Exploring Platformic Torque in Secondhand Market Platform Work

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we present an ethnography of US-based online fashion ‘reselling’, an understudied kind of gig work where individuals ‘resell’ or ‘flip’ mostly secondhand clothing in online marketplace platforms. We situate this kind of gig work as distinct from gig work models like ridesharing where labor is offered for trade through platforms: instead, in online fashion ‘reselling’, objects are sold through the platform, with resellers’ labor articulated around this action. Using Poshmark as an example, we characterize the platform’s mediation of gig workers’ labor in the larger context of US precarized labor landscape and the fashion consumption culture. We offer the framework of platformic torque as an extension of the information studies’ concept of ‘torque’ and the CSCW concept of ‘platformic management’ to foreground the intersectional experiences of platformic mediation in this kind of gig work. We shed light on the idiosyncratic sociotechnical apparatus that enables and constrains the worker’s agencies in feminized, racialized, aspirational and temporally fractured ways. Through detailed analysis of Poshmark’s sociotechnical mechanisms and thick ethnographic narratives we describe three kinds of ‘platformic torque’: aesthetic, temporal and regulatory.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2026 · DOI ↗