CLCF’s first theme is focused on key contexts and constraints workers face in creative industries that depend on digital platforms and generative AI, including barriers for the future of work in these spaces in a sustainable way. These constraints are related to the structures of the digital economy and how production and circulation are organized today including in light of AI advances.

Moreover, ideas about digital or data colonialism reveal how such global political economics result in data extractivism and datafication in the creative industries and performing arts, even while devaluing the contributions of creative workers. The work in this thematic area includes analyses of legislative regimes, platform policies, creative production and distribution processes and barriers, working with community partners and companies in the field. The goal is to reimagine community, market and nation-state environments that generate unwelcome, punitive, or toxic constraints for creative workers in these spaces.

In recent years, strong critiques of platform capitalism have emerged, including by cluster members Rafael Grohmann and David Nieborg (Grohmann & Qiu 2020; Karppi & Nieborg 2021), each of whom demonstrates that digital platforms play a central role but do not fundamentally alter exploitative industrial production elements from the past. Nieborg has helped stimulate renewed discussions about the political economies of creative labour through examinations of digital cultural production on platforms through a theoretical lens involving both institutional (markets, infrastructure, governance) and cultural (labour, democracy, creativity) approaches (Poell, Nieborg & Duffy 2021). Alongside Thomas Poell (University of Amsterdam) and Brooke Erin Duffy (Cornell), he has provided a theoretical framework for understanding how systems of cultural production and distribution inevitably privilege capital over creative workers and shaped by the emergence of artificial intelligence and its impact on cultural production practices including markets, infrastructure, and governance (Poell, Nieborg & Duffy 2021). This work was continued by a co-authored paper by cluster member Godwin Simon and Nieborg presented at AoIR, focused on practices of reciprocal platform labour among Nigerian content creators (read more about the CLCF cluster’s contributions at AoIR here).