather than restoring preneoliberal conditions, these processes create new situated knowledges and hybrid practices that have been enriched by “external influences and expertise in order to sustain the everyday life in their rural properties and households” (Quimbayo Ruiz, 2020, p. 10). This echoes Chan's (2014) notion of “networked peripheries,” shedding light on territorial agencies in global transformations.
While these concepts provide a macro lens on structural inequalities across core and peripheral areas, DeLanda's assemblage theory (2016) introduces a closely related and empirical micro-level perspective on local interactions and relations that shape these dynamics. To deploy a place-based perspective with a focus on labor processes, I conceptualize rural labor relations as place-assemblages (Dovey, 2020) that are continuously de- and reterritorialized by the expansion of platform economies.
Assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2016) understands territories as relational and emergent formations composed of heterogeneous human and nonhuman components, including materialities, affects, and symbolic institutions. Emphasizing interactions among these autonomous components, assemblages are inherently volatile and emergent. Building on DeLanda, Dovey (2020) conceptualized place-assemblages as geographical manifestations of assemblages that inform shape and identity of distinct places. Within place-assemblages, components are structured by forces of territorialization that exert a coherence of order within assemblages, stabilizing inner relations and manifesting spatial boundaries (DeLanda, 2019). Deterritorialization, conversely, disrupts these coherences, enabling emerging relations to form new assemblages. Analogously, DeLanda (2016) theorizes territorialization and deterritorialization alongside the processes of coding and decoding: While coding stabilizes expressive coherence among components toward territorialization, decoding disrupts it toward fluidity and emerging new assemblages. Hinging on each component's autonomous capacity to interact dynamically with other components, assemblage theory introduces a flat ontology in which hierarchies and binaries are opened to new trajectories. This is particularly useful for research on global–local relationships, as Woods et al. frame rural globalization as assemblages in “negotiation, contestation and hybridization” (2021, p. 9) with emerging translocal components. Such approaches are also crucial for understanding the dispersed and often invisible digital interactions of rural places with platform economies. Assemblage theory, thus, adds material and logistical nuance to the sociopolitical notion of autoreterritorialization (Quimbayo Ruiz, 2020) by extending it to heterogeneous and dynamic more-than-human components.
Given the multiple and dynamic nature of assemblages, this article focuses empirically on three realms of labor relations where platform- and place-based labor interact with each other: platform dynamics, platform-generated labor, and the ontological frameworks of platform workers.
Methodology and case study
Methodology
The paper draws on qualitative data as part of a four-year research project grounded in sociology and urban planning, examining the sociospatial dynamics of digital tertiary economies in peripheral and rural Chile and South Korea. Research in and on Chile was conducted from 2022 to 2023 and entailed a total of 29 interviews with experts, planners, and platform workers, alongside two months of fieldwork in 2022 in the selected Andean case study village. A coinvestigator from the Universidad de Concepción provided contextual depth and linguistic support to the semifluent author during the fieldwork. Data collection unfolded iteratively, using snowball sampling for interviews and participatory, ethnographic observations. While interviews provided structural and topical insights, ethnographic engagements as a research tourist offered embodied insights into the daily processes of Lihuen's assemblages (DeLanda, 2016). Initial contacts were graciously granted by an array of female planners, platform workers, and residents during the author's first weeks alone in the village. These connections possibly hinged on the author's positionality as a visibly migrant woman in her place of residence and on a shared belonging to mountainous countries marked by contested histories. Ethnographic engagements thus included spontaneous drop-ins for chats, daily chance encounters in the village, and shared walks to fulfil family tasks or just to visit local places. The ambiguity of the terms “platform economy” and “digitalization” enabled a comprehensive approach to Lihuen's platform labor, identifying key cases in rural tourism and commerce for data collection (Table 1). The significant impact of more-than-human territorial specificities on platform labor emerged inductively during fieldwork that spanned from the off- to the peak tourist season. This insight informed the sampling strategy and ultimately initiated this very paper.
List of interviewees and their platform work, including sociodemographic data.
Note: *In this case, both business owners were interviewed together as a result of the organic progression of the visit.
