Influencer culture makes people aspire to live as if they are corporations

Evidence

Our argument is that we can observe the contemporary autonomy of capital, along with how this autonomy has led to a strange context in which people aspire to live as if they are themselves corporations, when we begin attending to the practices of influencers. We can see into the material workings of late capitalism simply by looking at what is indirectly represented on social media, by looking at representational content, reading for backgrounds of production—forms of capital, as it were—that are certainly not intended to be the focus. In the chapters that follow, this often means looking at where videos were literally shot—in houses, in cars, in thrift stores, storage units, warehouses—drawing out the implications these spaces have for the generation and circulation of capital in influencer culture. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 55

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s Corpocene thesis — the ‘self becomes the firm’ framing.
• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s core method: reading backgrounds of production rather than representational content.