Fuck You, Pay Me: Payment apps, review platforms, and ambivalent resistance in the influencer industry

This article critically examines emerging intermediaries in the influencer industry that aggregate anonymous reviews of brands and allow influencers to report how much they were paid. Turning to four intermediaries (Fuck You Pay Me, Willa, Hashtag Pay Me, and Clara for Creators), I argue that although these emerging intermediaries represent an important step toward creating more equity, these efforts are a double-edged sword and represent a form of ambivalent resistance to broader structures governing the influencer industry. While these intermediaries are used to resist the precarity of platformized and branded cultural production, these transactions have the potential to be co-opted—used for surveillance and data tracking by brands, platforms, and corporations—potentially blunting emerging forms of collective action and solidarity. Ultimately, these intermediaries provide an opportunity to theorize forms of resistance to precarity as neither “top-down” nor “bottom-up,” but rather a means of negotiating and navigating power from limited and precarious positions.