The analysis primarily builds on a subset of 12 problem-centered (Witzel, 2000) and three go-along interviews (Anderson, 2004), in which the impact of more-than-human components on platform labor reached a point of saturation. This was equally supported by cross-referencing ethnographic field notes and insights from external experts, underscoring the depth of conscious and embodied practices of the more-than-human ecosystem in platform labor. All other interviews and ethnographic observations are therefore used contextually. The data analysis follows principles of grounded theory as a tool for data processing, operating with structural, open, and selective coding (Glaser & Strauss, 1999), to support the application of assemblage thinking to the findings. All 15 interviews were conducted in Spanish, audio-recorded, transcribed, translated, and synonymized. The research was conducted according to established ethical standards, including informed consent and the option of withdrawing from the research at any time. For this paper, the case study village is referred to as “Lihuen.” Given the small interviewee group and the size of the village, aside from locations and details, the quotes used here are presented detached from the contextual data in Table 1.
Lihuen’s labor relations as place-assemblages
This section introduces Lihuen through its material, affective, and symbolic specificities by conceptualizing its labor relations as place-assemblages. This framing lays the foundation for the analyses of platform interactions, platform-generated labor, and ontological frameworks and their interplay with the territory through labor processes. DeLanda (2016) emphasizes the principle of exteriority, by which heterogeneous components can form in multiple relations with one another. This perspective enables the analysis to move beyond sociotechnological binaries toward a flat ontology of sociotechnical-ecological entanglements. It also accommodates emerging assemblages, such as the emerging labor relations of Airbnb and Instagram, within existing place-assemblages. Accordingly, this section traces how labor–territory relations, as expressions of Lihuen's place-assemblages, have coalesced over its history and formed logistical and material dynamics. Though outlined chronologically, these developments have unfolded through overlapping processes of territorialization and deterritorialization, producing contested reconfigurations within Lihuen's evolving place-assemblages.
Lihuen comprises a settlement of approximately 600 households and is located in the Andean ranges of southern Chile, surrounded by an endangered temperate rainforest. Until 2018, it was connected to the nearest city in 65 km, solely via a winding rubble road. This road is now smoothly paved. Situated within the Wallmapu, 1 the Mapuche people have historically maintained relationships of coexistence with the forest. Colonialization and dispossession escalated in the late nineteenth century, when European settlers were invited by the Chilean government to establish territorial control (Maher, 2019). Lihuen's founding as a forestry village marked a shift to industrial, extractivist relations of assemblages centered around the exploitation of endemic woods such as coigue (Nothafagus dombeyi) and raulí (Nothofagus nervosa). For nearly 200 years, forestry and plywood production were Lihuen's primary economic drivers, peaking during Salvador Allende's presidency (1970–1973). During this time, peasant collectives territorialized Lihuen around the interdependence among the forest, the sawmill, and its laborers. This homogenized Lihuen's place-assemblages around the collectivist and place-based organization of livelihoods: Water was sourced from the mountains and distributed collectively, local timber expertise enabled the self-construction of homes, and winters were mitigated by the abundance of firewood. Meanwhile, the state provided basic infrastructure and services.
After Pinochet's 1973 military coup, the wider region became embroiled in violent conflicts well into the 1980s. By 1990, Lihuen's forestry activity had dwindled amid widespread land privatization under Pinochet's dictatorship. Residents described the period as one of mass outmigration, economic deprivation, and political stigmatization, reflecting the deterritorialization of Lihuen's place-assemblages. In 2001, national policies promoting foreign investments in conservation and tourism (Mendoza et al., 2017) led to the establishment of a Private Protected Area (hereafter: PPA) 2 km east of Lihuen. The PPA's luxury eco-resort facilities have won international sustainability awards and placed Lihuen on the global tourism map. Residents have linked improved infrastructure, such as the road upgrades and a new power plant, to the PPA's political influence, along with new direct and indirect employment opportunities within the growing digital market for Lihuen's particular rurality.
This transformation from forestry-based collective livelihoods to conservation and service economies also depicts a process of decoding and recoding. The PPA recoded the forest from a shared livelihood resource into a privatized conservation space. Access was monetized, and residents’ labor relationships to the territory shifted drastically from production to services, such as gardeners, cleaners, and cooks, transforming the landscape into capital for the global commodity chain. Although these changes began two decades ago, their impact on residents’ lives remains present. The son of a former forestry worker noted, “Before the PPA came, we saw a tree and thought about cutting it down. Now, we see a tree and want to protect it.”
