Car-dwelling YouTubers monetize their vehicles via affiliate links

Evidence

One YouTuber, Nikita Crump, whose channel is titled “Life in a Vehicle” (with nearly seventy thousand subscribers), gives advice about how she lives completely in a car, how she stays warm or cool, how she cooks and eats, where she showers, how she insulates her vehicle. “I feel like this is something I need to do,” she tells us. “I feel like it would be out of my character not to do this. And, I just want to. I want to live in my car. I wish I had done this sooner. I’m happy I’m doing it now.” In this video’s description are Amazon-affiliate links advertising the products Crump has described using and a link to a company that sells diffraction lenses that generate rainbows, complete with a coupon code for viewers of Crump’s channel. Crump tells us about how she can now afford rent by living in her car. The car, in replacing the domestic space of the home, permits Crump a way into a kind of entrepreneurialism that avoids the trap of real estate, rent, and other usurious machinations of contemporary capitalism. Yet, Crump’s stated “happiness” may conceal just how difficult this life of freedom is. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 203

Categorization

• SEED: Concrete case (Nikita Crump, ‘Life in a Vehicle’) directly usable as the real-creator case study for applying the four-infrastructure framework; vanlife-influencer economics as article angle.
• XREF: Connects to reader’s purpose of analyzing the car as one of the four infrastructures of the Corpocene; also resonates with James Bernard Frost’s ‘A Very Minor Prophet’ themes of precarity and labor under capitalism.