Digitization has fostered the platform creative economy built on user-generated content and digital streaming. Growing numbers of tech-savvy youth pursue digital self‑entrepreneurship despite volatile income, opaque algorithmic governance, and uncertain career pathways. While extant research documents vulnerabilities such as self‑exploitation, commodification, and work–life strain, less is known about how platform‑induced precarity is reproduced, negotiated, and tacitly managed within families, especially in non-Western socio-cultural settings. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young professional content creators in Hong Kong’s neoliberal‑Confucian milieu, this study examines how doing family and digital self-entrepreneurship intertwine. It is argued that precarity is relational, that is, it is co‑produced through intergenerational expectations, recognition politics, and everyday negotiations around care, finance, and time. Everyday family struggles and relational encounters both sustain and intensify risk—through moral evaluation, material support and constraints, and demands for respectability—shaping career trajectories, creative decisions, and wellbeing. Centering on a relational form of precarity thus moves beyond individualist portrayals of platform creative workers and narrow accounts of algorithmic subjugation and control, illuminating the family-cultural imperative and familial consequences of youth digital careers in East Asia. The paper thereby extends sociological accounts of the platform creative economy by theorizing how digital aspirations and labor are calibrated within family micro‑politics as well as markets and algorithms.

Authors:
Tin-Yuet Ting, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Ying Wang, Xi’an Eurasia University, China

About the Presenter(s)
Tin‐Yuet Ting (PhD, University of Illinois Urbana‐Champaign, USA) is associate professor of sociology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR.

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