Today, according to residents, most people sustain multiple income sources tied to seasonal tourism services. This has unfolded not only via public and private institutions but also through individual platform activities. Global platforms such as Google Maps, Airbnb, and Booking.com have showcased a surge of entrepreneurial offerings in Lihuen. Echoing findings on the professionalization of rural platform workers (Leick et al., 2024; Tang & Zhu, 2020), 10 out of 12 encountered cases were not directly linked to prior formal education but to situated, personal capacities. These hinged on two factors: land access for building tourist cabins and the marketing of local skills and knowledge online. Although enabled by platforms, these ventures have built on long-standing practices, as Lihuen has a history of attracting niche tourists, and woodworking is embedded in its forestry past.
This diversification of rural labor, while not entirely novel, has been rather reconfigured by platforms. Digital infrastructure arrived in 2011 through government programs such as Todo Chile Comunicado, which provided mobile coverage and hardware to remote rural areas. As of May 2025, 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile coverages are provided in the area by two Chilean mobile providers, with Starlink offering an alternative at double the price. In 2012, the Fibra Óptica Nacional project brought fiber-optic connections, enabling stable, private access for wealthier residents. While residents acknowledge new economic opportunities from the PPA and platforms, they also highlight a mismatch between externally driven reterritorialization processes of tourism agendas and affective, material, and symbolic components of Lihuen's place-assemblages. This is often summarized by descriptions of summers as “full breakdown” of infrastructure, due to the overwhelming tourist influx, representing the destabilizing properties of deterritorialization processes. Though the last census, from 2017, counted 1955 permanent residents (INE, 2017), 2 residents in 2022 estimated rather 3000–4000, with seasonal peaks up to 12,000.
Conceptualizing Lihuen's labor relations as place-assemblages highlights the dynamic interplay between single components of established place-assemblages and emerging new tourism assemblages. Building on this framework, the analysis further operationalizes assemblage thinking to grasp the nuanced relationships among assemblages of platform dynamics, their afforded labor, and Lihuen's territory.
Affording platform economies in rural Lihuen
Following the conceptualization of Lihuen's labor relations as place-assemblages, where labor emerges from dynamic interrelations among social, material, and affective components, this analysis examines how platform labor reshapes them. I focus on three intertwined realms of platform labor that link “placeless platforms” and “place-rooted labor” (Zhang & Webster, 2024, p. 122): platform interactions, platform-generated labor to produce/perform a digitally marketed product/service, and the ontological frameworks of platform workers. With this approach, I trace the messy nexus between platform dynamics, labor, and territory, which is often overlooked by anthropogenic and hierarchical frameworks. Rather than centering human or technological agencies, this paper highlights the agency of relational and more-than-human relations in rural place-assemblages. Ultimately, the analysis reveals socio-techno-ecological interdependencies that shape the expansion of platform economies, their labor, and future trajectories through place-based reterritorialization processes.
Platform interactions as agents of deterritorialization
In Lihuen, all interviewees traced the rise of platform economies to one event: la pandemia.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly two years of government-enforced isolation halted individual and tourism-related economic mobility. In the absence of tourists, one former PPA employee explained that she felt “forced to throw everything online” to access the digital market and invest in her economic independence. And what residents could “throw online,” they largely sourced from Lihuen's place-assemblages. Of the 12 interviewees, 11 relied on place-based material and affective components: local skills, spatial knowledge, and access to properties. To translate these components into products via platforms, platform workers employed a range of tools, mixing social media, communication apps, and commercial platforms. The use of these platforms ultimately displayed the deterritorialization processes brought about by the emerging decoding of established labor relations.
During field work, smartphones emerged as omnipresent agents of mobility and constant connectivity, integrating platform labor into the assemblages of social reproductive labor. As the interviewees moved among their childcare, eldercare, or community obligations, these reproductive tasks became entangled with platform labor through the incessant ringing of their smartphones. This hardware, as both a material component and connective agent, extended the temporal and spatial reach of platform labor and particularly enabled women to engage in microencounters with clients while still embedded in the practices, spaces, and affective realms of social reproduction. This simultaneity decoded components of intimacy into components of unregulated platform labor (cf. Pettas, 2024). Such deterritorialization processes are particularly manifested in private homes, as their material, affective, and symbolic capacities were decoded into interfaces of tourist experiences. In response, many interviewees emphasized strategic digital disconnection to mitigate the debordered logistics of platform labor, underscoring the affective and material limits of the laboring body. One Airbnb host contended: “Because there are a lot of people who call at 6 in the morning. I won’t pick up. You can’t because you have to be a mom, you have to be a housewife, you have to do things! […] Because here, we live at work. It's true that when you’re here, you don’t disconnect. So that's why you suddenly need to disconnect and relax.”
