From Commodification to Assetisation: Reconciling the Delights and
Disturbances of Digital Labour
One of the central features of the contemporary digital labour environment, especially in the creative economy, is the incorporation of personality, affect, and interpersonal relationships into the workplace. Subjectivity itself has been “put to work”. This is certainly the case in the online creator industry which is associated with self-branding, self-promotion, and the conscious crafting of commercialisable identities. The work of influencers, OnlyFans creators, and TikTokers is thus often critiqued for being a process of commodification and consequently a site for the degradation of meaningful personhood. But is this really the case? Is there only disturbance and no delight in online creative labour? Drawing on ideas from her new book Digital Labour (Polity, 2022), Professor Kylie Jarrett will question assumptions about the existence of commodity relations in digital work. It will propose instead the framework of “assetisation” to explain the commercialisation of subjectivity in online creator work, with implications for how we understand all kinds of digital labour both as economic phenomena but also as sites of worker agency.
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