Platform-Era Creative Leadership: Opportunities and Limitations in Organizing Alternative Micro-Communities
The landscape of creative leadership continues to undergo profound transformation in the era of algorithmic platforms, social media, AI-enhanced tools, and decentralized digital spaces. While traditional creative industries – advertising, media annd entertainment, design, brand communications, and journalism – once operated within clear institutional structures, today’s creative leaders increasingly seek alternative models of organizing that resist reliance on corporations and dominant platforms and foster deeper, individually- and community-driven engagement.
This fragmentation of creative leadership in the 2010s and 2020s marks a dramatic shift from its half-century of prominence as an alternative to traditional, efficiency- and task-oriented management practices. From the mid-20th century through the early 2000s, creative leadership emerged as a largely coherent response to the limitations of scientific management, emphasizing flexibility, imagination, and vision over standardization, measurement, and control. Creative figures (and authors) from Gordon MacKenzie at Hallmark to Ed Catmull at Pixar articulated approaches that prioritized psychological safety, intrinsic motivation, and creative autonomy and collaboration. However, the platform revolution has destabilized these established frameworks, revealing both their limitations and the new competencies required in a digital, networked, and algorithmic environment.
The platforms that now mediate creative work are not neutral conduits but active shapers of perception, cognition, feeling, and value – altering how we think about ourselves, our connections to others, and the very meaning of creative work. At the broadest level, as pioneering media ecologist Neil Postman already argued more than a half-century ago, we need to examine our technologically mediated environment as a complex system “which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It structures what we can see and say and, therefore, do. It assigns roles to us and insists on our playing them. It specifies what we are permitted to do and what we are not.” In the case of media environments, Postman went on, “the specifications are more often implicit and informal, half concealed by our assumption that what we are dealing with is not an environment but merely a machine” (1970: 161). For creative leaders, this ecological perspective requires abandoning the illusion that platforms are mere tools; instead, they must recognize how these environments fundamentally reshape creative processes, products, and identities.
The Promise of Alternative Creative Organizing
Micro-Communities and Decentralized Creative Networks
In the traditional creative economy, institutions such as agencies, studios, and media companies provided structure, funding, and legitimacy. As contemporary media theorist Andrey Mir suggests, the guiding incentives of the basic business models across media have switched from informing or entertaining (as a basis for securing ad revenues or subscriptions) to engaging (as a basis for collecting personal data). That latter business model is the basis of our current digital, social, media, and algorithmic platform economy. It is the model that has transformed audiences from largely passive consumers into increasingly active communities of users of social technologies and networks, organizing more around shared beliefs than shared information (2024).
In response to this sweeping formation of the platform economy, alternative creative communities – independent collectives, federated media projects, platform cooperatives, and decentralized guilds – offer new ways for creatives to collaborate and sustain themselves financially. These new business, operating, and financial models allow for autonomy and ownership, as creatives retain control over their work and are not subject to the restrictive mandates of corporate institutions. They also offer the promise of expanding and diversifying the formative environment in which we live, lead, and work that Postman described in general, cautionary terms and that we need to be attentive to today.
These networks benefit from community-driven support through crowdfunding, patronage models such as Patreon, Kickstarter, and Open Collective, and decentralized financial tools like blockchain-based revenue sharing, which enable sustainable income models outside traditional employment structures. At the same time, AI-enhanced content creation, distribution, and analytics tools are further aiding small creative collectives with reaching targeted audiences more effectively, bypassing traditional industry gatekeepers and financial constraints.
The emergence of the creator economy has further accelerated these shifts. Goldman Sachs estimated the total addressable market of this economy at $250 billion globally in 2023 and believes it could nearly double to $480 billion by 2027 (2023). This scale and rapid growth has enabled individual creators to build micro-businesses around their creative work. Platforms like Substack, Teachable, and Gumroad have created infrastructure that allows creators to monetize directly, reducing dependence on traditional gatekeepers and enabling niche creativity to find sustainable audiences. An early evangelist, venture capitalist Li Jin, acknowledges that “creator platforms do need to cater to top creators in order to incentivize them to stay – a dynamic that predisposes platforms toward inequality.” The challenge, she quickly notes, is “to balance the leverage that top creators have – and rightly spotlighting top talent – with lifting up newcomers” (2020: 16). To her call for building a societal and economic path for everyone to flourish, we might add alternative voices and even alternative platforms.
