THE value of creative labour has always been very context specific and dependent on subjective appreciation of the buyer of the products of such labour. The importance of aesthetic value of products has increased particularly with increased possibility of customisation of products. This has also increased the demand for artists, designers and different types of content creators who could add value to the product or service beyond its core uses. The range of creative activities has also increased with the process of globalisation and particularly with the use of internet which impacted both on the demand and supply side.

Labour is essentially a creative human engagement with nature and with this engagement not only new goods and services are produced but humans change their own environment and themselves through this labouring process. But as labouring act of a particular kind gets standardised and codified it becomes easily replaceable by other humans or machines. This labour no longer remains creative but gets transformed into routinised labour. In other words, creative labour is essentially manifested by the labour which cannot be easily separated from its owner and the reason being such labour both physically and mentally remains tacit in nature.

Creative labour produces use values which people appreciate for its specificity and uniqueness. Hence many a times the exchange values of such products are arbitrary and undergo high fluctuation. It is hard to compare an artist’s painting with another one’s using universal standard codes or judge a music as more valuable than others. The idiosyncratic nature of such use values and the concrete labour involved in the process of production of such content prevent it to be amenable to standardisation. The process of globalisation articulated in its most modern form through the platform networks are creating a new context, control and conflict in the world of creative labour.

PLATFORMS AND CONTROL

A platform network is a digital system that enables digital entities offer products and services facilitating interaction between firms and individuals using the internet. Such transactions are enabled by big tech giants Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) who together are worth a value equal to a quarter of the value of S&P 500 companies amounting to about 1.7 trillion dollars. Internet network is both a platform for consumers and a platform for global communication. Increase in the number of users in this platform increases the value of the goods and services transacted. Any product and its digital identifier uploaded in these platforms immediately connects to millions of potential buyers. This platform allows to reach out to consumers at such a large scale that was unimaginable before the internet age. And this global marketplace is expanding day by day. In 2004 Facebook had 1 million end users which increased 10 times in 2006, reached 100 million in 2008 and 2.91 billion in 2022.

The immense democratisation of the marketplace has come with huge concentration of capital in the hands of few tech giants. Entry and exit to the platform web is easier and producers receive huge information from the users of platforms free of costs. The processing of these data allows producers to offer customisation with greater precision. The creative digital industry working through platforms such as Google, YouTube, Instagram WhatsApp and so on are also engaged in high profile merger and acquisitions giving rise to some sort of oligopoly. GAFAM companies acquired about 400 firms in the recent times including Google acquiring YouTube and WhatsApp by Facebook. Such huge concentration of ownership of digital content diminishes the massive democratic potential of the web world. A small producer of a creative content music or painting can monetise creative labour easily by being able to reach out to a wider audience. In case of networks which are also a platform for interactions between various websites and applications, users multiply exponentially and that enables to exercise control over the market.

The demand for creative labour and their contribution to value creation increases with the changing modes and habits of consumption. We do not only eat food, wear clothes and live in houses. As human beings our way of eating food and the nature of food changes with rise in incomes. Also, the clothes we wear is not only about covering our bodies. At some level it is an expression of our individuality and subjectivity that changes with time and cultural content assumes greater importance as human civilisation progresses. Therefore, the taste of uniqueness and customisation has increased the contribution of creative content in goods and services we use. Internet allows a global interaction and exchange of such creative content as art, music, painting, pottery and designs of various sorts. Not only packaging of products presentation of conventional use values are also making difference in their exchange values as people learn to appreciate differences in looks and tastes. But at the same time this immense exposure to global market and the rise in the demand for differentiated goods and services is conditioned by the homogenising impact articulated through the governance structure of global digital platforms.

HOMOGENISATION OF LABOUR

Capitalism is a system driven by production of exchange values and an infinite chain of exchange constitutes the value relation between different commodities. The particularity of the commodity related to its use and its physical qualities has to be made comparable with other products with different use and qualities if exchange between infinite number of commodities has to occur. In a society of commodity production this universal norm of comparison becomes the precondition for such a society to exist and function. This is ensured every day by the real act of exchange where various concrete labour producing different use values are reduced to quantities of abstract labour in every act of exchange. Abstract labour is labour in the abstract separate from all its concreteness and hence can be compared based on quantities. Capitalism through the market defines various commodities into embodiment of socially necessary abstract labour quantities, that defines their value. Hence creation of value is an act of reducing qualities into quantities to ensure comparison between disparate goods and services. In the case of creative labour, the reduction of such labour into homogeneous abstract quantities become difficult and hence values of such goods and services are mostly arbitrary and spontaneous.

The autonomy of the creative labour exits in this arbitrariness as subjective evaluation of a work of art is specific to the beholder. In today’s world, products of creative labour can reach to a wider audience using various platforms embedded on the internet. This gives immense opportunity for creative labour towards a wider exposure but at the same time, such a platform makes valorisation of products dependent on norms and parameters which are beyond any control of the producer. Most of the time the entry and exit are apparently easy in the web market, but it is guided by a governance structure which is driven by the rules of the game hugely inaccessible by the participants of the market and at the same time guided by the norms of revenue models that essentially forces a compromise in the autonomy of the creative labour. Essentially it entails a process of homogenisation where survival and growth of income is subject to norms that are extrinsic to the quality of the creation. It is done through a process of standardisation and gradation of creative labour by certain algorithms in sync with market which is completely against the idea of creation. Hence capitalism creates a world-wide market for creative goods and ideas, but the very functioning of such market suffocates creation and tends to homogenise creative labour according to the revenue model of respective platforms.