Consumer society destroys objects to prove wealth rather than use them

Evidence

A market, in all these examples, is intrinsically wasteful or, at least, appears as such. That a space of exchange has been remade into a space of waste indicates how the “market” on social media has become something other than its traditional existence as a nexus of liberal capitalism. Or perhaps social media has realized the true essence of consumer society all along. “The consumer society needs its objects in order to be,” says Jean Baudrillard. “More precisely, it needs to destroy them… . Only in destruction are objects there in excess and only then, in their disappearance, do they attest to wealth.” The use value of a commodity is not in its specific utility as an object. Rather, use value has become the capacity of a specific thing to lose its specificity, to become a negligible part of a gigantic mass. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 210

Categorization

• XREF: Baudrillard’s use-value-as-destruction directly undercuts the labor theory of value the reader wants to trace — the commodity’s value is realized in its destruction and waste, not in socially necessary labor. Connects to the addendum on sacrifice. — connects to: The marketplace is an aberrant artifice that conceals consumption’s real sources — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 726; The word ‘waste’ conceals an act of rendering the valuable useless — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1196
• SEED: Angle: the influencer economy reveals that conspicuous destruction, not accumulation, is the terminal form of consumer capitalism — worth an essay contrasting Marx’s use-value with Baudrillardian waste.
• QUESTION: If use value is the capacity to be wasted, then what happens to surplus value and labor in this schema — is the influencer’s labor realized in the waste itself?