Compulsory Creativity: A Critique of Cognitive Capitalism

Larsen, Steen Nepper

doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.146159

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…According to [41], creativity is in fact a major driving force of a capitalist economy. Within this framework, creativity is ceaselessly appropriated to generate economic value; it becomes "difficult to know precisely where the individual use value of creativity stops and the exchange value of the original and creative talents begins" [41]. Likewise, the advancement of generative AI models, particularly those that automate creative tasks, is propelled by capitalism's fixation on economic growth.…”

Section: Ideationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practice-based research at SensiLab

McCormack¹,

Ilsar²,

Chandler³

et al. 2021

The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research

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Recent developments in prompt-based generative AI has given rise to discourse surrounding the perceived ethical concerns, economic implications, and consequences for the future of cultural production. As generative imagery becomes pervasive in mainstream society, dominated primarily by emerging industry leaders, we encourage that the role of the CHI community be one of inquiry; to investigate the numerous ways in which generative AI has the potential to, and already is, augmenting human creativity. In this paper, we conducted a diffractive analysis exploring the potential role of prompt-based interfaces in artists' creative practice. Over a two week period, seven visual artists were given access to a personalised instance of Stable Diffusion, fine-tuned on a dataset of their work. In the following diffractive analysis, we identified two

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Section: Ideationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practice-based research at SensiLab

McCormack¹,

Ilsar²,

Chandler³

et al. 2021

The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In Western societies, such as Finland, creative work is increasing as routine work decreases. Although the benefits of creativity for working life have been described extensively, there is today a growing trend to associate creativity with negative consequences like burden of individuals and the emergence of obligatory creativity [53]. Jobs that require constant creativity and development are mentally demanding and pose new challenges when it comes to coping with work.…”

Section: Studying Sustainable Creativity In the Finnish Technology Sectormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Jobs that require constant creativity and development are mentally demanding and pose new challenges when it comes to coping with work. Societal pressure requires the employee to be able to add value through creativity in order to secure a place in the labor market [53].…”

Section: Studying Sustainable Creativity In the Finnish Technology Sectormentioning

confidence: 99%

(Un)Sustainable Creativity? Different Manager-Employee Perspectives in the Finnish Technology Sector

et al. 2020

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The importance of creativity for working life and in organizations has increased in recent years. At the same time, the theme of sustainability has been intensely debated in research, society, and organizations. Together, creativity and sustainability have sometimes been described as a contradictory phenomenon: they are described in ways that place them in opposition to each other. To better understand creativity and sustainability and their differences from the perspective of people in different positions, we take advantage of a sociocultural approach in which we do not focus only on creative individuals but also on the impact of creativity on both organizational stakeholders and society at large. We aim to explore manager and employee descriptions of creativity and its relationship with sustainability at work in the Finnish technology sector, with a particular focus on how they relate to the sustainability of the creative processes and to workplace activities more generally. Based on a thematic analysis of 56 interviews, we found that the managers and employees in Finnish technology organizations described creativity in different ways, looking at the phenomenon from the viewpoints of clients, businesses, society, or colleagues, and had different perspectives on what it means to create, with the former treating creativity as huge innovations and the latter as daily problem-solving. We also found that sustainability in relation to creativity appears either as applying old solutions and thus recycling previous ideas or outcomes or as destroying old products and replacing them with the new (creative destruction). We discuss these partly conflicting discourses at the end of the article and present suggestions for future research.

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“…(Thrift 2006, Nepper Larsen 2014. Namely, the fact that this conception of the creative economy quite often in its self-explanatory, self-justificatory and self-constitutive discourse draws on the 1960's "New Left"/"Humanist Marxist" critical account of the maladies of alienating capitalist labour.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

(In)tangible Arguments about Play, Creativity, and the Political Economy of 3D Printing: The Free Universal Construction Kit

Stephensen

Hansen

2015

tripleC

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Abstract:With the increasing economic accessibility of 3D printers, the lessons learned and the logics cultivated on digital Web 2.0 now seem applicable to the world of material things. Released in early 2012 by the artist groups F.A.T. and Sy-lab, the Free Universal Construction Kit is a set of 3D drawings that enable everyone with access to a 3D printer to make connectors between intellectual property restricted toys like LEGO, Tinkertoys, and Fischertechnik. However, when describing this project as "reverse engineering as a civic activity", it becomes obvious that the Kit's greater agenda is not just to enable cross-over playing, but rather, to problematize and perhaps ultimately open up closed formats through critical appropriation. But how does that, for instance, conform with the fact that the connectors are parasitically attached to these toys, whose logic it is simultaneously defying? And which (implicit) notions of creativity and play are at stake in this project, and to what extent do they fit the more general philosophical underpinnings of this project?Keywords: 3D printing, Intellectual Property Rights, Political Economy, Art, Critical Design, Appropriation, Creativity, Play Acknowledgements: This research has been supported by Aarhus University's interdisciplinary research centre for Participatory Information Technology, PIT, and AU IDEAS Pilot Center The Democratic Public Sphere. Thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers for valuable feedback and insightful comments."The crux of prefigurative politics imposed substantial tasks, the central one being to create and sustain within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that 'prefigured' and embodied the desired society" (Breines 1980, 421)

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Compulsory Creativity: A Critique of Cognitive Capitalism

Cited by 12 publications

References 4 publications

Practice-based research at SensiLab

Practice-based research at SensiLab

(Un)Sustainable Creativity? Different Manager-Employee Perspectives in the Finnish Technology Sector

(In)tangible Arguments about Play, Creativity, and the Political Economy of 3D Printing: The Free Universal Construction Kit

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