Xiyin Tang (UCLA Law UCLA Law) has posted “Creative Labor and Platform Capitalism” (Forthcoming, UCLA Law Review, Volume 73 (2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The conventional account of creativity and cultural production is one of passion, free expression, and self-fulfillment, a process whereby individuals can assert their autonomy and individuality in the world. This conventional account of creativity underlies prominent theories of First Amendment and intellectual property law, including the influential “semiotic democracy” literature, which posits that new digital technologies, by providing everyday individuals the tools to create and disseminate content, results in a better and more representative democracy. In this view, digital content creation is largely (1) done by amateurs; (2) done for free; and (3) conducive of greater freedom.
This Article argues that the conventional story of creativity, honed in the early days of the Internet, fails to account for significant shifts in how creative work is extracted, monetized, and exploited in the new platform economy. Increasingly, digital creation is done neither by amateurs, nor is it done for free. Instead, and as this Article discusses, fundamental shifts in the business models of the largest Internet platforms, led by YouTube, paved a path for the class of largely professionalized creators who increasingly rely on digital platforms to make a living today. In the new digital economy, monetization—in which users of digital platforms sell their content, and themselves, for a portion of the platform’s advertising revenues—not free sharing, reigns. And far from promoting freedom, such increased reliance on large platforms brings creators closer to gig workers—the Uber drivers, DoorDash delivery workers, and millions of other part-time laborers who increasingly find themselves at the mercy of the opaque algorithms of the new platform capitalism.
This reframing—of creation not as self-realization but as work that is both precarious and exploited, most notably as surplus data value—demands that any framework for regulating informational capitalism’s exploitation of labor is incomplete without considering how creative work is extracted and datafied in the digital platform economy.