Capital exploits influencers through rents and debt until their bodies are exhausted and discardable

Evidence

But a singular emphasis on immaterial aspects of production obscures class antagonisms that persist today. The countless precarious influencers, invested in building brands and maintaining relationships, appear to be a mass of potential surplus population—that is, workers who are potentially redundant from the perspective of capitalism, who can be cast aside without any real impact to the larger system. This does not mean that capital cannot extract value from this population; it does so in the form of rents and debt but only to a point—credit card bills pile up; houses and cars are leased; one “hustles” and fakes it until they make it … or until they are eventually used up, thrown away, and forgotten. The potential “redundancy” of most influencers is found in how any specific individual can effectively be discarded once the debt becomes excessive, once value can no longer be eked from the worker’s body as it ages, as it breaks down in exhaustion, as it burns out. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 27

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s four-infrastructure frame — the houses and cars leased here are precisely the Corpocene infrastructures; and the debt-exhaustion-discard cycle maps onto the labor theory of value question of who realizes surplus.
• QUESTION: If capital extracts value from influencers via rents and debt rather than wages, does the influencer-as-firm realize surplus at all, or is value always externalized to lenders and platforms?