Across the interviews, platform workers emphasized WhatsApp as a crucial tool, not only for bypassing platform fees but also for its ability to verify contacts with clients. Another Airbnb host jokingly mentioned a form of local gossip that captured the silent competition that platforms had introduced: “One gossip about Booking, which was really popular here for a while, is that people, like the folks who own the cabin next door, would go and book yours for a week or two in February [the main tourist season] so they could have the tourists all to themselves, and then they’d cancel.”
This anecdote illustrates how the deterritorialization and decoding of Lihuen's place-assemblages also unfolded on a collective level, shaped by the individualized and neoliberal labor conditions of platforms. Affective dynamics, such as distrust, jealousy, and competition, emerged as deterritorializing forces. For those with forestry backgrounds, this shift toward privatized labor was particularly daunting. While labor once had centered around shared spaces and tactile collaborations, platform labor was now locked into the screens of private gadgets with paid connectivity and had become both individualized and opaque. This contrast was epitomized by the abandoned sawmill at the heart of Lihuen; its collective tools and spaces stood in stark contrast to the individualized reclusion of platform work. One interviewee reflected: “Before, we all worked in forestry, we all earned the same, and we were all poor. And the work was extremely dangerous. But now, everybody works something at home on their phone. Suddenly, someone has a bigger car, a bigger house. And that's nice. But there's also jealousy and competition.”
The shared practices, tools, and solidarity that once defined the affective landscape of Lihuen's place-assemblages were now eroded by the individual and neoliberal frameworks of platform labor.
Destabilizing effects were equally exerted by emerging algorithm-driven regimes of visibility. One adventure tourism guide recounted the daunting power of “going viral” through strategically posted pictures: “I took a photo of [my partner] at the top of the volcano. And then someone messaged me ‘I want the same photo of me, we have to get this photo, I don’t care if it takes 8 h.’ […] In fact, there are still places that are very little known. All you have to do is upload a photo of that place and you start to go viral.”
Such visual vignettes produced decontextualized destinations and products, instead of representing relational places. To mitigate this, interviewees supplemented this practice with the use of hashtags to embed these visual fragments of Lihuen's place-assemblages into broader translocal categories, such as landscapes (volcanoes, lakes), activities, or product types (hiking, soaps, foods). By adding a hashtag for Lihuen itself, they furthermore embedded Lihuen's fragmented materialities within new digital imaginaries. Through such practices, Lihuen's material components gained new meanings through their digital recoding, overwriting peripheralized symbolic relationships to their former political stigmatization that still lingered in the abandoned forestry building.
During the pandemic, Lihuen's residents increasingly turned to platforms to monetize components of their reproductive realm: local skills, spatial knowledge, and property. While digital hardware and algorithmic visibility enabled new labor assemblages, they also deterritorialized material, symbolic, and affective ties within Lihuen's place-assemblages, reshaping the local identity through translocal digital imaginaries.
However, as assemblage theory emphasizes deterritorialization as neither linear nor absolute, daily operations of platform-generated labor simultaneously illustrated emerging labor relations that were rather contested and reterritorialized by ecological constraints.
Platform-generated labor: ecological constraints as agents of reterritorialization
The previous section illustrates deterritorialization processes that unfold between Lihuen's place-assemblages and assemblages of platform interactions, including algorithms and affective properties of hardware. Meanwhile, realms of platform-generated labor, such as hosting and tour-guiding, reveal much closer interactions with Lihuen's material specificities. This section sheds light on how weather, geography, and water ecologies reterritorialize these deterritorializing forces, ultimately revealing place-based material constraints and affective capacities that shape the trajectories of platform economies through platform-generated labor processes.
