Paper short abstract

This paper explores how self-proclaimed middle-class pious women in Turkey working for an MLM company redefine platform labor as a moral pursuit of abundance, navigating a marketized patriarchal bargain within digitized and platformatized MLMs.

Paper long abstract

In the hyperinflationary and polarized landscape of "New Türkiye," digital technologies are re-engineering the domestic fabric of society. This paper examines how pious, middle-class women redefine "good work" as they work for GE International, a Malaysian Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) firm selling Ganoderma fungi-infused products. Drawing on ethnography and 32 in-depth interviews, I trace how these workers negotiate a marketized patriarchal bargain, shifting their pursuit of security from the collapsed male-breadwinner model to the digital market. I conceptualize this space as the "algorithmic berzah", a socio-technical isthmus where digital metrics and Islamic moral economies converge. Through three vignettes, I demonstrate how workers assess productivity and care. First, I analyze "somatic theology," where distributors physically ingest Ganoderma-infused products to become "living testimonials," reframing economic precarity as a physiological blockage. Second, I look at the "re-moralization" of labor; as the company shifts toward AI-generated advertisements, women intervene by adding vernacular prayers and domestic imagery to sterile outputs to sustain kinship trust. Lastly, I examine the member portal of the MLM as a digital Book of Deeds, where platform rankings are phenomenologically reclaimed as measures of spiritual zeal. By focusing on these micro-encounters with digital infrastructure, the paper argues that distributors function as "nodal persons" who transmute the "cold" extraction of the gig economy into a "warm" pursuit of divine abundance. Ultimately, I show how "good", "work", and "good work" are redefined as projects of spiritual self-reform that promise salvation in both this world and the next.