Creative Control T H E A M B I VA L E N C E O F W O R K I N T H E C U LT U R E I N D U S T R I E S Michael L. Siciliano Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Siciliano, Michael L., author. Title: Creative control : the ambivalence of work in the culture industries / Michael L. Siciliano. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045830 (print) | LCCN 2020045831 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231193801 (hardback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231193818 (trade paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231550512 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cultural industries. | Creative ability. | Creative ability in business. | Work—Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC HD9999.C9472 S525 2021 (print) | LCC HD9999.C9472 (ebook) | DDC 658.3/14—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045830 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045831 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Shutterstock (seesaw) Chapter One CREATIVE CONTROL? Creative control usually refers to the power to exercise final authority over the planning and execution of a film, a song, a performance, or some other cultural product. The guarantee of creative control is often a hard-fought clause in contracts of musicians, writers, filmmakers, and other “creatives,” and there exists an entire mythology around the pursuit of creative control—fabled stories of directors, musicians, and even pro wrestlers who dared, fearlessly, to wrest creative control from the clutches of executives and all those who might pursue profit over artistry. Depending on your point of view, those stories elicit either admiration or a laugh. Either way, my point is not to draw an imaginary line between the artistic intentions of “creatives” and corporate profiteering but to highlight the work involved in cultural production and, in doing so, highlight tensions between capital and labor in the culture industries. Struggles for creative control are ultimately struggles over who controls creative labor, placing creativity front and center as part of the contested terrain of work, especially today when creativity no longer finds its sole remit within the gilded lives of auteur filmmakers or visionary songwriters. As a wide range of scholars have said for the past forty years, jobs that involve “knowledge,” “information,” “cognition,” or “creativity” play a central part in the global economy,1 and today, roughly 25 percent of the 4 INTRODUCTIONS U.S. workforce finds itself employed in the fields that constitute Richard Florida’s “creative class” (science, technology, finance, higher education, and media), the same people whom Robert Reich dubbed “symbolic analysts” in the early 1990s.2 Work in these fields requires “creativity,” a job requirement that supposedly offers us the chance to “do what we love” so as to “never work” and, in the process, perhaps “change the world.” Presumably, we will love whatever it is we create and, hopefully, earn a tidy profit as part of a passionfilled career in a growing creative class of “entrepreneurial” workers. Put differently, work in these creative industries seems to offer up the chance of meaningful, potentially lucrative employment, one in which capital invites labor to be creative, but this still leaves the issue of creative control. Who controls workers’ creative labor? In this book, I examine creative labor in two organizational contexts, one fairly conventional (a music recording studio) and the other firmly embedded within a digital infrastructure (a YouTube production and management firm). I leverage this comparison to develop an empirically grounded theory of creative labor, one attuned to similarities across divergent cases, and to explain how each organization’s infrastructural context shapes creative labor processes. Here, recording studios represent a more conventional mode of organizing creative labor, emerging in their current form, independent of any single infrastructure, during the latter half of the twentieth century.3 In contrast, firms that manage the production of social media content represent a newer mode of organizing creative labor, one firmly embedded within digital infrastructures and, in this book, tied to a single such infrastructure: Google’s YouTube. I use this ethnographic comparison to extend sociological theories of control over labor and worker alienation, explaining how these organizations control and capture creative labor as well as how these processes vary by organizational context. The workers whom I met while writing this book perform creative labor, but who possesses creative control? Who controls their creative labor and the ends to which they put their efforts? No longer separated out from work, creativity and the use of judgment now appear as vital, requisite skills for work within knowledge industries, or “cognitive capitalism.”4 For cognitive capitalism, the key source of value lies in the organizational appropriation of generically human capacities to act through, upon, and with 5 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? symbols by way of complex technological systems—what I call creative labor. The peculiar thing about labor is that it is always bound up in the bodies of human beings and all the uncertainty that comes with them. Once hired for a job, there is no guarantee that a person will actually provide their labor—creative or otherwise. Workers may simply refuse to perform their jobs, watching the clock tick away while they do nothing. This happens less often than one might expect which is why discussions of labor often focus on why it is that people do not simply sit idle on the job. For sociologists of work in the labor process tradition, this becomes a question of how organizations maintain control over labor. Control tends to fall into one of five categories: simple or direct oversight, technical direction as in the assembly line’s mechanical governance, bureaucratic control through rules, normative control wherein beliefs propagated by management govern the labor process (e.g., “corporate culture” or company slogans), and organizational aesthetics or the material culture of an organization, a central theme in this book. Creative labor somehow seems different, less subject to control. After all, creativity tends often to be thought of as beyond or even antithetical to control. This way of understanding creativity may be seen in romanticized descriptions of a painter’s brushstrokes upon a canvas or any “wildcat” workers’ strike. For labor scholars and critical scholars of media, “creativity” supposedly resists power—the “soul”5 or personal “integrity”6 that remains ever eager to burst free from any cage. If one leaves these assumptions behind, there remains no reason to assume that creative labor should be any different with regard to capital’s need to control, and therein lies what I find so puzzling. If cognitive capitalism depends upon creativity or the generically human capacities to freely invent, express, and render judgment, then how does capital discipline or control creative labor? Typically, the absence of creativity at work results in worker dissatisfaction, or what Marx called alienation—and, often, resistance. This process varies in shape and form depending upon the sort of labor power required for work. So, for example, Arlie Hochschild in The Managed Heart draws a distinction between the experience of physical laborers breaking their bodies in the service of enterprise and the managed emotional displays of flight attendants and debt collectors (the smiles and anger that are not their own).7 In Hochschild and, more broadly, sociological theories of the labor process, each 6 INTRODUCTIONS type of labor experiences particular modes of control and alienation along with sociohistorically specific forms of resistance. Control, alienation, and resistance need to be included in any theorization of creative labor, and so I ask: How does capital control creative labor, and how does the inclusion of creativity shape workers’ alienation and the possibility of resistance? I take creative labor to refer to human capacities for interpretation, action, improvisation, and judgment using symbols and signs within the context of waged work. To be clear, I am not attempting to use this definition to arbitrate what does or does