An influencer’s popularity rests on excess quantity, not specific goods

Evidence

Yet the best example of how little these toys matter in his videos, how little the representation of specific material goods motivates his popularity as an influencer—the proof that Kaji’s popularity depends so little on any singular, specific plastic monstrosity that children are seeing—is the video that first made Ryan Kaji a breakout star, a video from July 1, 2015. Kaji had, at the time, been making videos for several years, each showing him buying or playing with singular toys. This video, “GIANT Lightning McQueen Egg Surprise with 100+ Disney Cars Toys,” which today has more than one billion views on YouTube, was his first foray into this consumption of excess, his first attempt at content as a stream of more, thus shaping himself into a consumable that is valued by how much he consumes. (We might add for specificity, Kaji did not do this himself. Kaji’s parents did this. As a child, he had little to no choice in his own self-commodification.) According to Kaji’s mother, he wanted to take part in a popular YouTube video trend at the time, the “egg” video, in which someone would whack open a papier-mâché egg filled, ideally bursting, with toys. Yet, at this early stage in his career, Kaji’s parents had limited how much he could spend on toys per week for his videos, so they loaded up the egg, covered in designs from Pixar’s Cars, with old toys—plastic cars representing the characters from Cars, stuffed cars, and other cars that had nothing to do with the Pixar film. This video launched Kaji’s meteoric rise to fame, and it never mattered what toys were in the egg, just that there were many of them, an excess to spill forth. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 233

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Sianne Ngai’s theory of the ‘interesting,’ which the chapter invokes, and to Debord’s spectacle of commodities.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘egg video’ genre and demonstrates the commodity as stream-of-more rather than singular object.