Several prominent examples illustrate the viability of such structures:
Are.na, founded in 2011 and based in New York City, is a decentralized knowledge-sharing platform that allows students, hobbyists, and ‘connected knowledge collectors’ to collaboratively curate and distribute content outside of algorithm-driven social media.
The Guild of Future Architects (GoFA), established in 2019 in the United States, fosters a network of artists and thinkers dedicated to reimagining systems for creative and social impact, blending artistic practice with long-term structural change.
Stocksy, launched in 2013 in Canada, is an artist-owned creative media agency and cooperative of creatives specializing in visuals organized around intentionally curated collection, platform, and community.
Enspiral is a collective of entrepreneurs, changemakers and activists – an ‘ecosystem of purposes’ – based in New Zealand since 2010 and committed to knowledge sharing, social impact work, and consulting worldwide. Their book, Better Work Together, is a valuable resource for organizational innovation and community building.
Branded Gatherings and Social-Creative Communities
Beyond primarily digital networks, a parallel evolution has occurred in physical and hybrid gatherings organized around shared creative values and practices. An important contributor to this evolution has been the experience of years of intensive if typically ephemeral in-person Meetups and Design Jam events. The communities involved or that formed offer crucial opportunities for creative leaders to forge connections, exchange ideas, and develop professional identities outside institutional frameworks.
CreativeMornings, founded by Tina Roth Eisenberg in 2008, has grown into a global phenomenon with chapters in over 200 cities worldwide. The organization hosts free monthly talks and workshops for creative professionals, emphasizing accessibility and community-building. As Eisenberg explained, “CreativeMornings was never about the talks – it was always about getting people in a room together” (Powers, 2023: 78). This focus on in-person connection provides a counterbalance to the increasingly digital nature of creative work, fostering serendipitous encounters that online platforms rarely facilitate.
Similarly, the House of Beautiful Business, founded in 2017 by Till Grusche and Tim Leberecht, creates immersive gatherings that blend philosophical inquiry, artistic experience, and business innovation. Their events explicitly position themselves as alternatives to conventional business conferences, creating what Leberecht calls “spaces of intimacy and vulnerability in professional settings” (2022). Participants engage in activities ranging from silent walks to philosophical discussions to artistic collaborations, all aimed at reimagining business as a force for human flourishing rather than merely profit generation.
These branded gatherings extend what sociologist Ray Oldenburg originally termed “third places,” those locations separate from home and work where individuals can gather informally to build community. While the term remains familiar for commercial spaces from descriptions of Starbucks’ early expansion strategy, the concept has evolved. French urban thinker Arnault Morisson has proposed ‘fourth places’ to refer to social environments that no longer separate but combine elements of the previous three (e.g., coliving spaces that combine living and working or coworking spaces that combine living and socializing) (2018). Today, hybrid in-person and virtual gatherings and events, as well as the resurgence of private clubs, further evolve these combinations and the overall understanding of community in creative hubs. Indeed, for creative professionals and knowledge workers navigating precarious employment conditions, these spaces and communities provide crucial professional support networks, inspiration, and opportunities for collaboration outside formal institutional structures.
The Role of Digital Platforms and Algorithmic Systems
In the late 1990s, sociologist Manuel Castells launched what would become a three-volume examination of the ‘network society’ that he viewed as the structure of societies in the Information Age. Network logics shaped power dynamics, processes of production, human experiences and interactions, and cultural expressions (2010). Decades later, Castells and others have observed how social and algorithmic platforms re-shaped the egalitarian promise of early networks into platforms with more centralized and corporatized financial, data, and infrastructural nodes (Castells, 2023; Comunello and Mulargia, 2023). While still potentially providing space and resources for micro-communities to flourish, digital platforms nevertheless exert control through algorithmic visibility, engagement metrics, ongoing data extraction, and monetization policies.
