[3] After his first work on the impact of industrial technologies on the imagery of the body, under the influence of Donna Haraway and Antonio Negri, he studied the communicational violence and digital cultures.

Casilli's main theoretical contribution concerns the transformation of labor by digital platforms.

[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.

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: