The earning web: Informal automation and the moral economy of platform earning in Vietnam

This paper examines the moral economy of ‘Make Money Online’ (MMO) practices in Vietnam and introduces the concept of the earning web to describe the distributed infrastructures through which informal platform earning is organised. MMO refers to a heterogeneous field of online income-generating practices that operate across advertising networks, e-commerce platforms, social media systems, payment channels and automation tools. Drawing on discourse analysis of MMO4ME, Vietnam's largest MMO forum and ethnographic fieldwork with phone farmers, the paper analyses three practices: content arbitrage, dropshipping and phone farming. It shows how participants monetise attention, time, connectivity, discarded devices and platform loopholes by navigating unstable rules, automated thresholds, volatile payout systems and uncertain boundaries of legitimacy. Rather than treating these practices as scams, marginal gig work or technical workarounds, the paper argues that they constitute a form of informal automation assembled from below. MMO practices are sustained not only by scripts, devices, accounts and monetisation flows but also by shared moral evaluations of effort, risk, reward and acceptable conduct. The paper contributes to debates on platform economies, digital labour and ICT infrastructures by showing how informal actors govern value within systems that offer monetisation without stability, participation without protection and automation without accountability.