Many creative collectives find themselves dependent on centralized platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and Substack, which ultimately control the opportunities for and extent of the collectives’ reach, visibility, and monetization. This dependency aligns with Hobart and William Smith College political scientist Jodi Dean’s notion of ‘communicative capitalism,’ in which digital platforms can be understod to co-opt creative labor, turning engagement into data for corporate profit rather than meaningfully sustaining independent creators and communities (2009). Furthermore, and increasingly, AI-driven homogenization raises concerns about the automation of creativity, intellectual property disputes, and the dilution of human artistic expression.
The emergence of these networked formations suggest a version of the contested notion of an ‘echo chamber’ – perhaps most associated with U.S. public intellectual Cass Sunstein – to denote a social community of people with social or professional ties who share certain viewpoints or values and who tend not to interact with others with different viewpoints or values (2001). While some critics have argued that informational ‘embubblement’ has always existed as part of individuals’ joining of communities, Sunstein’s emphasis is on the acceleration of these processes in digital and online networks, particularly because of the platform providers’ interest in collecting individuals’ personal data. For creative leaders, this fragmentation creates both challenges and opportunities. On one hand, this dynamic potentially complicates efforts to draw on diverse talents and experiences when striving to build cohesive teams and cultures with shared creative visions and priorities. On the other, it also potentially enables highly targeted creative work addressing specific communities with particular needs, interests, and aesthetic sensibilities.
One alternative approach to big platform dependency is media scholar and internet activist Ethan Zuckerman’s call to develop a taxonomy of social networks that include ‘defederated’ networks that decentralize ownership yet still have central rules ‘(more or less)’. Examples of this ‘Fediverse’ of independent, federated social media platforms include Mastodon and PeerTube (2023). These platforms resist the extractive logic of major tech companies by decentralizing control and enabling communities to govern their own digital spaces. In its recognition that communities – both people and practices – are often structured by distinct network technologies and logics, the taxonomy suggests that creative leaders need to develop new competencies in distributed coordination, ambient community management, and emergent strategy.
The Challenges of Economic Viability and Sustainability
Alternative Revenue Models
In leading these emergent communities, creative leaders must also continue to balance creative integrity with economic survival, necessitating new ways to fund and sustain work outside of traditional client-based revenue models. The transition from institutional support to community-based funding represents what culture and media scholar and activist Trebor Scholz calls ‘platform cooperativism,’ a movement to transform the platform economy from extractive to cooperatively-owned and democratically-governed generative models of value creation and distribution (2016).
Subscription-based communities have emerged as a primary alternative to advertising-dependent creative work. Platforms such as Ghost, Memberful, and Substack allow micro-communities to establish direct financial relationships with their audiences, replacing the intermediary role that institutions once played. This model functions effectively when creators can articulate clear value propositions that resonate with specific audience segments – typically smaller but more deeply engaged than mass audiences. To take one of mny examples, journalist Emily Atkin’s climate action-focused Substack newsletter “Heated” generates sustainable income through a dedicated subscriber base of more than 126,000 willing to pay for specialized environmental reporting that mainstream outlets have reduced.
The cooperative business model offers another promising alternative. As sociologist Nathan Schneider emphasizes, platform cooperativism is finally less about the cooperative as a legal form, a business model, or an organizational design and more fundamentally about the cooperative as an ethos with a governance structure (2018). Worker-owned creative agencies such as the previously cited Enspiral in New Zealand demonstrate how collective ownership can distribute both financial returns and decision-making authority among members. These structures support various types of distributed governance – mechanisms for collaborative decision-making that replace traditional management hierarchies while maintaining the effectiveness over time of deliberate organizing.
Hybrid financial models represent perhaps the most pragmatic approach for many creative collectives. By combining client work (maintaining relationships with existing institutional structures), grant funding (particularly for socially engaged creative projects), and audience-driven revenue (through subscriptions, memberships, or patronage), collectives can develop more resilient financial foundations. This approach acknowledges what Dutch visual artist and cultural economist Hans Abbing identified as the persistent “exceptional economy of the arts,” where market mechanisms alone rarely provide sustainable support for creative work and creative individuals (2002). Hybridity allows collectives to navigate between commercial imperatives and creative autonomy.