Fundamentally informed by decontextualized, algorithm-driven vignettes, affective platform expectations of destinations as static and readily available products collide with the unpredictable ecological temporalities and materialities of the territory. Highlighting the contingency of assemblages, Lihuen's place-assemblages entail seasonally emerging glacial winds and melting glaciers. These nonhuman material components require the continuous ad hoc adaptation of platform-generated labor. Here, interviewees’ local knowledge as place-based affective components plays a vital role in reterritorializing platform expectations by pivoting programs and establishing relational spatial knowledge. This has effectively reembedded and recoded platform-decontextualized destinations into their relational assemblages. One tourist guide explained: “So, when we’re faced with that terrain [melting glacier], we can't continue climbing because it's a very dangerous labyrinth. So, what do we do? A glaciological tour, where I invite people to walk on the ice, to look at the crevasses, to learn what a glacier is.”
Similar adjustments are needed in response to the local puelche, a strong, warm wind occurring around the volcano that poses severe risks to ascents. Such instances illustrate how digitally decontextualized material components of Lihuen are reterritorialized by the local expertise of platform workers as place-based components. Their labor practices within platform-generated labor have recoded labor practices in relation to the nonhuman components, such as weather, geographic morphology, and seasonal dynamics.
The algorithmic amplification of Lihuen's decontextualized assemblage components also contributes to an unregulated influx of tourists and digitally mediated expectations. This detachment between platform-driven imagery and material, relational capacities of Lihuen's place-assemblages stands in conflict with emerging platform-driven imaginaries of “rurality” marked by seamless and infinite resources. In Lihuen, these new imaginaries place demands on the material expression of architecture and the provision of potable water. Due to its remote location and morphology, Lihuen's water has historically been managed locally and sourced exclusively from the volcanic river. But this ecosystem has been under stress since the PPA diverted large volumes of the river for its own purposes, further intensified by digital representations of “rurality” on the platforms. An Airbnb host describes how “rustic” timber houses without insulation are most popular on platforms when they simultaneously feature bathtubs for daily hot baths and hot tubs. Perceiving this new assemblage of architecture as detached from local logistics, she chuckled about the contradictory behavior of tourists expecting a rustic house but reluctant to bathe in cold water. This contradiction illustrates the platform-driven decoding of architectural components from situated logistical constraints, decoding them into detached products of temporary use, divorced from seasonal changes and resource constraints. However, this platform-driven abstraction has ultimately failed, as water cannot be separated from its ecological framework, showcasing how some components, such as water, have only limited capacities to interact with emerging new ones. Therefore, hosts have recoded water consumption by framing water as a finite, relational resource embedded in local practices and ecologies. The same host chuckled, “Because here, water is priceless, it just is. There is no other explanation.”
Another prominent realm of conflict emerging during platform-generated labor entails the often-assumed digital connectivity as a seamlessly existing infrastructure detached from its logistical and material affordances. In Lihuen, stable mobile signals are never a given, but rather depend on an assemblage of human actions, nonhuman dynamics, and infrastructural frameworks. This includes practices such as moving bodies, knowing one's service providers and the location of signal towers, and how the interplay among rain, wind, and the area's geographical morphology impacts signals. An Airbnb host recounted how her clients were only able to grasp digital connectivity as a physical frequency and its material interdependencies upon their arrival in Lihuen: “People come here thinking that here in Lihuen, they will never have problems with the internet connectivity. That's what people think. But when they look at the number of trees here and then…they manage to understand, for example, why the connectivity is so bad.”
This quote delineates how emergent components, such as a stable mobile connection, do not derive from a single component, such as paying for one's mobile data plan. Instead, it reterritorializes digital connectivity as a contingent interaction among multiple human and nonhuman bodies, hardware, climate, and geographic morphology.
The recurring tensions described in these situations underscore how Lihuen's place-assemblages persistently reterritorialize deterritorializing forces of platform assemblages. Rather than playing into global-local and platform-place binaries, these moments of contestation and negotiation reveal the strongly relational dynamics through which assemblages negotiate emergent capacities. Algorithmically decontextualized products, such as viral destinations, affordances of “rustic” accommodations, or invisible expectations of seamless connectivity, are met with the ecological and infrastructural constraints of Lihuen's place-assemblages. This tension manifests, at times, in looming bodily harm, droughts, and sudden infrastructural failures, thereby unveiling the resilience of place-assemblages and their relational networks. Upon their confrontation, these constraints ultimately adjust platform-generated labor components to the more-than-human territory.
