Destroyed consumer goods produce the influencer’s self as the real 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: This is the labor theory of value payoff: the physical goods are used-up constant capital; the surplus is realized in the commodity ‘MrBeast’ himself. Directly serves the reader’s stated goal. — connects to: Fake influencers’ manufactured existential crises borrow sci-fi android tropes as a marketing strategy. — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe:…, 1190
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion is dense: waste is not destroyed value but the productive background against which the influencer-self is realized — destruction as a form of production.