The emotional labour of cartomancers on platforms

Drawing on a qualitative study based on around 20 semi-structured interviews with cartomancers working on digital platforms, and the analysis of a corpus of 35 videos, we examine how the technical and economic mediation operated by platforms transforms the nature of the emotional labour cartomancers perform on them. We start by showing that, for asynchronous, remote content to have an emotional impact on audiences, cartomancers must recreate the conditions of a traditional consultation, personalize messages that are nevertheless produced for a broad audience, and frame their interpretation in a positive light. The emotional labour all their activities require is however demanding and difficult to sustain over the long term. We analyse the strategies cartomancers employ to distance themselves from this emotional labour, which involve moving away from unpaid work and developing asynchronous formats that allow for economies of scale. The ability to expand their use of digital tools in order to alleviate the most demanding aspect of the work nevertheless remains unevenly distributed.