not count as “creativity.” My intention is quite the opposite insofar as I use this definition to draw together two critical traditions—labor process theory and British cultural studies—that focus on the relationship between creativity and class power in capitalist economies. From the former, there is Harry Braverman’s classic argument in Labor and Monopoly Capital wherein capitalism progresses by removing creativity from work, by separating planning from execution or mind from body, as in Taylorist factories.8 Though still readily used by scholars studying “digital labor,”9 Braverman’s argument runs rough against capital’s increased demand for “creativity” in paid employment, a trend most clearly seen in this book’s empirical subject matter: (un)paid work performed within the culture industries. Heightened capitalist demand for “creativity” runs counter to labor process theory’s conceptualization of power within capitalist labor processes, and this stems, in part, from this tradition’s overemphasis on factory or service workers. Studies of factory and service work do little in explaining how capital commands creative labor, and so if capital tends to invite rather than banish “creativity” from the labor process, how does capital control creative labor? This brings me to the other strand of critical scholarship underlying my project, one that ought to be familiar to those in cultural sociology and neighboring disciplines who concern themselves with creativity and inequality. My definition of creative labor borrows rather directly from British cultural studies, specifically Paul Willis’s definition of “symbolic work” in Common Culture.10 Symbolic work consists of everyday meaning making, all that we do when we interpret the increasingly dense array of sensations, images, sounds, and words in our social worlds. Creative labor refers to these activities in the context of paid employment. Willis’s specific focus had been on showing how consumers and audiences of mass media possessed agency, specifically how the lived realities of the working classes 7 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? and other marginalized groups pushed against earlier theorizations of the “masses” or working classes as “dopes,” their cognition supposedly deformed by a singular “culture industry.”11 In stark contrast, Willis and other members of the “Birmingham School” showed how the working classes and other marginalized groups “resisted.” Their resistance came in the form of everyday creative reinterpretations of cultural forms promulgated by corporate mass media and dominant cultural institutions. This creative resistance came, for example, in the form of the bricolage style of early punk rockers; people of color who invented hip-hop by reimagining turntables as instruments, vinyl records as raw materials, and street lamps as power sources; and “slash” fiction authors who appropriate fictional characters for homoerotic storylines. Though perhaps accepted today, these activities were initially denigrated and excluded by both capital and cultural institutions. These activities demonstrate creativity, which Willis called the “rare, irreverent gift” of the marginalized.12 Today, capital invites “creativity” from all, seeming to offer agency to anyone who engages in “creative entrepreneurship” and “self-branding.” Arriving at this observation requires neither in-depth ethnography nor exceptional library skills. To see what I mean, you need only drift through some North American cities, observing their murals and advertising as fragments suggestive of work’s new terrain. While in Chicago for a conference, I rode the Blue Line train to Wicker Park—the nexus of business and culture that Richard Lloyd calls “neo-bohemia.”13 There an advertisement invited people to become a “Creative Entrepreneur” by enrolling in a local college. A mural around the corner advised me to “Never Stop Pursuing Creativity!” Following the mural’s advice, I ended up in Montreal to discuss some of the research I conducted for this book. There, I encountered another advertisement for something called a Gym de Creativitie, or Creative Gym. The gym offered “free and directed workshops for individuals and companies” seeking “expressive creativity.” In Los Angeles—the primary site of my research—I regularly saw advertisements for “creative office space.” These stand alongside billboards paid for by YouTube that invite passersby to “Be yourself” by producing content for the companies increasingly called the “Fearsome Five” (Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and YouTube’s parent company, Google/Alphabet). These fragments of contemporary urban life suggest a capitalist economy that invites “creativity.” Just as this runs rough against sociological 8 INTRODUCTIONS theories of the labor process, the invitation to “be creative” shifts the political stakes when it comes to questions of creativity and inequality. Rather than searching for “creativity,” hoping to discover everyday acts of resistance among workers and marginalized groups, we need first to think through how capital invites us to be creative, to participate in our own exploitation whenever we accept the invitation to be an entrepreneurial worker flexing in a creative gym or inhabiting a creative office and producing content for one of the Fearsome Five’s social media platforms. The digital infrastructures that we commonly call “platforms” “disrupt” media work by enabling participation and innovation, supposedly undercutting the role of traditional media gatekeepers (e.g., movie studios, TV networks, book publishers, and record labels). How exactly do platforms shape creative labor processes? One narrative, popular since the first wave of social media platforms arose in the early 2000s, goes something like this: heretofore excluded peoples and publics may now let their voices be heard and their faces be seen as one hundred flowers bloom in the twenty-first century’s wide-open fields of media production. Here, Google’s corporate invitation to “Broadcast Yourself!” echoes yesteryear’s transgressive call to “make a spectacle of yourself” in a way not unlike capital’s recuperation of the 1960s’ radical demands for participation described in Boltanski and Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism.14 This narrative increasingly falls flat. Platforms certainly expand opportunities for creative employment to anyone with a computer, microphone, and camera or even just a smartphone, but this rather obvious fact obscures how the corporate-owned, monopoly infrastructures that we call social media platforms structure users’ paths to expression and remuneration. According to YouTube—one of the most popular of these platforms, with over a billion users—people produced more video content in the past ten years than was produced over the course of the twentieth century. Many pieces of content on YouTube generate revenue from paid advertisements that run before, after, or within the videos and music distributed by the platform. YouTube takes a portion of the advertising revenues and then distributes the remainder to content producers, or, to use the parlance of the platform, “creators.” So, while this digital infrastructure provides for an abundance of “participation,” the infrastructure’s owner (Google) depends upon the globally distributed labor of its users, and these users constitute Google’s largely unpaid, global 9 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? media production workforce. To this, I again ask, how does capital control creative labor? Put differently, how do organizations compel workers to their creative labor despite radically uncertain and, often, paltry economic rewards? Nearly forty years ago, Michael Burawoy, in Manufacturing Consent, asked why workers in factories seemed to participate actively in their exploitation.15 Why did they work so hard in the absence of direct force or coercion? He responded by arguing that the organization of capitalist labor processes elicited consent to managerial hegemony, often by promoting localized forms of meaning making. Workers made a game of work, and so they did not need to be coerced. I am pressing the same question to creative labor processes, and I argue that any answer requires us to understand how workers come to be affectively invested and sensually engaged by their precarious, often alienating