Selling More Than Goods: The entrepreneurial logic of the digital underground marketplace
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reyes-ambarreyes-ms-sts-2026-thesis.pdf
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Author(s)
Reyes, Ambar
Advisor(s)
Beltrán, Héctor
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This paper explores how Facebook sellers construct and communicate the legitimacy of their economic practices and build trust. Through analysis of posts, images, and self-descriptions, it examines how sellers draw from entrepreneurial discourse, religious language, and references to masculinity, community, and moral obligation. These narratives evoke sentiments of aspiration, legitimization and explanation, as related to the future, present and past of sellers. Yet, rather than operating in temporal sequences, they are mobilized concurrently and recurrently, implying a constant interplay between aspirational, legitimizing and explanatory discourses in identity construction. Furthermore, I contend that these narratives reflect a contradictory stance in relation to precarity, adopting on one hand a critical perspective on structural inequality, and on the other hand, embracing logics and vocabularies that justify and contribute to widening of socioeconomic gaps. By focusing on digital expressions and platform-based behavior, the project contributes to an understanding of the way entrepreneurial identities are produced and reproduced by multiple social groups in digital spaces operating along shifting boundaries of formal and informal labor.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
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