Capital extracts value from precarious influencers through rents and debt until they burn out

Evidence

Of course, images, relations, information, and emotion are all central to labor online. 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. As one relatively popular Instagram influencer, Lee Tilghman, once known as @LeeFromAmerica, told the New York Times in 2023, after years of constant work creating branded content, she found herself exhausted, feeling empty and alone, desiring an office job, a boring job. “You don’t get it,” Tilghman recalled saying to a coworker in her boring office, who couldn’t believe she’d trade in her life of glamorous influencing: “You think you’re a slave, but you’re not… . When you’re an influencer, then you have chains on.” Her years of influencing left Tilghman depressed and stressed, worn out from constant striving to achieve luxury. And, like so many other influencers who have quit and been forgotten, Tilghman’s exit from influencing doesn’t particularly matter from the point of view of capital. For every @LeeFromAmerica there once was, countless others are willing to take her place and become the next personality to go viral. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 27

Categorization

• XREF: The Lee Tilghman quote — ‘When you’re an influencer, then you have chains on’ — is the lived-experience anchor for the labor-theory-of-value analysis of who realizes the surplus. — connects to: The career portfolio externalizes risk onto workers while capital reaps the rewards. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 455