jobs. CREATIVE LABOR’S ATTACHMENTS AND WORK’S AESTHETIC DIMENSION Workers who perform creative labor also tend to be precariously employed, especially in the culture industries, where a few stars earn fortunes while most workers take home lower-than-average wages or nothing at all. Still, studies commonly find that culture workers “love” or enjoy their work despite lacking stable incomes and all the protections that come with “standard” employment. Some people might cynically interpret this common finding as nothing more than a mere rationalization or trivial ideological gloss. That seems much too easy an answer and much too dismissive of peoples’ ability to reflect accurately upon their lives. I prefer to take these workers at their word and then ask how they come to enjoy precarious work, and, in doing so, I find a much more complicated and altogether more multivalent picture, one in which enjoying precarious work coincides with alienation. Current explanations of creative labor’s core contradiction tend to be predicated upon a rational, calculative individual, one for whom the opportunity to be creative functions as a fair tradeoff, a “psychic wage” that replaces stinging financial burdens and, ultimately, motivates workers to supply their creative labor to employers.16 But how exactly does being creative offset the socioeconomic costs of precarious employment? Another 10 INTRODUCTIONS explanation common to both economists and sociologists focuses on normative control or ideology—what Bourdieuian scholars might call the illusio of the “field of cultural production.” Proponents of this explanation claim that an “art for art’s sake ideology” motivates culture workers to pursue status or “symbolic rewards” rather than purely economic gains. In this explanation, the weight of reputation and the disciplining whip of radically uncertain labor markets discipline or control labor rather than management or capital. The limit of this style of explanation becomes apparent when endeavoring to explain what actually binds people to their beliefs. A passage from Ashley Mears’s Pricing Beauty—a Bourdieuian ethnographic study of fashion models—clearly illustrates this limit. An informant explains to Mears that he pursues low-paying gigs because he genuinely enjoys his work and wants to be part of a “masterpiece.” Mears dismisses her informant’s explanation and instead claims that culture workers merely say that they work “for the chance to be a part of something magical. But the magic . . . is an illusion,” or illusio, the field’s guiding ideology.17 In this explanation, illusio or ideology supposedly explains both why people work so hard for so little (control) and their persistence in uncertain careers (attachment). Anyone familiar with even the cheapest of dollar-store magic tricks ought to find this interpretation odd. Illusions, after all, do not produce magic. If the magician conjures illusions and the sorcerer’s spells bind, then what spells bind creative workers to their illusio? Less magically wrought, how do workers become affectively attached to precarious employment, or, to use my informants’ words, what makes these jobs so “cool?” Drawing from Mears’s example, it seems rather easy to point to the magic of cultural products as a source of power over their producers. After all, the anthropologist of art Alfred Gell was not without reason when he theorized cultural objects as “technologies of enchantment,”18 and of course, there is a long history of considering the culture industries’ products as tools of “mass deception” or “distraction.”19 In this book, I tell a slightly different story, one that ought to be of interest not just to scholars of work and media but to anyone concerned with the materialities that support and enable capitalist power as well as the potential political possibilities of affect and aesthetic experiences. Workers in the culture industries often feel deeply attached to their labor processes, 11 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? but as I show in this book, they also report a distinct type of alienation vis-àvis their products, often likening the fruits of their labor to trash, garbage, or excrement. In the same breath, they emphasize embodied pleasures derived from “being creative”—often pointing back to sense experiences in relation to technologies—and so I want to press a bit further on Gell’s “technologies of enchantment.” For Gell, aesthetic objects (e.g., art, media, music, etc.) mediate social relationships and exert power over us by virtue of our fascination or ability to figuratively “disappear” into them as we search for meaning. This constitutes the “magic” that an object has over us, and to disappear into or “merge” with an object is to have what a range of philosophers and social scientists describe as an aesthetic experience. Mobilizing my extensive ethnographic fieldwork alongside theory and research from the social sciences and related fields, I argue that contemporary work technologies provide us with aesthetic experiences, enchanting work as workers “disappear” into these objects in search of meaning. No longer appendages to disenchanting machines of mass production or slaves to bureaucracy, creative workers appear enchanted by the machines that enable and extend their ability to perform creative labor. In presenting technology as part of the material, embodied experience of work—one that both enchants and enables work to be done—I hope to provide a more full-bodied and ultimately more satisfactory answer to the question of how workers become so deeply attached to precarious employment. As I argue, explaining creative labor’s attachment to precarity by pointing only to ideology provides an incomplete, disembodied answer. Ideology depends upon distinctive, often technological aesthetics or materialities found in creative workplaces. The objects or artifacts that enable and extend creative labor provide a bit of “magic” or ineffable “cool”—a distinctive “structure of feeling” that binds workers to their work.20 In discussing how organizational aesthetics and materialities shape how work feels, I am gesturing toward what, in critical cultural theory, has come to be known as “affect theory.”21 Here, a diverse array of theorists defines affect as our “ability to affect and be affected” through nondiscursive forms of meaning caused by a variety of sensory impingements upon the body—not quite emotion, more vague and inchoate: a feeling. This resembles how organizational scholars define aesthetics, or “what is thought and felt by the body’s sensory and perceptive faculties,” in relation to objects.22 A key assertion from Brian Massumi, one of affect theory’s 12 INTRODUCTIONS leading voices, has been that these “asocial but not pre-social” embodied meanings lie below the level of discourse and outside ideology.23 As such, affect supposedly provides an “outside” from which one might resist dominant and dominating meanings and thus a basis for political mobilization. In this book, I describe an altogether more ambivalent situation, one where aesthetics or sense experiences vis-à-vis objects enroll workers in capitalist projects of profit making. Workers often experience the sort of effervescent moments that Émile Durkheim claimed to bind believers to their beliefs while using technology at work.24 Repeated interactions with technology make precarious work sensually enjoyable, affectively binding workers to their work. So, to be clear, I am arguing in support of affect theory insofar as I consider embodiment and sensation to be of causal import, but rather than positing the affective or aesthetic dimension of social life as a sort of asocial wellspring of resistance, unbridled by ideology or discursive qualification, I argue that affect or aesthetics may lead us down the path of consent to domination just as much as our felt experiences might nudge us toward refusal. Affect and aesthetics provide a basis for power to act upon us just as much as a bedrock upon which resistance might be built. My contribution lies in bringing these discussions into the sociology of work while standing alongside recent critiques of affect theory in anthropology,25 highlighting how work’s aesthetic dimension constitutes what Pasquale Gagliardi called the “fourth dimension of control.”26 DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES AND CREATIVE LABOR This book also