Antonio Casilli studies the concept of privacy,[8] criticising the hypothesis of the end of privacy as a consequence of the uses of social media. Instead of arguing that privacy is disappearing, he observes a change of perception in society. The privacy of an individual is characterised by the construction and the management of online social capital. Casilli proposes a new representation model of privacy, where it is learnt as a negotiable entity: not purely from an individual decision, but from a permanent negotiation. In this case, social media users adapt to the publication of personal information in their social circles, and on the feedback given by their contacts. The private and public characteristics do not intervene first but as a function of collective variables.
Digital labor
Casilli's main theoretical contribution concerns the transformation of labor by digital platforms. Notably, how automation, instead of causing a replacement of jobs, in reality, displaces them through business outsourcing processes and the reduction of human action to its smallest possible unit: a click (a process called taskification).[9] Digital labour platforms play a fundamental role in breaking up and outsourcing these tasks to millions of workers around the world, most of them located in developing countries.[10] According to him, these platforms render the human labour invisible to consumers, but it is nonetheless essential to train, maintain, correct, and even impersonate artificial intelligence systems.[11]
In his book Waiting for Robots. The Hired Hands of Automation (University of Chicago Press, 2025[12], initially published in French as En attendant les Robots, Éditions du Seuil, 2019),[13] Casilli identifies three types of platforms were users—and workers—provide digital labor: