Individual influencers now mirror the corporate form Camatte described

Evidence

In the Corpocene, we see a deepening of the tendency described by Camatte: not only do collective forms of social organization repeat the logic of the corporation, but individuals now mirror the corporate form. The individual cannot be grasped as an entity that could possibly withstand the real subsumption of community by capital. What we have seen, over the course of this book, is how influencers should be grasped as a synthesis of an individual with the material reality of contemporary capitalism, with real estate, with markets, with supply chains. The appearance of an influencer as an individual distinct from these capitalist infrastructures only happens through a phenomenological apprehension that differentiates figure and ground, a differentiation that forever articulates influencer and infrastructure while rendering infrastructure obscure. Attending to these grounds reintroduces the influencer as a new kind of corporate person, revealing how the real subsumption of capital has pushed even beyond the pessimistic diagnosis of Camatte to constituting the very being of a “person” today. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Core of the book’s thesis — influencer as new corporate person — directly serving the stated reading goal of explaining the Corpocene.
• ADDENDUM: The move from corporate personhood conferring rights of people to the reverse (persons formed like firms) could extend a corporate personhood essay.
• DEFINE: Defines the figure-ground move that renders infrastructure obscure while foregrounding the influencer as individual.