addresses how digital platforms affect creative labor. In doing so, I extend outward from two fieldsites, always considering them within their broader infrastructural contexts—what Karin Knorr-Cetina calls the “microstructures” of economic life.27 In extending beyond the local sites of my fieldwork, I am following in a tradition wherein sociologists of labor and work emphasize the effects of structure upon microinteractions— what Michael Burawoy calls the “extended case method.”28 In this ethnographic tradition, researchers begin with their “favorite” theory or explanation of a social process and then go into the field in search of anomalous cases in order to “extend” or make existing theory more robust. Both cases 13 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? of creative labor in this book exist within the same country, and so, rather than examining the effects of different political economies and nationstates, as in so many extended-case ethnographies, my key source of variation lies a bit higher, way up in the “cloud.” My aim in comparing two cases of creative labor is to explain how one of global capital’s digital infrastructures or platforms (i.e., YouTube) affects creative labor processes. If my focus on control begins with Marxian theories of the labor process and Bourdieuian theories of cultural production, I examine distribution infrastructure as a way of extending Paul Hirsch’s organizational model of media production.29 In Hirsch’s model, gatekeepers (critics, curators, talent scouts, etc.) exert power over production (control) by determining what is available in the market. In conventional media, film studios and music publishers along with distributors have traditionally taken this role. As gatekeepers between producers and consumers, these intermediaries tend to shape or exert a structuring influence upon production much like an editor may shape the work processes of writers. The advent of internet distribution and production platforms such as iTunes, YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Bandcamp suggest a diminished role for traditional gatekeeping and thus, potentially, a more open and democratic future for media production. Platforms like YouTube, however, perform a similar gatekeeping function. This function often goes unnoticed in discussions of culture industries but is already underway in discussions of politics and the public sphere.30 Thus, I expected both cases—music production and YouTube content production—to exhibit a similar degree of influence from platforms. Instead, music workers experienced few, if any, direct effects of any particular platform, while both production and office staff in the YouTube case regularly grappled with Google’s arbitrary governance. This core difference, I argue, stems from each case’s political economy of infrastructure or concentration of infrastructural ownership. CREATIVE LABOR’S AMBIVALENCE These theoretical concerns emerged from situations I encountered during the extended ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted at a music recording studio and a YouTube management firm, which I respectively call SoniCo and The Future. Before explaining more about those two 14 INTRODUCTIONS organizations, I want to ground my theoretical discussion by introducing some of the workers whom I met during my fieldwork, starting with my second day as participant observer with SoniCo, a recording studio that also runs sound for live music events. On a warm winter evening in Los Angeles, a crowd of fashionable, young urbanites stood outside waiting to see a pop singer perform at an “invite-only” event held in a corporate-branded art gallery. SoniCo had been contracted by the gallery to provide an engineer to oversee sound during the performance and a crew to set up the stage and backline, which included the PA system and musicians’ equipment. I was inside with the crew setting up the backline beside a cotton-candy machine in the middle of an artificial grass field. The walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling images of that evening’s performers along with stencil paintings of various instruments—saxophones, guitars, and the iconic Roland 808 drum machine. On the eighth hour of that twelve-hour day, the crew and I went to the alley behind the gallery, taking a short break to eat from the catering table and smoke some cigarettes before showtime. That’s when I first met Jerry, a sound engineer who worked freelance for both SoniCo and a handful of local music venues. Sound engineers like Jerry oversee the technical aspects of music recordings and live performances, using a variety of equipment to adjust, alter, and document the sounds produced by the musicians. Without their creative labor, live performances or recordings might sound dull, harsh, or lacking in sonority. Providing his creative labor in this job required technology, and during a typical gig in a studio or at a venue, engineers like Jerry mediated between musicians’ demands for particular sounds and the technologies (“gear”) used to achieve those sounds. Gear factored into how Jerry and the other engineers I interviewed for this book came to enjoy certain gigs. As he said, “I like working at those places because they’re just beautiful places and I can work with really cool, new equipment. Like, they have these new [mixing] boards there and me and the other engineers are just like ‘Whoa! Do you know how to work that thing? Have you ever seen one of these!?’ It’s really great.” Good gigs, as he said, provided “cool, new equipment,” objects that seemed to possess exciting possibilities, potentials that he might unearth if only he could use them. That’s how he imagined them, at least. If sound engineers like Jerry found beauty in the aesthetics of technology and its potential uses, what about the more routine workers in the 15 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? crew? Crew members were largely responsible for loading, unloading, and setting up the equipment; building stages; and any other physical labor. They earned about ten to twelve dollars an hour, a small wage for skilled work, but accepted because they strongly desired employment with the company. Some even worked as office staff, earning the same hourly wage and performing many of the same tasks, save for the heavy lifting. These workers, too, claimed to “love” their jobs despite the low pay, or, at the very least, they preferred these jobs to other employment options that might pay more. For instance, Thomas, part of SoniCo’s office staff, regularly sold plasma to pay rent but still emphatically voiced enthusiasm for the job, despite being fully capable of working in more lucrative and stable fields, given his earlier career as a barber. What explained these routine workers’ enjoyment? Before I met Jerry, I helped the crew assemble the stage and the backline. While we set this up, one of SoniCo’s owners spent a few moments showing off equipment owned by the studio that had been rented by the gallery for the evening. He invited our gaze, asking, “She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” as he unveiled a vintage Rhodes electric piano, Vox amplifiers, and analog synthesizers. The crew responded with varying degrees of excitement, which left me wondering about the relationship between technology and creative labor. Were these simply tools? Or, as Jerry and the manager seemed to imply, were they also objects of beauty, sources of both aesthetic pleasure and imagined potential agency? Technology seemed to offer temporary moments of enjoyment, but absent these small satisfactions, creative labor performed in the service of others, like a lot of jobs, seemed rather alienating. Jerry described the gig at the gallery where we met as “a big pain in the ass.” Why? Well, first of all, Jerry lacked the tools he preferred, so the gig lacked a certain aesthetic satisfaction. Second, the musicians repeatedly challenged his ability to exercise creative control or judgment over the use of his creative labor. Earlier in the day, before our pre-performance break for food, Jerry ran a lengthy soundcheck to ensure that all the musicians could be heard loud and clear without feedback—the squealing, irritating noise that sometimes occurs during a performance. With upward of a dozen sound sources onstage, this required extensive technical skill and practical knowledge. After