THE PRECARITY, PERILS, AND PROMISES OF EMERGING CREATOR ECONOMIES

Abstract

This panel focuses on the relationship of emerging creator economies to conditions of precarity, as they have come to develop in several distinct yet partially overlapping social, historical, and geographical contexts, including: Dalit mobile street performances in Haryana, India; YouTube street interview videos recorded in China, Japan and South Korea; the digital circulation of ethnonationalist themes and tropes surrounding the 2024 parliamentary elections in Uttarakhand, India; the resurgence of New Age beliefs and practices on CrystalTok; and, the rise of motivational speakers as political intermediaries in rural areas of neoliberal India. Across these various contexts, emerging creator economies, and the media practices and technologies which constitute them, appear as often attached to various contextually situated promises—of social mobility; political empowerment; cultural recognition; fame and wealth; or healing and relief from systemic forms of harm. This panel considers how various individuals, social groups, and organizations have, through participation in and strategic engagement with emerging creator economies, sought to achieve at least one (and in some cases, multiple) of the above listed goals and objectives. Utilizing a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches that collectively prioritize ambivalence and contextual nuance over sweeping generalizations, each of these five papers in some way balances an interest in the unique social and political potentials that emerging creator economies have helped (or might help) to realize, in a given context, with a critical awareness of the systemic forms of inequality, political disempowerment, and social and psychological immiseration that creator economies have both contributed to and intensified.