Late-Night Farm-Support Livestreams: How Much Genuine Emotion, How Much Script?

Although we talk about being “trapped in the algorithm” so often that the phrase has become a reflex, this has done nothing to stop algorithms from embedding themselves ever more deeply into daily life. And yet – bloggers, delivery riders, e-commerce livestreamers, media professionals, Didi drivers – surely these people, who interact with algorithms day in and day out, must have developed their own sense of how they work?

Duan Shichang, a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, began “infiltrating” e-commerce livestream teams in 2021 and spent nine months on the other side of the camera as a livestream sales host, selling salted duck eggs, garlic, tea leaves, noodle sheets and all manner of agricultural produce… His four-year field study into algorithms and labour revealed that front-line entrepreneurs and workers trapped in the algorithm are finding ways to break through, systematically distilling knowledge about how algorithms operate from hard-won practice. In the age of the algorithm, to win the traffic on which their livelihoods depend, they are actively producing their own algorithm lore.

When you happen upon a wrinkled, sun-weathered farmer selling oranges from the fields, behind that agricultural livestream pushed onto your screen lies a dynamic tug-of-war between a group of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs and workers and an ever-evolving web of algorithms.

In this episode, we walk with Duan Shichang into the rural livestream rooms of Hangzhou and Henan. You will hear: why the grandmother selling salted duck eggs might be a professional actor; how algorithms commodify “suffering”; and behind the traffic anxiety, how these clear-eyed, adaptable “new-generation farmers” are building their own emotional communities through what might seem like a superstitious exchange of experience amid the digital tide. This is not merely a business about traffic – it is about the shifting identity of farmers and their self-redemption in the age of digital capital.

This Episode’s Guest

Duan Shichang

Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Xiamen University, and postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, with research interests in the platform economy and e-commerce livestreaming – an early-career academic shuttling between city and countryside, between China and the Netherlands, between communication studies and anthropology

This Episode’s Hosts

Yuyang

Foodthink editor – the Foodthink editor who stares at the analytics dashboard every day, anxious about traffic and bewildered by algorithms

Xiaojing

Foodthink host, focused on food culture and sustainable living.

Li Ye

Foodthink’s newest project officer and the new host of Food Talk. Has binge-watched farm-support livestreams and placed order after order – though she still isn’t sure whether she’s actually helped the farmers.