Digital Pyramid Built by Datafication: Take Bytedance’s Corporate Culture Text for Example

The Form of Extraction of Surplus Value Is Morphed from the Traditional Employment Relationship to the Datafication of Social Life

TikTok is one of the most popular products of ByteDance that is categorized as a live-streaming social networking platform where users can share and watch short videos of dances, lip-sync, comedy, talent videos, and so on (Ma & Hu, 2021; Schwedel, 2018). It has been introduced in 155 countries and regions in 75 languages and the number of monthly active users is more than 800 million (Moshin, 2020). Facing the massive content production all over the globe, ByteDance is under huge pressure of human resources. Accompanying the enormous business volume is the rapid expansion of the company’s employees and the extension of their working hours. With the large-scale resistance of the notorious “996 regime”, ByteDance applied the “big/small week” policy, where most of its employees work a six-day week every second week (Huang, 2019). But “big/small week” is just a transfiguration of “996 regime”, it is the surface regulation compared to the corporate culture, but its deep structure is reinterpreted by corporate culture texts and regarded as a creed, which is gradually accepted as normalized “social life” by people in a subtle process.

Invideo issued on the intranet of ByteDance (e.g., lark as the communication tool), the slogan is poetic and persuasive: “with an ordinary mind, let’s keep our feet on the ground while aiming for the stars”. This series of videos for the purpose of commenting employees applied a narrative strategy of a structure of the hero’s journey: 1) faced with an urgent mission, employees were challenged by a voluminous amount of difficulties. 2) they decided to cross the thresholds. 3) when they were about to succeed, there was a huge crisis. 4) They cooperated together and finally completed the mission. When describing the difficulty of the mission, several interviews of the employees were cited: 

“The whole project was much more difficult than the previous ones…We will not have break time with so many bugs.” 

“We have made dozens of plans alone for the moment when we draw the winning numbers of the latter lottery at 11:00 pm.”

Those selected utterances reflect how challenging the mission was, but meanwhile, the internal video of ByteDance utilizes the presence of “break time” as well as “11:00 pm” to form a notion that: working overtime is normal. The emphasis is put on the subject (the employee) and the object (the mission), but the context (irrational situations) of working itself is somehow disguised. This presencing (Anwesen) bypasses a non-totemic semiosis, directing the intentionality to a pseudo-justified reality, breaking down the traditional employment relationship. The standard working hours system is ideologically morphed into an objective-oriented non-written rule, showing the employees an ideal, commendable attitude that: I am on an important mission, and I volunteer to finish the task overtime with no extra pay.

The “overtime culture” is not rare in China’s big techs, but the capitalization of social life is far deeper than this. Work is one of the biggest sections of social life, therefore, the tempo of lives is largely influenced by enterprises. Within the fast-paced lifestyle, the pieces of leisure time of employees are also treated as raw materials to produce profits. With TikTok blending with people’s lives, employees themselves become users of TikTok and other products. They act as “the second level digital labour”, processing and dealing with data in the daytime, seeking high-intensity entertainment when out of duty. The fragmented leisure time and the remaining energy are also totally squeezed out by the media. 

Corresponding to the temporal presence is the absence of space. Within the video, a host of montage shots were presented: when preparing the, a lobby was transformed into a work area full of rows of workstations, the aisle is crowded with employees, the environment is noisy with the employees’ whispered discussions, hubbubs, and loud voices of instruction from the leader’s microphone, the employees are holding laptops in their hands, their speed of walking and speaking are very fast, but in the scenes, full of fervor. Then there comes the voice-over of the employee interviewed: 

“I already could tell how my colleagues sound like when they just wake up. You will have to call them even it’s two or three in the morning. You will hear their sleepy voice when the call gets through…At moments like this, you will feel this team is really trustworthy, you can trust them to have your back.”

Those visual-auditory materials constructed a flattened spacial structure, in which the leader and the employees are working in the same space with a close distance. The high level of power/distance in traditional Chinese culture renders breaking through bureaucracy interpreted as highly unethical behavior (Wang, 2020). But the sense of power and authority was diluted with the distance shortened, the only symbol of power is the microphone in the leader’s hand, metaphorically, making the imagery of the leader traffic police directing the rush-hour traffic, rather than a senior executive. The shrinkage of distance can also be seen in the recruitment advertising video: followed by a set of scenes of daily work, with the door of the elevator opening, Zhang YiMing, the CEO of ByteDance appears on the screen playing smartphone and smiling. All of the symbols demonstrate a notion that: we are breaking through the bureaucracy, there is not deviance behavior in ByteDance.

