The structure of the labor market has shifted in recent years, with waged employment giving way increasingly to “alternative work arrangements” (AWA). Largely driven by computing technologies, the exact nature of this shift remains underexplored. This paper examines the shift from the perspectives of the discursive economy and political economy. To that end, we first propose a discursive framework to account for current displacements in the labor market. Then, we extend the notion of “heteromation” to discuss various mechanisms of value creation and value extraction in current capitalism, including not only waged labor but also the varieties of non-waged labor that fall under AWA. To ground our conceptual analysis, we examine YouTube as the largest digital global labor platform and a pioneer in the use of AI computing technologies. YouTube provides us with an insight into how mature AI-driven platforms interact with labor and may provide insight into what a mature Generative AI platform may become if it similarly becomes infrastructural and no longer dependent upon venture capital investment.