49 2024: 14). The willingness is not in dispute, but it is precisely what makes the system so structurally effective. Free creative labour functions most efficiently when participants do not experience it as work. Over time, the line between freely chosen participation and structural expectation blurs. Terranova argues that “free labour is a desire of labour immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field that both sustains free labour and exhausts it” (Terranova 2000:51). The platform sustains the desire to participate and then exhausts it by continuously extracting while returning engagement metrics rather than material reward. Duffy’s work on aspirational labour updates Terranova’s argument for the creator economy era. Duffy argues that “it is the hope of securing a full-time career that propels certain forms of participation in the online economy” (Duffy 2017:48), but as Duffy also observes, “the narrative of creative self-expression conceals the unrelenting work, much of it unpaid, that takes place behind the screens” (Duffy 2017:x). Hannah Lowther’s journey from TikTok creator to Six cast member represents aspirational labour that paid off. But for every Hannah Lowther, there are thousands of creators performing the same labour with no professional outcome. The platform benefits equally from all of them. Ratatouille generated over two million dollars and reached 350,000 viewers, but was never developed into a full professional production. The creators gave their work away for free, the platform amplified it briefly, and then the algorithm moved on. The Algorithm as Pressure on Performers Platform culture operates through a logic that makes participation feel voluntary while making absence professionally costly. Terranova captures this precisely, noting that in platform culture “if we do not get online soon, the hype suggests, we will become obsolete, unnecessary, disposable” (Terranova 2000:39). For performers in contemporary professional musical theatre, maintaining a social media presence is no longer optional but functionally required. Follower counts have become professional currency, as established in Chapter 3, meaning a performer who does not perform online risks invisibility not just to audiences but to casting directors and producers who factor platform metrics into professional decisions. The performer who posts regularly gains followers, algorithmic reach, and opportunity. The performer who does not, loses ground simply because the platform’s logic treats absence as failure. This pressure does not exist in isolation. The performing arts profession is already characterised by structural precarity before platform visibility adds its own demands. A 2026 report by the Actors’ Trust, based on a survey of nearly 3,700 UK actors and stage management professionals, found that 78% of actors had experienced mental health problems in the last three years, that 81% had to take on non-acting work to make ends meet, and that financial insecurity, low confidence, and loneliness were widespread across all career stages (Actors’ Trust
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