An innovative example is DisCO.coop (Distributed Cooperative Organization), which emerged in 2018 from an earlier Spanish media collective and integrates peer-to-peer collaboration, feminist economic principles, and blockchain governance to support creative work. DisCO operates globally, leveraging decentralized financial structures to sustain its collective initiatives. Unlike many cryptocurrency projects, DisCO has at its core what its founders call ‘care work’ – the often invisible labor of community maintenance, relationship-building, and mutual support that sustains creative communities over time. Similarly, for creative leaders, another core principle is ‘value-based accountability’ (DisCO.coop, n.d.). These priorities directly aim to challenge the extractive logic of platform capitalism by embedding economic exchanges within broader social relationships.
The Gig Economy and Creative Precarity
The rise of micro-communities exists alongside the broader expansion of the gig economy, which offers both opportunities and challenges for creative workers. Norwegian social scientist Arne L. Kalleberg, a leading researcher of changing employment patterns, has explored both the shifting institutional and material conditions and the changing subjective experience of work. In Precarious Lives (2018), Kalleberg explores how uncertainty and instability shape workers’ perceptions of their jobs and careers. He highlights how gig work, in particular, can blur the line between employment and unemployment, leaving workers in a constant state of insecurity, which affects mental health, career identity, and job satisfaction. The autonomy and flexibility offered by the gig economy, that is, is often attended by the cost of financial instability and stress.
Platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and 99designs have created global marketplaces for creative services, democratizing access but also driving commodification and price competition. These marketplaces, and the gig or sharing economy generally, turn on complex and varied dynamics: while some creative workers succeed in these environments, often by developing specialized niches, many others struggle, still others use these opportunities supplement their stable jobs, and a further group uses these platforms to organize their own teams and micro-communities (Ravenelle, 2019). Adopting communication scholar Brooke Erin Duffy’s resonant phrase, such platform technologies have introduced ‘algorithmic precarity in cultural work’ by creating “new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such insecurity are platforms’ algorithms, which structure the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural content in capricious, enigmatic, even biased ways” (2020).
In response, new models of creative freelancing have emerged that resist the atomization of gig platforms. The Freelancers Union, founded in 1995 but significantly expanded during the platform era, provides collective benefits and advocacy for independent workers. Similarly, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britainestablished a branch specifically for game workers in 2018, creating collective representation for creative professionals in precarious employment arrangements. These organizations (among many others) demonstrate the ongoing importance of collective action even within individualized work structures.
Branding Without Corporatization
A dilemma facing many creative leaders and workers today is how individuals can both succeed economically in navigating the platform economy while avoiding being commodities serving those platforms. Nearly two decades ago, Canadian information and media studies scholar Alison Hearn sounded a critique that has only grown with the proliferation of social media, algorithmic, and AI-enhanced platforms. Hearn wrote them about risks of the ‘branded self,’ for which the construction of one’s individual self becomes increasingly inseparable from the economic processes of producing and selling one’s self-image (2008). The platform era has only intensified these pressures, as algorithmic visibility mechanisms reward personal – and, especially, distinctively ‘creative’ – branding through quantified metrics of engagement, follower counts, and social proof.
Alternative approaches that resist the commodification of creative identity have emerged in response. The Wu Ming Foundation, which emerged in the 2010s from the earlier Wu Ming literary collective, uses shared pseudonyms to emphasize creative work over individual identity (Wu Ming means ‘anonymous’ in Chinese). The literary collective itself grew from the Luther Blissett Project, a multi-purpose collective pseudonym used by hundreds of artists and anti-capitalist activists in the 1990s. By refusing individual attribution, and instead embracing anonymous or group authorship, these collectives challenge the platform economy’s insistence on personal brand development.
Guild-based identity systems offer another alternative, where creative networks develop shared reputational economies that reward contributions without personal commodification. Drawing inspiration from medieval craft guilds, these systems draw on sociologist Richard Sennett’s conceptualization of ‘craftsmanship’ as the intrinsic value of work well done for its own sake, rather than for personal advancement (2008). Modern iterations arguably include makerspaces and hackerspaces, such as Metalab in Vienna, c-base in Berlin, Noisebridge in San Francisco, and Sector67 in Madison, Wisconsin. These in-person and hybrid spaces and communities prioritize collaborative work and learning by establishing shared standards of practice, peer mentorship systems, and collective representation to external stakeholders, thereby replacing market-based individual competitive positioning with mutual support and skill development (Rosa et al, 2018).
