Becoming serious young men: Joblessness, platform enterprising, and the contradictory production of Amazon reselling in North India

• Platformisation serves as a contradictory resource for educated youth in India. • Amazon work enables young men to partially achieve breadwinner norms. • Simultaneously, it deepens the experience of risk and precarity. • Ethnographic research reveals contradictions of platform work at scales. Drawing on 14-month-long ethnographic fieldwork in North India, this paper analyses the ways in which young marginalised people in the global south are navigating social and economic transformations associated with platformisation in their everyday lives. Complimenting political economic analyses of platform work and neoliberalism, I focus on a set of young men working as online resellers who styled themselves as ‘serious’ to look at young people’s bodily and affective navigation of ’online’ work amidst crises of joblessness. In doing so, I bring together youth and cultural geographies to provide a ‘thick’ account of the spatialities of platform work in the Global South by foregrounding young people’s agency and practice amidst a range of social and economic crises. Focusing on the effects of platform work across young people’s localities, bodies, and scales, I argue that platform work emerges as a contradictory resource for youth in the Global South.