Authenticity norms make extreme wealth on Instagram invite a how-can-you-afford-that question

Evidence

Luxury Instagram accounts function as catalogs of what many young people dream of having and the lifestyle they dream of living. Decoupling extreme wealth from fame, they pull back the curtain on lifestyles typically unavailable to and unseen by most. Notwithstanding the expectation that people on social media will be more “authentic” than traditional celebrities, who typically are separated from fans by a layer of managers and agents … this authenticity contradicts the photographic “truth” of an endless parade of luxury goods, in that it enables the audience to ask, “How can you afford that?” There is a difference between traditional celebrities and the highly followed. While most rich people are not famous, and many famous people are not rich, income inequality is deeply obvious when the wealthy person is brought into intimate high definition through his or her personal pictures. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 244

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to how the influencer must maintain both intimacy and conspicuous wealth, relevant to the reader’s Corpocene application. — connects to: Social-media authenticity paradoxically invites skeptical questions about wealth’s source. — Alice E. Marwick, Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the…, 68
• SEED: Authenticity as a trap: the demand to be transparent forces the wealthy to expose their own unanswerable consumption.