By experimenting with alternative identity, community, and production formations, creative collectives make visible the constructed nature of creative selfhood under platform capitalism. Another compelling example of this approach is New Models, founded in 2018, a decentralized media collective that aims to provide alternatives to corporate influence over digital culture by curating independent research, design, and criticism. The organization, based in Berlin, provides a platform for critical discourse that is not bound by traditional media hierarchies. What distinguishes New Models is its commitment to cultural critque and using alternative models of encountering information by countering the dominance of algorithmic feeds, social media, and platform-specific incentives for personal brand development. By emphasizing ideas over individual identities, particularly in its podcast and online aggregation, New Models demonstrates how creative collectives can build recognition while resisting the commodification of personality.
Reshaping Creativity and Leadership
Creativity as a Collaborative, Post-Individualist Practice
The creative practices of many of these communities and collectives can be understood through Yochai Benkler’s seminal writing on commons-based peer production, which demonstrated how collaborative models of creativity could produce sophisticated cultural and technological artifacts without traditional market incentives or hierarchical management (2006). In these alternative structures, creativity is understood as a collective, iterative process rather than a solitary act of genius. This collaborative turn is further supported by Teresa Amabile’s dynamic componential model of creativity, which emphasizes the social environment’s critical role in creative processes. The decades-long research by the Harvard Business School professor suggests that meaningful creative work emerges from interaction, dialogue, and mutual support – precisely the conditions that micro-communities aim to foster. Highlighting the importance of community structures in fostering innovation, she writes simply (with Chris Pratt) that, “the social environment can influence both the level and frequency of creative behavior” (2016: 158).
The digital environment, of course, has complicated these ideas. For example, Andrey Mir’s media ecology distinguishes between the ‘viral editor’ and the ‘viral inquisitor.’ The former, prevalent in the early blogosphere, represented a human-driven, collaborative filtering of information. Users collectively determined relevance through sharing and interaction, fostering a post-individualist creative environment (2014). Conversely, the ‘viral inquisitor,’ driven by social media algorithms, prioritizes engagement and data extraction. This shift fosters surveillance, enforced conformity, and stifles genuine collaboration (2024). While the ‘viral editor’ aligned with collaborative potential, the ‘viral inquisitor’ promotes algorithmic control and social pressure, undermining collective creativity and shifting from collaborative to controlled production.
Amidst these increasing pressures – and with AI-enhanced platforms only further proliferating what Mir, in an earlier context, called “a self-built consensus of the masses” – collectives and cooperatives continue to support novel approaches to co-creation, communal storytelling, and tech innovation. An example of this is DAOhaus, itself a DAO (Digital Autonomous Organization) governed by its own community and built with open-source code. DAOhaus specializes in supporting Moloch DAOs, which are known for their focus on community-driven funding and governance.and tech innovation, and encourages the development of additional tools and applications that extend the functionality of other DAOs. Various journalism and media collectives likewise build on technologies and creative practices that challenge rather than reinforce existing technological power structures. Indymedia.org, founded in Seattle in 1999,is a decentralized global network of autonomous media centres that supports supports citizen and grassroots journalism through an open publishing and participatory media models.
The post-individualist approach to creativity, particularly in the designs of communities and collectives, shifts the focus from singular creative breakthroughs to a culture of shared knowledge and learning and iterative innovation. Digital platforms and networked collaboration tools further enable this by allowing distributed teams to co-create across geographies. Following this approach, intellectual property may be collectively owned, and success is measured by communal impact rather than individual accolades. Such models challenge existing capitalist norms of authorship and ownership, proposing instead what peer-to-peer researchers and activitis Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis term a ‘regenerative creative economy’ where ideas are freely built upon and expanded through group effort (2014). By embracing common pools of knowledge, peer production, and shared creativity, micro-communities and cooperatives can challenge not just economic arrangements but fundamental cultural narratives about creativity itself.
