Peripheral allegories of platform capitalism: Carnival Row,Prague and the materiality of local labor

This article proposes a critical materialist perspective on the recent transnational mode of streaming production, which combines seamless global flows of capital, talent, technologies and fictional worlds with exploitation of differences in labor costs, national media regulations and financial incentives on the ground. Using concepts of ‘platform imperialism’ and ‘digital peripheries’ as points of departure, the article approaches the global streaming production pipelines from the peripheral, bottom-up, ethnographically-informed perspective, which pays attention to the lived realities of the local production and interpretive communities. It employs this approach to propose a new way of interpreting fictional worlds created by the global streamers as allegories of platform imperialism, using the Amazon series Carnival Row (2019–2023), which was shot in studios and on locations in and around Prague and was the biggest investment for the local screen industry ever made by an incoming producer to date, as a case study.