Influencer haul videos extract value from objects’ display, not their sale

Evidence

On entering the unit, Donaldson finds dozens of boxes of shoes, almost forty pairs, which he and his crew line up on the sidewalk outside of the unit, a virtual store aisle worth of product, an image reminiscent of someone selling knockoffs on Canal Street. “We just have so many [shoes] we don’t care at this point,” Donaldson says. He and his friends goof around with a hula hoop they find; they jokingly smash a printer to the ground for laughs; they make fun of some art left in the unit—an admittedly kitschy print of a child angel kissing a baby angel. They find piles of clothes, some in boxes, some in plastic bags. As they tear into the cheap protection for these goods, Donaldson asks, “Are these clothes worth anything?” This question, about the exchange value of the objects in the storage unit, as evidenced by the destruction of the printer, is ultimately meaningless. The value of these objects is beside the point. Value is eked from these material goods as Donaldson and his friends speak these words and record them, as they throw piles of seemingly worthless clothes (at least worthless to them) outside the unit, heaping them on top of the shoes, making an even more ludicrous display of excess and destruction (fig. 5). … We applaud the hundreds of used socks we are shown, the costume jewelry that these influencers throw at each other. We delight when they look up items on their phone, finding monetary values of the things they’ve purchased, the sale of which they will most likely never pursue. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 249

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘Grafting & Growth’? No — more directly it extends the reader’s Corpocene/labor-theory-of-value thread: the commodity here is the spectacle, not the goods.
• XREF: MrBeast material connects to the reader’s planned case study of a real creator under the four infrastructures.