Ontological frameworks: reterritorialization through continuities
DeLanda (2016, 2019) contends that assemblages are nonessentialist, nonlinear, and shaped by simultaneous and multiple infinite interdependencies and relations, as assemblages are in a constant state of flux. Consequently, assemblages do not evolve exclusively through contestation or disruption, but rather through the selective resonance of single autonomous components in place and time. Accordingly, between previous illustrations of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as reactive resistances, there are also broader accounts of platform labor as economic activities that have stabilized the established affective and material components of Lihuen's place-assemblages. These cases outline reterritorialization as processes of digitalized continuities (Lee, 2025), where platform activities resonate with long-standing ecological ontologies and practices.
In Lihuen, when asking platform workers about their labor, the central emerging topic is their socioecological interdependency with the territory. Within this territorial ontology, interviewees perceive realms of labor, life, and the ecosystem as tightly intertwined. This also includes long-term ecological knowledge about the territory and accompanying anxieties around resource exhaustion and the consequences for human life in Lihuen. Acknowledging this interdependency, an Airbnb host explained: “I thought that it was going to be the same as in the north, like in the saltpeter mines. That the saltpeter, everything that they exploited there, was finished, and they had to go to other places. And here, I thought it would be the same.”
In this regard, human labor is strongly embedded in the ecological frameworks of the living territory and its dynamic capacities and temporalities that exceed human lifetimes. The natural cosmetics producer, for instance, acknowledged that the forest is regenerative; however, it is subject to varying degrees of human exploitation: “Well, I believe that, with the passage of time, companies have changed. And now there is [the PPA] with more modern means to exploit. But thank God, the forest regenerates.”
These place-based ontologies intrinsically intertwine human and nonhuman components across time within a more-than-human conviviality, setting a firm affective framework for their platform labor. This is particularly evident in the place-based meanings of livelihood based on diversified practices and place-based sufficiency beyond monetary labor. To illustrate this point, one of the adventure tour guides outlines territorial sufficiency beyond monetary value that can create certain degrees of independence from wage-based labor, such as her platform work: “Many people, including us, suddenly run out of firewood, and we go to the forest to look for leftover firewood. […]. So, they are productive places that many people do not realize that there is so much. And they are very abundant in many things that allow us to get by and get ahead, like…We don't need the work as in the traditional jobs.”
This perspective, however, stands in contrast to her clients’ frequent comments that this territory “needed to be exploited more,” delineating a chasm between external extractive, profit-oriented logic and her own regenerative framework. Platform labor, for her, is not a representation of waged labor, but a complementary strand within the broader labor assemblages of sufficiency-based livelihood practices in Lihuen.
Some interviewees attribute their “networked agency” (Chan, 2014, p. 19) in platform labor to the ability to consolidate their “territorial identity,” as one recalled their sociomaterial entanglement with the territory. Rooted in the forestry era and/or from Mapuche ancestry, resources such as spatial knowledge and knowledge of endemic herbs have become affective components with distinct historical identities that are materialized by platform activities as a natural cosmetics producer or tour guide. This takes on a political significance amid increasing land scarcity, as Lihuen is encircled by the PPA property, and parcels are sold to commercial platform actors. Facing potential economic displacement and ecological degradation (Srnicek, 2017), residents’ platform labor emerges as place-based autoreterritorialization processes (Quimbayo Ruiz, 2020). By leveraging the affective components of their territorial identity, interviewees legitimize and tether their livelihoods in Lihuen's place-assemblages.
Such encounters introduce a third category of platform interaction: continuity-based reterritorializations, which complement the deterritorializing dynamics of platform interactions and the ecologically constrained reterritorializations of platform-generated labor. Moving between ruptures of established relations and adaptations of emerging platform assemblages, cases of continuity illustrate how platform labor newly materializes single affective components of the place-based ontologies of platform workers. Such interactions with platforms, as well as platform-generated labor, on the one hand, integrate their labor into a global commodity chain. Yet, on the other hand, they stabilize place-based meanings of livelihoods and more-than-human conviviality. As such, these forms of reterritorialization represent a situated form of agency and autoreterritorialization where platform visibility is leveraged to reinforce, rather than overwrite, established identities of Lihuen's place-assemblage.
