People’s Republic of Desire (2018) is a documentary exploring the social transactions of two live streamers who seek fame, fortune and human connection to China’s “digital idol-making universe”. While watching this film, my tweets expressed my raw emotions towards the individuals, as I discovered the underlying struggles that these live streamers had to go through in order to “strategize and monetize their popularity” to make a living for themselves and their families (Marwick, 2015).

In China, the development of digital infrastructure has risen drastically as two billionpeople are now internet users (Internet World Stats, 2017). In china, this raised a large opportunity to make money digitally as live streamers, especially due to labour being extremely cheap.

Within this documentary, the success of these live streamers was very obvious and it was due to the marketing of their often-meagre talents in ways that allows thousands of their fans to send…