Creative Destruction? Precarious Works and Precarity in Creative Industries in Turkey

Creativity has been not only attributed to human species as their distinctive faculty, but also turned into a specialised field of work during and after the industrial revolution. Current revolutions, namely the digital and the AI, taking place in the neo-liberal era, produce further existing precarious conditions and waging new challenges for creative works. The proposed paper deals with jobs in creative industries, including arts and crafts, and aims to delve into the division of labour, settings and organisations of those industries to analyse both the existing conditions of precarity reinforced by neoliberal economic policies and the conditions both emerged aftermath of the digital revolution and emerging due to the AI revolution. The aim of the study is to make employment conditions in creative industries more visible to open more space for a debate on those conditions to foresee the future of creative jobs and human creativity in these jobs. Against the backdrop, the paper will be divided into three parts. In the first part, the impacts of both the digital and the AI revolution on selected three types of professional creative works, namely theatre, cinema and music and three types of arts works, namely quilt making, tailoring and carpentry. In the second part, experiences and predictions of men and women working in these jobs will be both presented and discussed. The last part is devoted to a discussion on the future of those works and what can be done for the removal of the economic, social, legal and political insecurity in these works.