Abstract

The emergence of the so-called creator economy, the $400 billion global industry of monetized online content creation, raises urgent questions about how platform economies articulate with social life. Critical theorists argue that platforms, as monopolistic digital intermediaries, act as rent-seeking landlords in between producers and consumers of commodities. Bringing a feminist, ethnographic lens to “the Internet of Landlords,” this article follows Indian food media creators on YouTube and Instagram, asking: Why is the Hindu home kitchen, a stubbornly guarded space of heterosexual caste-making, now opening for business? In unraveling this paradox, the essay argues that content creation’s production relations take the centuries-old labor form of household industry, refashioned in this conjuncture as the entrepreneurial “household start-up.” As the private household becomes a key locus of global production, this hype-fueled resignification of home-based piecework depoliticizes labor while reifying social difference. Such a reframing better clarifies the sociopolitical relations between platformization and class struggle. 

Keywords

creator economy; households; Marxist feminism; platform capitalism; caste; food

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2026 Sucharita Kanjilal

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.