"Cash is King!": Sugar Work in the Age of Digital Surveillance and Censorship

The growth of the online sex industry is in part due to the persistent stigma and criminalization of sex work, which has also resulted in increased legal and political pushback. In recent years, various sex work research has examined the impact of changing U.S. laws on the digital platform provision of legal spaces of work and facilitation of safety strategies for sex workers, as well as new financial and digital discrimination faced by sex workers. To expand this research on the surveillance of online sexual labor, this study focused on workers' use of technology in assisting and restricting the facilitation of sugar relationships, which can be classified as sex work or sex-adjacent work, depending on the exact terms of arrangements. I conducted in-depth interviews with sugar workers to examine their platform use. This study found that though not all participants situate sugar work as sex work, their use of technology and subsequent resistance within the social, political, and legal constraints is on par with the broader sex industry. Furthermore, workers strategically used "algo-speak" to mitigate harms stemming from sexual censorship, digital discrimination, and the stigmatization of sex work by, for example, avoiding using select phrases during conversations, blurring identifying facial features in pictures, and creating exclusive sugar worker communities. By examining various technological conundrums, this study deepens our understanding of the contemporary role of technology in work and the ways marginalized (and often criminalized) workers circumvent a continuous state of surveillance and censorship, regardless of the legality of their work or their class status.