Structuring the analysis across realms of platform interaction, platform-generated labor, and ontological frameworks, key findings of this study illustrate how processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization have unfolded simultaneously and across various scales of platform labor. Such intertwined and multifaceted trajectories in place illustrate how platform economies and their labor processes are neither universally disruptive nor homogenizing. Their impacts emerge through place-specific assemblages, resonances, and tensions among components across scales, as well as affective, material, and symbolic realms.
Discussion and conclusion: toward a platform–labor–territory nexus
This article has examined labor realities of platform workers in a rural Andean village in southern Chile by conceptualizing Lihuen's labor relations and platform dynamics as assemblages (DeLanda, 2016, 2019). By zooming into place-based affective, material, and symbolic processes within platform labor, the relational nexus between platform dynamics, labor processes, and the specificities of territory was explored (Wang et al., 2022; Zhang & Webster, 2024). Thus, tracing the uneven expansion of platform capitalism (Leong et al., 2016; Srnicek, 2017), the analysis empirically grounds assemblage theory within three realms of platform labor: platform interactions, platform-generated labor, and the ontological frameworks of platform workers.
Findings across these domains illustrated how platform workers have been drawn to hybrid labor regimes (Pettas, 2024). Interviewees integrated various forms of bodily, emotional, and material labor into a continuous economic performance (Roelofsen & Minca, 2018), which was often tied to their social media self-branding (Scolere et al., 2018). In this regard, former practices of intimacy, such as land use, social media use, and personal resource allocations (spatial knowledge and skills), have become individual economic capacities. Constantly mobilized by omnipresent smartphones as gatekeepers, this shift delineates how platforms have not only economized previously unpaid capacities. They also introduced new forms of hybrid labor, reconfiguring reproductive, cultural, and ecological practices into a perpetually connected economic performance. Consequently, hybrid platform labor blurs boundaries between intimacy, subsistence, and algorithmic performance value (Busalim & Hussin, 2016; Leong et al., 2016).
Amid this reconfiguration of labor relations, the individualized precarity and informality of platform labor have emerged both as constraints and strategies for platform workers (Leick et al., 2022; Xu et al., 2021). Since the pandemic, interviewees have pursued economic autonomy through highly volatile platform economies, though tempered by seasonality, murky legal frameworks, and algorithmic pressures. Such ambiguous accounts align with research on informality in platform work as both a lack of regulation and a strategy to deal with the volatility of global markets (Solanki, 2024; Stryzhak et al., 2025). This study, however, adds the argument of cultural continuity, illustrating how platform economies have enabled platform workers to digitally capitalize on gendered, biographical, or indigenous affective resources of their place-based “territorial identity” (cf. Lee, 2025). These opportunities hinge not only on technological infrastructures but also on how algorithms shape labor realities (Farías & Cancino, 2021; Stryzhak et al., 2025), which therefore “have different affordances for different actors” (Leong et al., 2016, p. 482). In rural Lihuen, the tension between platform-mediated autonomy and economic informality thus underpins the individualized precarity of platform labor as an inherent condition of platform expansion at the periphery.
Employing assemblage thinking (DeLanda, 2016, 2019), the analysis reveals the interplay of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that extends beyond economics into sociomaterial and ontological realms (McCall et al., 2021; Sandoval et al., 2017). Deterritorialization has unfolded through algorithms that pressure workers to adapt to external platform imaginaries, decoding and decontextualizing rural components from their historical and relational meanings. This echoes Latin American accounts of rural neoliberalization by external forces (McCall et al., 2021), illustrating how platform dynamics render rural territories as fungible landscapes while simultaneously extracting agency (Datta, 2024). Concurrently, interviewees engage in practices of strategic disconnection (Pavez et al., 2017) and regulate the scale and professionalization of their platform activities (Leick et al., 2022). These strategies are profoundly shaped by territorial ontologies and ecological constraints, emplacing platform economies in place-based meanings of livelihood and practices of more-than-human conviviality (Rojas Bahamonde et al., 2020; Skewes, 2016).
