Car interiors generate a new intimacy by annihilating specificity of place

Evidence

Yet, when we look to the background of influencer videos and find the interiors of automobiles, we don’t find “nonplaces,” at least not quite. Ironically, we find not only a space to move through but a background that generates a new kind of intimacy, an intimacy that is simultaneously personal and impersonal, specific and nonspecific. In stripping down the details of personality and place—details that characterize the specific intimacy of the domestic—we see how cynical we have become about the intimacy of social media. The car shows us how intimacy can be obtained only by shedding details that, today, we believe to be fabricated and therefore false. The dialectic of intimacy we see with cars is that “personality” and “specificity” can only emerge when the material details of personality and specificity are annihilated. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 187

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s four-infrastructure analysis framework — the car as a stage that strips the influencer of domestic markers.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the essay-adjacent theme on drivers and the intimacy infrastructures that enable vulnerability-at-a-distance.