Influencer culture fragments into workers and owner-conglomerates within one person

Evidence

Today’s influencer culture carries with it a similar privileging of waste, leisure, conspicuous consumption, and pecuniary emulation. But today’s influencers, however much they mirror Veblen’s understanding of class differentiation, are distinct from the opinion leaders, influentials, and “geniuses” of the past. We argue that influencer culture distinguishes itself through new forms of class antagonism, an almost bizarre parody of proletariat and bourgeoisie. One group becomes raw material for brands, laboring endlessly, hammering themselves into visual commodities that are eventually used up and discarded. These are the people we typically think of as influencers. This precarious population, struggling to make deals with brands and foster audience interactions, can be contrasted with a far more exceptional kind of influencer who, at first glance, appears to descend directly from the members of Veblen’s “leisure class.” These influencers do not seem to work for a living and instead mostly engage in activities of luxury and expenditure. Those that rise above a certain level of precarity seem to do so through sheer consumptive excess—as if they’ve discovered a particular trick or hack to work less and indulge. But, we suggest, this appearance is an illusion. This second category of influencer—those who appear as a wasteful “person” engaging in excessive spending—is an embodiment of a vertically integrated conglomerate, moving beyond the production of self as commodity to the ownership of the means of production of the self. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 22

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core book thesis moment: defines two influencer classes mapped onto proletariat/bourgeoisie and introduces the means-of-production-of-the-self formulation.
• QUESTION: The ‘vertically integrated conglomerate’ definition of the top influencer is pivotal for the Corpocene reading; worth chasing where the surplus is realized.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the Corpocene essay: here is the person-becomes-firm inversion the reader wants to analyze with a real creator.
• DEEPTHINKING: The class-antagonism-within-the-self and ownership-of-the-means-of-self-production formulation is the paradigm-heavy core of the whole book argument.