Corporate waste offers a more fully alienated subject than personal abandonment does

Evidence

The problem of MrBeast’s foray into storage unit archaeology—objects inherently speak to the life of another; the abandoned storage unit is a grave, not an impersonal archive of complete disposability—is corrected in the videos of other influencers, such as those of Hope Allen, an influencer better known as HopeScope. Like Mia Maples, Allen is a moderately successful influencer who has, at the time of writing, around 1.3 million subscribers to her YouTube channel. Most of Allen’s videos relate to her perfecting the kind of content MrBeast attempts above: lengthy unboxing videos of lost cargo, Amazon returns, Target returns, used clothing, and so on, all which Allen purchases without knowing exactly what she is buying. Where MrBeast’s attempt at purchasing an abandoned storage unit failed to embrace the impersonality of exchange, approaching, if not ultimately reaching, the acknowledgment that the “waste” in the video is not waste to all, Allen turns instead to objects and products more likely to be corporate waste. She thus begins with the implicit alienation of mass culture as a backdrop for her content. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 255

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the MrBeast storage unit analysis from earlier in the book; draws the conceptual contrast between personal and corporate waste as the defining axis. — connects to: The word ‘waste’ conceals an act of rendering the valuable useless — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1196