Leadership as Facilitation and Social Influence, Not Control
In micro-communities and creative collectives, leadership moves away from top-down decision-making and toward networked facilitation. Inspired by Castells’ concept of networked power, these models distribute leadership across fluid, adaptable structures rather than rigid hierarchies. For management thinkers and practitioners, complexity leadership theory offers a particularly apt framework for understanding leadership as an emergent process within complex adaptive systems rather than a fixed position of authority. As longtime TCU professor of leadership Mary Uhl-Bien and her co-authors note, this approach “focuses on identifying and exploring the strategies and behaviors that foster organizational and subunit creativity, learning, and adaptability” (2007: 314). Rather than directing creative work, leaders in this model create enabling conditions for self-organization, emergent innovation, and adaptive response to changing environments.
The shift from instrumental and rigidly hierarchical to enabling and facilitative complexity leadership opens valuable possibilities for creative organizing. When leadership functions as orchestration rather than command, collectives gain the capacity to self-organize around emergent opportunities and challenges. This facilitative approach – leadership of the many by the many – creates environments where constituent power flourishes: teams rapidly reconfigure, adapting to shifting contexts, ideally without losing coherence or momentum. For creative communities and collectives, this represents a profound strategic advantage. While maintaining institutional memory and core values, the organizing demonstrates remarkable tactical flexibility, quickly mobilizing resources around promising projects. This model provides both theoretical foundation and practical inspiration for leaders navigating increasingly complex landscapes, suggesting that the most resilient organizing is that which effectively harnesses collective intelligence while remaining nimble enough to evolve continuously.
Indeed, this theoretical approach is exemplified by The Ready, a consultancy founded in 2016 and based in New York City, that helps organizations transition to non-hierarchical, decentralized leadership models. The Ready draws on practical frameworks such as ‘Holacracy’ (Robertson, 2015) and ‘Teal Organizations’ (Laloux, 2014) to implement distributed authority systems where leadership functions are separated from hierarchical positions. It also generates resources across multiple media and platforms, including founder Aaron Dignan’s 2019 book, Brave New Work. By distributing decision rights throughout an organization, these models aim to increase both adaptation to complex environments and individual autonomy.
This facilitative leadership approach requires a fundamental shift in the practice of creative leaders navigating hybrid environments. Success no longer means controlling outcomes but rather orchestrating conditions where diverse talents flourish across multiple digital platforms. As micro-communities grow in virtual and physical spaces, leadership is evolving from positional authority into a dynamic practice of convening, connecting, and catalyzing distributed potential. Today’s most effective creative leaders recognize their primary value isn’t in providing answers but in asking generative questions that unlock collaborative intelligence across fragmented digital ecosystems. They create safe, platform-agnostic spaces where experimentation thrives, failure instructs, and divergent perspectives strengthen solutions. This emergent model represents not merely a tactical adjustment but a far-reaching reimagining of what creative ladership is and how creative work organizes itself in increasingly complex, multi-platform environments.
Creative leaders navigating the digital, algorithmic, social, and AI-enhanced platform era face both unprecedented opportunities and structural limitations. The rise of micro-communities, federated creative networks, and alternative economic models suggests that new forms of association are possible – ones that prioritize autonomy, equity, and sustainability over corporate extraction. However, significnt challenges remain – and also continue to evolve – particularly in maintaining financial stability, resisting platform dependency, and countering the pressures of self-commodification.
Moving forward, the success of these alternative models will depend on continued experimentation, emergent collective organizing, and the development of digital infrastructures that support non-extractive creative economies. By challenging or even rejecting the platform/attention/intimacy economy’s demand for constant visibility and individual experiences and branding and instead embracing collaborative, cooperative structures, creative leaders have the potential to forge new pathways for co-creation, business innovation, and economic resilience.
Importantly, these exploratory and alternative models also offer potential insights for legacy organizations and industries, where creative leaders can selectively integrate networked practices – some temporary, others ongoing – into existing structures to enhance resilience and responsiveness. Major cultural institutions like the Barbican in London, MoMA in New York, futurelab at Ars Electronica in Linz,and LUMA Arles, for example, have established learning and R&D labs and creative ateliers that operate with greater autonomy while maintaining connections to the main institutional resources. Likewise, innovative organizing can prioritize collaborative creative processes and distributed leadership yet still succeed in legacy creative marketplaces. Consider the multidisciplinary design studio, Pentagram; the immersive British theatre company, Punchdrunk; and the New York-based independent film and distribution company, A24.
