Influencer culture promises fulfillment that corporate existence structurally blocks

Evidence

But this industrialization of the self is forever incomplete and chaotic, a constant struggle that is never finished or realized. And, most significant, the dream of escape—from the emotional deadening produced by the capitalist subsumption of social existence—is no longer presented as “industrialized” sex and drugs; rather, through the capitalist subsumption of social existence, it is imagined to produce an “unalienated” selfhood where the influencer, as corporation, is the fulfillment of a truly satisfied existence. Influencer culture, in other words, requires a model that almost archetypally follows what Lauren Berlant described as “cruel optimism.” The structural existence of capitalist reality is a barrier for the satisfaction that very same structure promises. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 355

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the cruelly optimistic structure: the influencer-as-corporation is framed as the end of alienation but reproduces it.
• XREF: Relates to the reader’s labor theory of value focus — the promised ‘unalienated selfhood’ is the ideological realization of surplus never actually paid out. — connects to: Corporate structure deadens and subsumes hopeful individual managers — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 144