what seemed like hours, the musicians remained unsatisfied. One even came back to Jerry’s mixing console, repeatedly pushed 16 INTRODUCTIONS the sound levels into “the red,” which would overload the system, producing feedback. The musician would then ask Jerry to fix the feedback, a dance of egos that continued for several hours. As a former touring musician, I was surprised. I had never seen anyone challenge an engineer like this in nearly twenty years of performing. Most live engineers (“sound guys” or “the sound man”) never allow musicians to touch a mixing console. Save for microphones against the lips of a singer, they rarely let anyone touch any of their equipment. To touch the gear or challenge an engineer’s use of it can be a major cause of friction during a recording session or live gig. I asked Jerry if that particular musician was the band’s personal “sound guy.” Apparently, the musician had said, “Well, I am an artist, but tonight I am the sound man as well.” Jerry repeated this several times in parody. “See, I’m an artist! See! I’m an artist.” Jerry was not questioning the quality of the musician’s work; in fact, he said he’d “liked the last group that soundchecked a lot.” What infuriated him was the musician’s usurpation of Jerry’s ability to shape and exercise judgment over sound. “But I let him do his thing, and if he makes it sound crappy, what do I care? It’s not my name on this bullshit.” Alienated from his judgment, Jerry distanced himself from his contribution to the performance. He could be creative, but only within limits set by his clients. Across town, Desmond worked for The Future—a company that earns its money through advertising revenue generated by views of videos made by its network of thousands of content creators located around the world. Sitting at an IKEA desk, eyes transfixed on the world coming through his laptop’s screen, Desmond, like many of The Future’s employees, searched for YouTube content producers or “creators” with hopes that he might convince them to sign a management contract. He and the rest of the staff then provided a minimal amount of career services to creators, offering advice on when to post new videos to the platform or “best practices” for lighting and video editing. I regularly did all these tasks during the ten months I spent at The Future. Less often, we tried to set up brand sponsorships, but only with the most popular creators. The Future received a percentage of creators’ earnings, not wholly unlike a traditional talent management company, except at a global scale—and providing significantly fewer services to the “talent.” 17 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? Desmond had entered the culture industries as an actor when he had been in his early twenties. He landed at The Future after deciding to seek a “steady” job behind the scenes. By the end of my fieldwork, he had worked there for two years. Most employees lasted under twelve months—a high level of churn thought normal by many in the office. Despite their rather fleeting time at The Future, Desmond enjoyed his job because he could “be creative”—something that nearly all the people I spoke to in my research cited as the most enjoyable part of their job. What did it mean to “be creative” at The Future? The meaning of “creativity” varied quite a bit among employees, but for managers it usually meant improvising solutions to the organization’s practical problems. Finding and securing a steady flow of new content producers, or “creators,” was one such organizational problem, one Desmond could freely solve and thus “be creative.” How did he choose to solve this problem? He tried to anticipate emerging trends in YouTube content, searching for untapped genres, or “verticals,” by drawing together pieces of information he found on Reddit or Twitter, combing through data that The Future scraped from YouTube’s servers, and chatting with friends about what they liked to watch. When I asked him to explain this process, he described a rather ambulatory experience vis-à-vis his screen, what he called entering a “wormhole.” Metaphorically, he entered the world offered up by his laptop screen in search of content that might prove lucrative for The Future’s bottom line. Disappearing through the wormhole, he would end up in some unexpected part of YouTube and discover untapped sources of the types of content desired by his employer. He felt more “productive,” seeming to lose himself in this process—a certain subjective absence that I quickly recognized as similar to my experiences when I performed the same tasks. These moments resembled what philosophers of art and social scientists might call an “aesthetic experience”—one in which the subject disappears into an object in order to unlock the meanings that seem to lie within. Again, the organizational demand for workers’ creative labor coincided with a certain embodied engagement vis-à-vis technology, a situation similar to what I found at SoniCo. YouTube content “creators” lie downstream from both the platform and The Future. Creators work in their homes all around the world and earn a 18 INTRODUCTIONS piece rate tied directly to the metrics that so concern people like Desmond and companies such as YouTube. When I arrived at the Midwestern home of the creator whom I call Hank, he and his family greeted me warmly before he led me down to his basement production studio, where he had a green screen, a camera, audio recording equipment, and a professional lighting kit. He started creating video content in 2008 after being laid off during the “Great Recession.” With no college education and no prior media production experience he said to himself, “I’ve got to do something that’s flexible and that I can maybe make money at and just do when I can do it.” He had read a number of news articles wherein people “make all kinds of money” making YouTube content. He imagined, “I can at least do something with it.” A 2018 report presented to the World Economic Forum on British schoolchildren’s most desired careers suggests that Hank does not imagine alone. In the report, schoolchildren ranked the occupations of social media celebrity and YouTube vlogger higher than work in music and the arts, law enforcement, law, medicine, or science.31 After coming home from his new full-time job in an unrelated industry, Hank spent most of his free evenings producing videos where he explained how to prepare for a nuclear attack or, heaven forbid, a zombie apocalypse. With over eighty thousand regular viewers, Hank earned about $30,000 a year, in addition to his salaried day job. Still, the flexibility and freedom of platform-based work came at the cost of stability. Only one-quarter of that $30,000 came from YouTube’s piece-rate system. The rest came from a variety of side deals and sponsorships that Hank learned about on his own, despite being under a management contract with The Future. With these side deals, Hank could earn roughly 21 cents per view; he earned only six cents without them. Not counting the costs of his labor, Hank spends two to three cents to produce each view, so he works hard to retain the more favorable profit margin. Despite his contract with The Future, he said they do little to help, though they occasionally mediate on his behalf when YouTube removes his content or erases his view counts without warning. Each of these jobs requires creative labor: broadly distributed yet historically specific human capacities for interpretation, action, and improvisation using symbols and signs. Like physical and emotional labor, all forms of employment require some creative labor, but as I show throughout this book, capital explicitly invited workers in each of the jobs I have just described to “be creative.” Even in rather routine jobs, such as those 19 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? performed by SoniCo’s crew and by Desmond at The Future, I found management inviting workers to take “ownership,” to devise strategies for routine tasks, to be, in a word, “creative,” in ways not wholly unlike those in seemingly more clearly expressive jobs, such as Jerry and Hank. Despite management’s exciting invitations, each worker remained economically precarious because of low pay, high churn, or the wide-ranging power of a platform. Notably, all of this may be seen within the labor process, an empirical focus severely lacking in research