Conspicuous destruction produces the influencer as a differentiated commodity

Evidence

Even if Donaldson throws all these goods in the trash, they have served the purpose of creating more commodities: those of content and identities. Even the destruction of these objects is valuable. Asks Jean Baudrillard, “Does not affluence ultimately only have meaning in wastage?” And even more important, the more excessively objects can be wasted, the larger and more spectacular their destruction, the better the display of affluence. “At any rate,” Baudrillard continues, “it is clear that destruction, either in its violent and symbolic form … or in its form of systematic and institutional destructiveness, is fated to become one of the preponderant functions” of our current capitalist order. … But Donaldson is, in a sense, not actually “wasting” these objects, at least not completely. Their wastage becomes a background from which Donaldson emerges as a commodity named “MrBeast,” a commodity whose use of physical objects signifies his difference and distinction from the flow of things against which he appears. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 250

Categorization

• XREF: The destroyed-goods-as-background for the self-as-firm echoes Veblen’s conspicuous consumption and Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange, both already in the reader’s theory toolkit.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that wastage is NOT waste but the raw material from which the person-brand (MrBeast) is minted as commodity is the crux of how the influencer realizes surplus — dense and paradigmatic for the Corpocene thesis.