Distributing the self across owned industries corporatizes it and insulates against precarity

Evidence

For Kardashian, one’s value comes not only from the ability to attract attention, to be “branded” and sold, but from a distribution of self into a range of multiple industries owned, managed, and controlled by an individual, conflated with that individual, much like naming a private jet after yourself; it is a return, in many ways, to a traditional understanding of industrial capitalism after the rise of immaterial labor in the 1970s, after the perpetuation of an “entrepreneurial” neoliberal selfhood. Davis can only sell herself to an audience—her precarity resides in how the only thing she can sell is her labor power, encapsulated in how her self can attract attention for others. Kardashian has partial ownership of at least twelve businesses and business ventures, almost all of which involve manufacturing and selling physical commodities. … In the sheer distribution of selfhood through all of these industries, along with not only representing the branded goods of others but conflating oneself with one’s own brand, a brand that makes numerous material products, is, we want to suggest, a method for corporatizing the self, for insulating against the precarity of life in which self-image appears to be the commodity most of value. Yet, what Kardashian really reveals is how this attention to self, this attention to image, is at least partially a distraction. The self only matters insofar as it conceals a corporate apparatus we mistake for an individual human being. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 371

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the chapter’s operative mechanism — what it means to ‘corporatize the self’ via vertical integration of identity into multiple owned material-product industries.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s book goal: this is exactly the Corpocene claim, the influencer-as-firm inverting corporate personhood.
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing inversion — self only matters insofar as it conceals a corporate apparatus we mistake for a person — is the book’s sharpest single formulation and resists easy summary.