Furthermore, the trajectory of employees’ behavior is also confined. The company provides housing subsidies to employees who rent an apartment within a certain distance. The surrounding landscapes that people perceive are similar, both physical and mental distance to the mansion of the company are shortened. Besides, the company’s data protection also functions as another path of compressing the spatial distance. Not only confidential documents and information, but also employees’ title, salary, department, and even locale of the company cannot be discussed to prevent data leakage.

But ironically, a large number of positive gossips about ByteDance are spread into all kinds of channels that people can get in touch with, especially in TikTok and other media produced by ByteDance without screening. In so doing, the gossips of ByteDance are processing datafication, becoming the data that can be controlled and transformed, and the human relations are also evolved into the new stage of data relations. This is not a natural process but redefined by giant data producers, or in Mejias and Couldry (2019)’s theory, the “social quantification sectors”. Users are seeking information positively but receiving information negatively: when they wish to seek for the headlines to know one most important event in the society, they get three pieces of irrelevant content, that host of information become redundant pan-entertainment information, but they are not appearing with no reason, they carry certain value and interest, and are controlled by the algorithm as well as the capital behind it. The myriad employees and users become the custodians of ByteDance’s myth construction.

This form of primitive accumulation of capital has been discussed for a long time, of utmost debatable question in this proposition is: is social life a renewable resource? For individuals, the answer should be no, however, for big techs such as BAT and ByteDance, they may follow a totally different train of thought. Those tech giants have the most powerful resource of media and the capability of directing, emphasizing, and even molding public opinion. Those contents on the theme of sudden death from working overtime and harming health by staying up late to play games have gradually lost their critical dimension. They have merely become products that take social events as raw materials and process them into data that cater to the demands of users to obtain data traffic. Users finish their heavy-loaded work and strike chords with these contents, but they are unable to resist this constructed “social reality”. Both employees and ordinary users can only accept the “reality” of “the era has changed, and I have to change”, continuing to work overtime in silence, spending time on these redundant pan-entertainment data. 

The cunning point is that it is not a revolutionary form, and there is no clear trace within the transformation process. Rather, the process of datafication is based on the original pyramidal structure, attribute the changes to the natural social transformation, silently “modifying” the original structure. ByteDance and other big techs aim at the users’ temporal and spatial “gaps”, accurately producing pan-entertainment data to fill in those gaps of social lives, extracting surplus value from the double-sense digital labor, creating a naturalization trap.

The Reality of Social Life Is Constructed by Informing and Hiding

Social lives as the raw material were extracted to produce surplus value, but in between the fundamental form and the outcome is a funnel-shaped “gatekeeper”. Corporate culture is the invisible strategic asset that functions as a critical factor in organizational success and failure, and among its various dimensions the customer orientation dimension is the most important one. To cater to the main body users, who are primarily teenagers and young adults, ByteDance constructed a market-oriented ideology through its various types of corporate culture text (Ma & Hu, 2021). The funnel, as the authors point out, is a mechanism of informing and hiding: to inform users of the rejuvenated and the marked “the other”, to hide the old fashioned and the native.

In the 2021 recruitment advertising video, a classic 60s TikTok short video, the rejuvenation orientation can be reflected much. The video usesby Ed Sheeran, which is popular among youngsters, as the background music. Also, the scene adopts a first-person perspective, and follows a young, good-looking, student-like girl to observe the employees’ daily work in ByteDance. The colleagues met along the way are commuting using a skateboard, wearing headphones, T-shirts, and jeans in the office, dancing hip-hop in front of the mass, and discussing equally at the round table. All of the imagery inform the audiences of an emphasis on rejuvenation, personality, and informality, attracting thousands of excellent students from the best universities to join in.

Correspondingly, the other side of those items is somehow hidden. Representation of aged, conservative, and decent employees is hidden due to the ideology of ByteDance. The prototypes in the real life have been through the process of datafication, and filtered by the mechanism of informing and hiding. The chosen prototypes become imagery in cultural texts, but the left part is muted. This process is not a reflection of social life but is shaping social life and social culture through dataficaiton. This naturalized transformation is not only aimed at the organization itself but also formed domination based on dimensions such as age and personalities within the macro social scope, constructing a “reality” to force social members to embrace the changes made by those cultural products.

Another aspect of the mechanism is to emphasize “the other”. In the advertising video for the 2021 campus job fair, among some of the representative employees, there is a woman whose skin is black, she has a red haircut of dreadlocks, wearing colorful, collage clothing, swinging to music in front of a bookshelf filled with books arranged in a disorderly manner, saying that “I graduated from the University of Cape Town, off work I am a DJ!” It is hard not to believe that the video is putting efforts to demonstrate ByteDance’s culture of “Champion diversity & inclusion”, but in an almost crude way. Dreadlocks can be associated with the Rastafarian movement, has become “a symbolic accompaniment to oppositional collective identities associated with the African liberation/Black Power social movements” (Kuumba & Ajanaku, 1998). It is also viewed as resistance against hegemonic politics and spread extensively among African liberationists, womanists, radical artists of African descent. With these meanings that the haircut carries, the woman in dreadlocks herself is a strong symbol with a high intention of informing.