on the creative labor of “informational” or “cognitive” capitalism.32 In bird’s-eye theorizations of cognitive capitalism, work is supposedly regulated or controlled by the capitalist mobilization of workers’ passions, affects, or feelings. Put differently, power over work supposedly operates at the level of affect, of sensation, of feelings. This differs from more empirically grounded research on creative labor processes that instead point toward ideological mechanisms of control wherein “creativity,” as a discourse, justifies precarious employment. A key argument I make in this book is that these ideological mechanisms depend upon distinct materialities or aesthetic structures that modulate workers’ affect and allow workers to perceive and imagine possibilities within the working day. These aesthetic structures of work exert power or control over creative labor by affectively binding workers to their tasks. THE CASES: SONICO AND THE FUTURE The scenes I just detailed come from twenty months of extensive participant observation and interviews that I conducted from 2013 through 2018. During this time, I worked alongside or shadowed employees such as Jerry the engineer, office workers like Desmond, and music laborers. This includes eighty-four semistructured, in-depth interviews with managers, workers, and technology designers; a field survey of employees at The Future; and audio field recordings.33 Men tend to be overrepresented in terms of employment in both conventional and digital media, a pattern present at both field sites and thus also in my data. Despite somewhat of a lack in gender diversity, my informants were diverse in terms of ethnicity, race, and sexuality, especially in the case of YouTube production. I mention this because my effort to maintain the confidentiality of informants’ identities often obscures this feature of my ethnographic data. After concluding 20 INTRODUCTIONS my primary fieldwork, I began interviewing YouTube creators in Los Angeles and then in the Midwest and Southwest of the United States. Sometimes I had known these creators for several months, but sometimes we only met for an interview. Creators were clients of The Future; I selected them with the aim of achieving maximum variation in terms of creators’ genre, gender, race/ethnicity, and location. A few chose to speak with me only via Skype, but many were overwhelmingly generous with their time, often inviting me into their homes to see how and where they worked. In addition to qualitative data sources, I used descriptive statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and economic census data to locate workers within the broader U.S. economy. The primary aim of my research was to examine creative labor in two divergent organizational contexts, drawing out similarities between the two cases so as to develop an empirically grounded theory of creative labor. To address the theoretical issues discussed earlier in this introduction, I selected a fairly conventional mode of organizing creative labor (SoniCo, the recording studio) and a relatively new mode of organizing creative labor, one that depends upon a particular social media platform (The Future, a YouTube management network). I also leverage this comparison to explain how each organization’s infrastructural context shapes the creative labor process. As a music recording studio, SoniCo represents a more conventional mode of organizing creative labor, the current form of which emerged in the 1970s and has remained largely unchanged since the 1990s. Music production is relatively independent of any single infrastructure, and much like other industries marked by what Walter Powell and others refer to as “networked” forms of organization, SoniCo and its workers depend upon reputation and social networks in order to secure profits.34 In contrast, The Future depends upon YouTube’s global platform and thus upon global, technological capital. While digital distribution infrastructures or platforms exist in both organizations’ respective fields, no single platform dominates in music, whereas YouTube content, by definition, exists on only a single platform. Thus, this comparison provides insight into how dependence upon a single infrastructure shapes work in the emerging field of cultural production around YouTube. Both SoniCo and The Future generate revenue from the provision of production services. At both firms, production personnel such as sound 21 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? engineers and creators (expressive creative workers) are considered independent contractors, while office staffmembers (routine creative workers) tend to be employed full-time by the firms. They differ insofar as YouTube creators tend to be under multiyear (and sometimes lifetime) contracts at The Future, whereas audio engineers tend to be employed on a project-byproject basis or self-employed. Like barbers or tattoo artists in their parlors, audio engineers worked at SoniCo but not for SoniCo. Management at both firms invited workers to “be creative,” to improvise and integrate the planning and execution of tasks, yet workers’ skills command very little power, given the large standing reserve of creative labor. This feature stemmed, in part, from SoniCo’s location in Los Angeles, The Future’s use of a globally distributed workforce, and the more general decline in unionization in the United States. These factors, which prevent culture industry workers from appealing to labor regulations, combine with management’s attempts to extend the working day while paying relatively low wages.35 Creative labor in the United States exists within what thus may be termed a despotic labor regime.36 Though similar, SoniCo and The Future differ in the logics that undergird how they organize production. I draw out what is common to creative labor processes through a comparison of these divergent cases. SoniCo exists within a network of organizations that operate under what Bernard Miège calls a “publishing logic.”37 Common to music and other conventional media industries (e.g., film, television, etc.), the publishing logic tends to organize work around short-term projects, with a networked organization of small firms producing a range of products with the hope that a few products may be successful enough in terms of sales or status to support other, less successful projects. The Future, on the other hand, exists within a network of organizations tied together by their dependence upon a single platform: YouTube. YouTube production tends to be TABLE 1.1 Cases of creative labor in the U.S. culture industries Product Workers SoniCo The Future Music Sound engineers Office staff YouTube content Content creators Office staff 22 INTRODUCTIONS organized around a constant flow of new content produced by a globally distributed workforce, given the economics of platforms and their reliance upon increased growth in their number of users.38 The platform determines the economic value of this content by way of various metrics and blackboxed calculations. Surprisingly, I find that these two cases share more in common than might be expected, even if they still differ in one fundamental way. Both cases share a dominant managerial ideology (“be creative,” a euphemism for self-management), requisite forms of labor, and workers’ relation to technology. Many of the differences between SoniCo and The Future stem from the latter’s structural dependence vis-à-vis global, technological capital (i.e., Google and its YouTube platform). The platform enables The Future (and Google) to capture the value produced by a globally distributed workforce of content producers. SoniCo and The Future represent two regimes of creative labor: the social and the quantified. Each contains distinct but similar modes of control. SoniCo’s social regime controls labor by managing how work feels through workplace sociality and the materialities or aesthetics of the workplace, whereas The Future’s quantified regime governs first through metrics and quotas and second by managing how work feels. As an ethnographer, I aim to provide an in-depth view of creative labor in these contexts while generating theoretically transposable concepts, so I aim for conceptual generalizability rather than statistically generalizable findings. Though these cases may limit my theorization to the particular political economy of the United States, they