Even critiques of warehouse exploitation are channeled through self-commodifying influencer formats

Evidence

These videos are made by people who aspire to be popular YouTube influencers, leaving their warehouse jobs behind for the luxury of influence; lamentations about warehouse labor are relayed after we’re told to like, comment, and subscribe. Even first-person denunciations of the dehumanizing conditions of contemporary capitalism must be delivered through a means to maintain the commodification of the self. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 287

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s thesis: the warehouse worker becomes the firm; even dissent must pass through the commodified self. Instantiates the labor theory of value question — the commodity is the self-narrative, the surplus realized by the platform. — connects to: Fashion blogging scholarship treated influencer work as feminized glamor and aspirational labor. — Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame…, 638
• DEEPTHINKING: The trajectory from exploited warehouse laborer to aspirational influencer delivering anti-capitalist content via self-promotion channels is a dense, layered inversion of the Corpocene circuit worth sitting with.