Bland, generic backgrounds make the self seem more authentic

Evidence

The intimacy of the car appears “democratic” and “populist” only because this democratic populism presumes that the primary measure of citizenship and equality is, today, a generic exchangeability of information that seems “intimate” because of its detachment from specificity. The car suggests that each and every one of us can successfully produce the self as commodity, a self that can appear both as product and as “authentic,” as “real.” The self can emerge more fully, more directly, because of the blandness of the background against which it appears. The car video, thus, is another sign of the real subsumption of sociality by capital. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 182

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘real subsumption of sociality by capital’ connects directly to the reader’s labor theory of value lens—the commodity here is the audience-subsumed self. — connects to: Deliberate small flaws make a persona read as more authentic — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 271
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the car’s generic intimacy from the home’s specific intimacy—the second infrastructure in the Corpocene framework explicitly contrasted with the first.