raise broadly relevant issues that may prove useful in understanding creative labor processes in other sociocultural contexts. STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK Leveraging the ethnographic comparison of creative labor in two organizational contexts, I make three arguments in this book. First, a full-bodied understanding of creative labor under cognitive capitalism requires consideration of work’s aesthetic structures in conjunction with work’s social, economic, and technical structures. In this book’s two cases of creative labor, I find that work’s aesthetic structures engage and excite, exerting power or control over creative labor. These engagements—what I call 23 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? aesthetic enrollment—increase the likelihood of workers’ consent to precarious, often exploitative conditions of employment. This leads to my second major point. This distinctive mode of social control never fully resolves the contradictions of creative labor processes. The organization of creative labor produces neither full consent to exploitative precarity nor eruptive collective resistance. Instead, these engagements temporarily bind workers to work, enrolling them in capital’s projects of profit making just long enough to secure their creative labor. When this process slips out of balance, workers exit or engage in simple refusals. Third, social media platforms may and do exert centralized control over creative labor much as other platforms exert power: by imposing blackboxed systems of governance along with quantified metrics that reconfigure or replace professional conventions. I make these arguments across three parts. In chapter 2 I provide a brief genealogy of “creativity” discourses to better understand the variety of ways in which people used the term creativity while I was in the field. To be clear, this chapter treats creativity as an ideological formation or discourse, so my goal is not to find some “real” creativity but to understand the range of historical and contemporary meanings of the term and then to understand how creativity, as ideological construction, operates in this book’s two cases of creative labor. Critical scholars of creative labor claim that the contemporary discourse of “creativity” functions as a dispositif, that is, a self-regulating ideological control mechanism that regulates. Bourdieuian studies of cultural production suggest much the same, that a field’s singular illusio, or ideology, justifies what might otherwise seem exploitative. Based on these explanations, I expected to find minimal variation in the discourses employed by workers and capital. Instead, I found differences along class lines, with workers, managers, and global capital all offering up different definitions. Though still steeped in distinctly Western, often masculine discourses of autonomous self-expression, workers’ accounts of creativity never appeared fully subsumed by the more instrumentally pragmatic views espoused by management and global capital (Google’s YouTube). These divergent accounts, I argue, show how the discursive terrain of creativity appears too varied to provide either a stable source of normative control, as in critical feminist scholarship, or explain workers’ affective attachments to work, as in Bourdieuian studies that point toward illusio. There remains a gap between 24 INTRODUCTIONS classes, one that needs to be bandaged over if these extant theories are to explain why workers consent or become affectively attached to precarious employment. Part 2 then focuses on the entangled processes of attachment, control, and consent. I begin the ethnographic portion of the book at SoniCo, where I delineate the contradictions of creative labor processes—what I call creative labor’s positive and negative poles. At SoniCo’s positive pole, I find dense social ties and embodied engagement vis-à-vis technology, which provide for workers’ attachments to precarious employment. These features of work hang alongside the precarity and alienation of SoniCo’s negative pole. Examining the working days of expressive audio engineers and routine office staff, I find that both jobs require creative labor, and so any empirical distinction between expressive and routine workers in these industries appears to be of less conceptual import than suggested by previous research. Across both types of workers, managerial power tends to be exerted directly through a soft form of simple, direct control and indirectly by managing how work feels and incentivizing professional networking opportunities. Managers shape how work feels by cultivating social relationships with employees and creating a “cool” workplace. I show how this ineffable “cool” tends to be intimately bound up in SoniCo’s distinct materialities—most often through embodied engagement vis-à-vis the studio’s technology. Here, I develop what I call aesthetic enrollment—a mechanism by which workers’ come to feel “creative” even in the most mundane of jobs. Alongside the mechanism of aesthetic enrollment, management incentivizes tasks by framing the workplace as full of possibilities for professional networking and reputation building— crucially important parts of work in networked organizations such as those found in the culture industry. These strategies aim to secure friendly office staff and a stable group of freelance engineers while also encouraging labor to adopt an entrepreneurial disposition. Focusing on the negative valences of creative labor, that is, precarity and alienation, chapter 4 asks how workers reproduce their labor power and relate to what they produce. I find that engineers and office staff both understand their jobs as just one of many income streams—not unlike theorizations of neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial subject. Illustrating this entrepreneurial disposition toward work, engineers often view themselves as small businesses, while office staffmembers see their full-time jobs as 25 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? enabling them to become a small business eventually. The lines between work and nonwork blur as this disposition leads workers to engage in constant professional networking within and without the formal boundaries of the organization in order to secure enough income streams to maintain economic solvency. Often failing to do so, workers rely upon networks of friends and family for economic and social support. In explaining how SoniCo’s employees relate to music produced at the studio, I theorize creative labor’s distinctive form of alienation, what I call “alienated judgment.” While creative labor requires workers’ use of judgment, they do so toward another’s ends. Work is both immediately engaging, as in the previous chapter, and mediately unpleasant upon reflection. Part 3 extends these concepts to a different organizational context by examining YouTube content production and office life at The Future. Doing so highlights the specificity of creative labor under conditions of monopoly infrastructure as well as the transposability of the concepts developed in part 2. Chapter 5 examines The Future’s positive pole, tracing the production of YouTube content from creators’ home studios to the daily rounds of employees in The Future’s offices. Beginning with an analytic description of the platform’s interface and training materials, I show how YouTube disciplines a global workforce. While the platform leaves creators free to choose the thematic core or message of content, the platform endeavors to discipline creators’ formal choices as well as creators’ production of metadata and use of preexisting intellectual property. The Future’s office workers reinforce the platform’s disciplinary strategies by advising creators on platform-specific “optimization”—not unlike the process of formatting used in homogenizing other commodities. Within these structures, management and the platform invite workers to “be creative.” I then descend from the platform to the working days of The Future’s content creators and office staff to illustrate how control strategies described in earlier chapters reappear in altered form. Whereas management at SoniCo governed, primarily, through the socioaesthetic experience of work, The Future governs through quotas or metric benchmarks and manages creators by withholding projects and production assistance until creators meet monthly growth goals. Likewise, The Future governs office staff using a quota system linked to YouTube’s metrics. The platform and The Future invite these workers to “be creative” within these quantitative structures. 