Influencer car videos channel forced confession into mass broadcasting

Evidence

By insulating one against others, locking the doors, driving away, the car becomes a libertarian paradise, a space in which others are finally disposed of and one’s voice can truly be heard. In the car, it would seem, one’s sovereignty is never in dispute. With children, the car becomes an interrogation cell, a confession booth, in which the discomfort of being locked up with a parent incites the child to discourse. I’ll lock you in a car to make you tell me who you are. But the point of parental discussions in the car is to let the “honesty” of the automotive trap force the child to speak. When an influencer (or politician, or celebrity) is given a smartphone, the car’s incitement to discourse expands out elsewhere. In its sequestering from the outside world, the ability to feel free, to feel like one can finally speak one’s truth, is transferred from other spaces of confessional enclosure toward a space of confessional broadcasting. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 192

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s Corpocene thesis: the car-as-firm is the space where the influencer’s confessions are produced as the commodity — self-disclosure packaged for labor extraction.
• QUESTION: If the car confessional produces the person as commodity, who realizes the surplus value — the influencer or the platform/geico-style sponsors that underwrite the parent-confession genre?
• SEED: Essay angle: reading a specific creator’s car videos (any ‘sit in my car and talk’ genre) as forced-confession labor under the car-as-firm infrastructure.