The future almost certainly lies not in a wholesale replacement of established organizational forms, but rather in thoughtful hybridization that combines institutional stability and a recognition of predominant technological and economic models with the dynamism, equity, and authenticity that alternative organizing provide. To thrive today and into the future, creative leadership and organizing will need to acknowledge and coordinate structure and emergence, stability and experimentation, technological and humanity, and institutional authority and distributed governance. The many creative and leadership practices already proven and currently being explored by micro-communities and creative collectives demonstrate how even conventional organizations can develop greater autonomy, collaboration, and creative capacity in the platform era.
References
Hans Abbing (2002) Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press.
Teresa M. Amabile and Michael G. Pratt (2016) “The Dynamic Componential Model of Creativity and Innovation in Organizations: Making Progress, Making Meaning,” Research in Organizational Behavior, 36, 157-183.
Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis (2014) “From the communism of capital to capital for the commons: Towards an open co-operativism,” Triple C: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 12(1), 356-361.
Yochai Benkler (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven, Yale University Press.
Manuel Castells (2010) The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed., London, Wiley-Blackwell.
Manuel Castells (2023) “The Network Society Revisited,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 67(7), 940-946.
Francesa Comunello and Simon Mulargia (2023) “Does the ‘Platform Society’ Mean the End of the ‘Network Society’? Reflections on Platforms and the Structure and Dynamics of Networks,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 67(7), 859-871.
Jodi Dean (2009) Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Duke University Press.
DisCO (n.d.) “Seven DisCO Principles”; https://basics.disco.coop/2-disco-principles.html [accessed February 27, 2025].
Goldman Sachs (2023) “The Creator Economy Could Approach Half-a-trillion Dollars by 2027,” April 19, 2023; https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-creator-economy-could-approach-half-a-trillion-dollars-by-2027.html [accessed February 19, 2025].
Alison Hearn (2008) “‘Meat, Mask, Burden’: Probing the Contours of the Branded ‘Self’,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 1-217.
Li Jin (2020) “The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class,” Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, December 17, 2020, 1-16.
Arne L. Kalleberg (2018) Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies, New York, Polity.
Fredric Laloux (2014) Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, Brussels, Nelson Parker.
Andrey Mir (2024) The Viral Inquisitor, and Other Essays on Postjournalism and Media Ecology, Toronto, Popular Media Ecology.
Andrey Miroschnichenko (2014) Human as Media: The Emancipation of Authorship, Moscow, Kingston (ON), self-published.
Arnault Morisson (2019) “A Typology of Places in the Knowledge Economy: Towards the Fourth Place,” in New Metropolitan Perspectives Local Knowledge and Innovation Dynamics Towards Territory Attractiveness Through the Implementation of Horizon/E2020/Agenda2030, Springer, Volume 1, pp. 444–451.
Neil Postman (1970) “The Reformed English Curriculum,” in High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, ed. Alvin C. Eurich, New York, Pittman, pp. 160-168.
Alexandra J. Ravenelle (2019) Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.
Brian J. Robertson (2015) Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World, New York, Henry Holt and Company.
Paulo Rosa, Ângelo Guimarães Pereira, and Federico Ferretti, “Futures of Work: Perspectives from the Maker Movement,” EUR 29296 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2018.
Nathan Schneider (2018) “An Internet of Ownership: Democratic Design for the Online Economy,” The Sociological Review Monographs, Vol. 66(2), 320-340.
Trebor Scholz (2016) Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office.
Richard Sennett (2008) The Craftsman, New Haven, Yale University Press.
Cass R. Sunstein (2001) Echo Chambers: Bush V. Gore, Impeachment, and Beyond, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Mary Uhl-Bien, Russ Marion, and Bill McKelvey (2007) “Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting Leadership from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Era,” The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298-318.
Ethan Zuckerman (2023) “A Social Network Taxonomy,” New_ Public Substack, February 19, 2023;
[accessed March 4, 2025].