UCLA

This dissertation considers how, and whose, everyday practices of digital media use have turned into the “creator economy”, the $100-billion global industry of digital content creation that is often touted as a paradigm shift in the “future of work”. It follows ethnographically an unlikely set of creators — dominant-caste Hindu, Indian women, self-styled “home chefs” — who make home-cooking content for YouTube and Instagram. I argue that the creator economy is best understood as the expansion of the household industry, reconfigured in this conjuncture as the household start-up. In such a framing, the historical, sociopolitical, infrastructural and affective constitution of households is as central to the accumulative apparatus of the creator economy as apps, smart devices, algorithms, web traffic, practices of individual self-making and the intentions of tech companies. In content and method, Home Chefs argues for a broadening of the presumed sites, practices and socialities through which the mutual imbrication of digital media and capitalism can be understood. In doing so, it models an ethnographic insistence on materiality, place, affect and embodiment in studies of the digital. It de-centers technologically deterministic and universalizing theorizations about the ‘effects’ of social media and platform economies on labor and social life, and provides a non-Western genealogy of the existing structural conditions that are constituting digital capitalism as a set of uneven, contradictory global exchanges. In making food its object of inquiry, it foregrounds as central to these projects the intersecting relationships between gender, race, sexuality and caste in the global emergence of neoliberalism and xenophobic nationalism. In re-centering the household, homes and homeworkers as the primary producers of a global industry, it highlights the intimate social arrangements that are central to producing capitalism, and challenges the notion of a priori capitalist ‘logics’. Taking capitalism to be a project, not a context, my chapters address the questions: How is the abstract capitalist project of the creator economy materialized in particular places by particular people? What work goes into making it tangible and powerful? What kinds of actors, infrastructures, social structures and cultural processes are pressed into service, moulded, and reorganized in the process of its actualization?