26 INTRODUCTIONS Despite rampant quantification, The Future resembles SoniCo insofar as both firms attempted to manage how work felt through their distinctive workplace materialities. The Future accomplished this through unsettling, flexible office design and the use of communication technologies designed to re-create the aesthetics of social media. Among creators and office staff, I find that working on and through the YouTube platform elicits an ambivalent mix of frustration and fascination. Workers navigate the platform’s blackboxed, algorithmic governance—often the cause of lost revenue and precarity—alongside the platform’s ever-changing interface and opaque rule structure. Nearly constant changes in this infrastructural technology dynamize work, simultaneously engaging, captivating, and frustrating workers. Change is constant—a source of “cool” satisfaction—yet the platform’s satisfying dynamism often results in heightened precarity. Paradoxically, workers appear fascinated and satisfied by that which heightens their precarity: the unknowable logic underlying changes in the algorithms and interfaces through which they work. Chapter 6 examines The Future’s negative pole in order to show how The Future’s quantitative regime shapes workers’ attempts to mitigate precarity and their use of judgment. In attempting to mitigate precarity, The Future’s creators and office staff engage in constant learning aimed at consistently expanding their skills so as to maintain employability. Rather than learning from peers, as under SoniCo’s social regime, they learn from YouTube content. As they view this content, they simultaneously learn and generate advertising revenue for the platform, and so the platform captures value from both their production and consumption of content. Relatedly, The Future indefinitely defers support to the majority of creators. This deferred support, along with YouTube’s training and promotional materials, encourages workers to inventively develop new income streams. They do so by creating a dense web of revenue streams derived from YouTube and other digital platforms. The Future captures a portion of these revenues, and so, again, even in attempts to mitigate precarity and gain economic autonomy, workers generate value for The Future and YouTube, blurring the lines between labor performed for capital and labor performed for one’s self. In the remainder of chapter 6, I illustrate the subordination of workers’ judgment vis-à-vis the platform, arguing that the platform structures the creative labor process more loosely and more thoroughly than under SoniCo’s social regime. 27 C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? In the conclusion, I provide a conceptual map or theory of creative labor and discuss the implications of my findings for the sociologies of work and media production as well as for theories of cognitive capitalism and the relations among affect, aesthetics, and power. I emphasize the power of work’s aesthetic dimension, the engaging everyday materialities that aesthetically enroll workers in economically exploitative work. In doing so, I argue that control operates at the level of sense and feeling, not simply discourse or ideological gloss. Embodied experiences vis-à-vis work’s technologies allow for this to occur, illustrating how the ineffable “cool” that binds creative workers to their tasks depends upon distinct materialities. In other words, the aesthetic dimension of work exerts control or power at the level of the labor process, and this aesthetic dimension often obscures what might otherwise feel grossly exploitative, eliciting a partial and ultimately tentative form of consent that may at any time spill over into passive resistance or exit. Workers know and understand their economic circumstances, yet work feels undeniably engaging, dynamic, and, often, enjoyable. Based on this, I argue for a labor politics of judgment focused not on how work feels but on workers’ control over the use of their creativity. Closing out the book, I suggest the potential policy relevance of these arguments to discussions about the blurred boundaries between work and nonwork and the power of digital platforms. NOTES 1. CREATIVE CONTROL? 1. See, e.g., Bell (1976); Castells (2010); Florida (2002); Hardt (2005); Reich (1991). 2. Florida (2002); Reich (1991). 3. Kealy (1979). 4. Here I am referring to a loosely assimilable set of political, social, and media theorists (e.g., Boutang 2011; Fuchs 2011; Marazzi 2011) who tend to take the “social factory” thesis (i.e., we are always working, even when not at work) put forth by Italian autonomist Marxism (see Tronti 2019 [1966]; see also Hardt and Negri 2001, 2005) as a key orienting problematic. The capture of value generated by networks of workers and nonworkers (e.g., social media users) and their cognitive-linguistic skills (what I am calling creative labor) tend to be the generative locus of value under “cognitive capitalism.” 5. Berardi (2009). 6. Mills (1951). 7. Hochschild (2003 [1982]). 8. Braverman (1974). 9. E.g., Aneesh (2009); Huws (2014). 10. Paul Willis (1990) calls this “symbolic creativity.” I use this definition because it remains adequately generic so as to encompass all the work examined during the ethnographic research that informs this book and, as mentioned in this chapter, as a way of gesturing toward the rather fraught history of the term “creativity.” 11. Adorno (1991, 47). 12. Willis (1978); see also Hall and Jefferson (1975); Hebdige (1978). 13. Lloyd (2006). 254 1 . C R E AT I V E C O N T R O L ? 14. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005). 15. Burawoy (1982). 16. Menger (1999). 17. Mears (2011, 69, emphasis added). 18. Gell (1992). 19. E.g., Horkheimer and Adorno (1947); Kracauer (1963). 20. Williams (1978). 21. E.g., Massumi (2002); Clough and Halley (2007); Sedgwick and Frank (2003); Ahmed (2006); Stewart (2007); Gregg and Seigworth (2010a, 2010b); see Leys (2011); Mazzarella (2010) for critique. 22. Strati (2003, 54). 23. Massumi (2015). 24. Durkheim (1995); see Mazzarella (2017a); Barnwell (2017) for discussions of Durkheim vis-à-vis affect theory. 25. See Mazzarella (2017a); Newell (2018); Rutherford (2016). 26. Gagliardi (1996). 27. Cetina and Bruegger (2002). 28. Burawoy (1998). 29. Hirsch (1972). 30. Gillespie (2010); Terranova (2017). 31. Chambers et al. (2018). 32. There are, of course, terrific studies of cultural production and creative work based on rigorous participant observation (e.g., Frenette 2013; Mears 2011; Ross 2004), but more often this line of research draws primarily from interviews, leaving the labor process behind (e.g., Gerber 2017; Gregg 2011; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). 33. I made field recordings of the sound at both fieldsites and conducted a weekly survey while at The Future. The field recordings guided informed my interview questions regarding workplace aesthetics. Edited versions of these recordings may be heard at the Sound Ethnography Project website (soundethnography.com). I based the survey instrument on the workplace affect survey reported in Theresa Amabile’s study of affect and creativity (2005) as well as on several open-ended questions about what workers found enjoyable or unenjoyable about the days on which they responded to the survey. By no means representative in a statistical sense, I used the data primarily to guide my observation, develop interview questions, and develop a rough estimate of average job tenure. In their open-ended responses, employees frequently identified their day-to-day tasks as what they most enjoyed about their work. This influenced my decision to focus on the minutiae of those tasks when I discuss work’s positive pole. 34. Powell (1990); see also Adler (2001). 35. Caldwell (2008); Curtin and Sanson (2016); Gill and Pratt (2008); Ross (2009). 36. See Burawoy (1985). 37. Miège (1989), but note that Raymond Williams made a similar observation in Sociology of Culture (1981), wherein he developed a typology of cultural production not wholly unlike that put forth by Miège. 38. See Srnicek (2016) for discussion of platforms’ reliance upon “network effects.”