This resonates with Quimbayo Ruiz's (2020) concept of autoreterritorialization and extends it beyond social movements to include more-than-human socioecological interdependencies. Rather than resisting these new dynamics to restore preneoliberal forms of labor, these reterritorialization strategies actively navigate and adjust incoming platform logics and open new trajectories. Ultimately, these negotiations between platform-driven abstraction and ecological specificities underscore the relational, emergent nature of platform labor and its diverse realms of interaction. Place-based reterritorialization processes, therefore, shape platform labor by embedding it within local ontologies and ecologies and highlight rural scholars’ calls to understand rural (platform) labor not only as sites of extraction but also as sites of strategic and more-than-human agency. Regarding Latin American dependency theory (Kay, 1989; Quijano, 2000), Lihuen's historical reliance on timber delineates a shift in dependency from material extraction to the algorithmic capitalization of affective and reproductive labor in the platform era. By drawing on recent Latin American perspectives on territorial agencies through an assemblage lens, this paper ultimately extends dependency theory beyond its center–periphery binary toward a more ecological understanding of how peripheral actors navigate global asymmetries and incoming capitalist logics.
Fittingly, Chan's (2014) networked peripheries resonate with how peripheral actors, both human and nonhuman, leverage platforms to access global markets while maintaining degrees of territorial agency. The simultaneity of de- and reterritorialization reflects the nonlinearity of assemblages, as their multifaceted trajectories hinge on situated relations. In this regard, reterritorializations through ecological constraints and strategic continuities frame peripheral platform labor as place-based and contingent, navigating connectivity and constraint. Platform workers are not simply subjected to algorithmic visibility but they equally curate their visibility to fit platform affordances and territorial boundaries. This visibility serves as a component for reterritorialization: Interviewees digitally emphasize certain ecological values and “territorial identities” while concealing others, such as resource limits. Consequently, this practice, too, resists full platform assimilation and diversifies rural imaginaries promoted by the platforms. Such findings add to broader debates on rural platformization by underscoring how platform labor is shaped by place-specific dynamics, mediated and gatekept by not only infrastructure (cf. Young, 2019) but also social ties, territorial ecologies, and situated ontologies.
This article contributes to critical scholarship on platform economies by shedding light on the territorial dynamics of platform labor in the Chilean Andes. It demonstrates that platform labor, encompassing platform interactions, platform-generated labor, and ontological frameworks, is not solely shaped by platform dynamics. Instead, the findings frame it as an arena in which platform components interact with place-based human and nonhuman components, causing reterritorialization as reactions of resistance, adaptation, and visibility. Highlighting the emergent and contested nature of rural labor assemblages, this article thus deepens our understanding of platform capitalism in peripheral contexts as an interactive process. Employing DeLanda's (2016, 2019) assemblage theory, with its relational and more-than-human frameworks, enables a closer examination of the nexus between territory, place-based labor, and global platforms, emphasizing their interdependencies and dynamic relationships. The implications of this nexus are theoretical and practical, aligning with calls for more context-sensitive approaches to platform studies (Vonk & Salter, 2024; Young, 2019; Zhang & Webster, 2024). This is of particular interest in nonurban and peripheral settings, where previous urban biases have possibly overlooked the diverse components that actively shape rural platform economies. Such areas are then not only passive receivers of platform capitalism but also more-than-human networked peripheries (Chan, 2014) that navigate their places in the world.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
En primer lugar, quiero expresar mi profunda gratitud a los habitantes de Lihuen por haberme permitido conocer su territorio y sus historias. The author also would like to thank Juan Carlos Santa Cruz Grau for his generous and always patient translations, conversations and reflections. Without you, this truly would not have been possible. The author is also grateful to Gabriela Christmann for her ever supportive, critical and generous input and expertise. Thank you also to Isabel Pavez and Teresa Correa, who had read the very first idea of this article and whose work in rural Chile inspired and encouraged me to pursue this research, and to Barbara Orth for her immensely helpful comments. The author would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their patient and constructive feedback that significantly deepened the outlook of this paper.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This study is part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” within the project B01 “Peripheralized Rural Areas: Digitalization and Construction of Space” at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space. The research was funded by the German Research Fund (DFG) from 2022 to 2025 under the grant number 290045248.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability
Data is not available due to data protection requirements.
Statement of informed consent
All research participants gave written informed consent for this study with the option to withdraw at any time. Their names and circumstances have been changed to safeguard their anonymity. All data were processed in accordance with EU data protection requirements.