The imagery of the woman bears two levels of semiosis. The first level is the symbolization of herself. With the cultural capital expanding to all over the globe, ByteDance admits talents as well as users from diverse backgrounds, it is important to construct cultural imagery of a “the other” to show a stance on its inclusiveness. The tricky one is the second level, which refers to the linkage between the character imagery and her social life as her label. Compared to other representative employees interviewed who wear suits or glasses, behaving like the stereotypical wage earners, she is the “other” to this environment not just due to her high self-expressive appearance and unconstrained personality, but the demonstration of her social life beyond the working hours. She as a symbolized imagery is a piling of the marked terms, when attached to the social expectations within the text, the prototype has lost its initial meanings, being constructed into a part of the representation semiosis. 

Overall, the mechanism of informing and hiding works as a filter that construct the reality of social life, through the screening of the binary opposition, the core as well as the shape of the corporate cultural text is formed. Then with the text spreading into TikTok and other influential media, people’s perception of social lives can be morphed into those advocated, ideal representation. In so doing, domination based on the cultural divide of age and personality will be formed, aggravating societal injustice and disorders. 

The Redundancy of Pan-entertainment Information Forms a Verisimilitude Sphere, Dominating Social Lives by Data Streams

The social lives as raw materials are capitalized and extracted as surplus value, becoming cultural products under the filtering and processing of the mechanism of informing and hiding. The essence of these cultural products is pan-entertainment data that is blended into the daily life of users, and they become the core part of the macro social culture. There is a stratification among them, forming a supporting structure from the bottom to the top, but the increasing data redundancy has accumulated to an overloaded volume and becoming dominant oppression upon social lives. The authors name this structure digital pyramid built by datafication. The specific mechanism can be demonstrated in the following pattern in Figure 1:

See Full Size >

In the pyramidal structure, the capitalization of social life is the foundation. Social lives are compressed both temporally and spatially, being processed as the raw material to produce cultural text. Social lives are spun into data for the social quantification sectors, who are the giant techs to arbitrarily select the materials they want to use. Social lives are datafied, and in a more intimate sense, are experience a process of capitalization, becoming the open resources available for extraction.

In the second layer, data made from social lives is processed by digital labor, who are not only the employees but the users of the cultural products. With the social lives being compressed, surplus value is extracted in a steady flow to generate profits. In this process, digital labor is not even the creators of cultural products, but just weavers who are mending bugs or errors in the crowded “factory”, or staying in front of the little screen in their sofas, laughing and crying under the control of the real producers of the cultural text that they are immersed in. Besides, people’s relationships were transformed into data relationship, where once living, then a person is generating surplus value, he becomes a knot of the textile he weaves by himself.

The third layer is a filter, which is called a mechanism of informing and hiding. This layer works as a gatekeeper, through this filter, those cultural products that are considered to have the potential to carry the mainstream culture of the society are displayed on the media. Different from the gatekeepers of traditional media, this filter weakens the dimension of authority but caters to the dimension of public opinion. The filtered cultural products form a social fashion of rejuvenation through prominent, contagious representations of “the other”. Social news, films, pop music, and advertisements are derived from one certain side of social life, those sides chosen by the mechanism of informing and hiding are molding the social life increasingly faster and normalizing the fierce competition as well as the transformation against the traditional social structure. Through this layer, a new order of positive cultural term is established by screening data.

Eventually, the chosen data extracted from social lives as the raw material becomes cultural products that touch the users after being filtered by public opinion. They are produced not to gratify users, but to attract users’ attention. The essence is that the crude deposition of redundant pan-entertainment data replacing the traditional cultural structure, becoming the core part of social culture, but the new structure built by redundancy is not systematic. The digital pyramid demonstrates an inverted pyramidal structure, and with the volume of the redundancy enlarging, there is a risk of social structural crisis. Furthermore, revolving around redundant pan-entertainment data as the core of social culture, a verisimilitude sphere with cultural division as the basic unit is formed, which develops into a dominant power upon social lives and digital labor. The restraint of the employment relationship and the pressure of power/distance are weakened, but the verisimilitude sphere oppresses the society in new manners, which are data streams such as emphasizing rejuvenation and the marked item of the other. The sphere of today’s social culture has achieved colonial domination over social life through datafication and data relations, which is likewise to say, data colonialism put forward by Nick Couldry.