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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 scrutinizes how pious, middle-class women define what constitutes "good," "work," and "good work" as they work for Mycelial Network International, a Malaysian multi-level marketing (MLM) firm selling lingzhi-infused products. Drawing on a multi-sited patchwork ethnography comprising seven months of digital tracking, ‘lurkings’ in Zoom trainings, participant observation in hotel meetings and home visits, and 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. Through three vignettes, I demonstrate how workers assess productivity and care. First, I analyze their somatic labor, their ingestion of the products to accumulate testimonial capitals, reframing precarity as a physiological blockage. Second, I look at the re-moralization of their labor. As the company shifts toward AI-generated advertisements, they intervene by adding vernacular prayers and domestic imagery to sterile outputs to sustain kinship trust. Lastly, I examine the membership 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 asserts that distributors function as nodal persons who relationally transmute the 'cold' extraction of the gig economy into a 'warm' pursuit of divine abundance. Ultimately, the paper shows how good work is constituted as projects of spiritual self-reform that promise salvation in both this world and the next.