Corpocene mega-influencers are conglomerated corporate selves masquerading as precarious entrepreneurs

Evidence

In the Corpocene, then, the corporation exists as a social form insulated from precarity, from punishment, from risk under conditions in which the state no longer cultivates society but abandons individual citizens to their own resources, letting them slowly die. It mitigates precarity through a multiplication of the self into multiple industries, vertically integrating the self, hiding and revealing particular parts of the self, as if one is no longer an entrepreneurial subject but a distributed self that can act in multiple roles, as if the self is a synergistic business. Any remains of the social contract are replaced not with the privileging of “entrepreneurial” individuals but with massive, conglomerated bodies that appear as individuals, who exist both as corporate brands and as proper names—Jeffree Star, MrBeast, Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. Because these corporations appear as singular, “natural” persons, they are mistaken for entrepreneurs, as if they are as precarious as anyone else, as if they are as exposed to the same risk that comes from the collapse of the liberal nation-state as anyone else. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 352

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition: the Corpocene names a social form where persons are conglomerated corporate bodies rather than entrepreneurial individuals.
• XREF: Inverts conventional personhood theories — corporations granted human rights (Santa Clara) now humans take corporate form, mirroring the reader’s framing.
• ADDENDUM: The influencer-as-corporate-self analysis directly feeds the reader’s roadmap on the Corpocene concept.