Influencer culture splits into commodity-laborers and conglomerates owning the means of producing selfhood

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

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: This is the core two-class model of the book: the precarious influencer-laborer versus the vertically integrated conglomerate-person.
• ADDENDUM: The influencer as vertically integrated firm completes the corporate-personhood circuit analogous to what trees-as-infrastructure reframes—here the person is the infrastructure.

Related

• Influencer culture fragments into workers and owner-conglomerates within one person (similarity 0.95)
• Influencer labor manufactures the self as a commodity whose worthlessness prevents class solidarity. (similarity 0.87)
• The logic of selfhood becomes indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation (similarity 0.86)
• Influencer culture makes people aspire to live as if they are corporations (similarity 0.85)
• Successful individuals now act as if they were vertically integrated corporations (similarity 0.84)
• Elite influencers are capitalists whose image obscures corporate ventures (similarity 0.83)
• The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity (similarity 0.83)
• Elite influencers are vertically integrated capital embodying the corporation as a person. (similarity 0.83)
• Influencers act as intermediaries bonding consumers to commodities under precarity (similarity 0.83)
• Top influencers collapse personhood into ownership of production means (similarity 0.83)
• Influencer luxury fuses class distinction with wastefulness ending in exhaustion and death. (similarity 0.82)
• The influencer’s crafted self derives its uniqueness from interchangeability with property (similarity 0.82)
• The influencer actively labors to commodify herself where ordinary users are passively commodified (similarity 0.81)
• Influencers become vertically integrated individuals spanning self and corporate body (similarity 0.81)
• Influencer prosperity conceals structural precarity behind an opulent display (similarity 0.81)