Influencer labor manufactures the self as a commodity whose worthlessness prevents class solidarity.

Evidence

Influencer culture is a factory, in which countless individuals on the internet labor daily, most often for pittance wages, manufacturing a commodity called “the self.” This commodity must appear distinct, unique, different, a product that is exchangeable and valuable. And it must be produced, made, fabricated using tools given and controlled by monopolistic industries—fashion, cosmetics, social media, technology—often to sell these very things back to the audience watching on their phones and computers. Yet these workers do not have the ability to organize themselves as a class because the product they make is effectively worthless, because this product is the self. Rather than the sale of their labor power, the product is the very possibility that one is a unique individual with unique connections and unique abilities—labor power and personal identity fully converge. As the promise of individuality is a delusion—Adorno and Horkheimer might say that individuality under consumer capitalism is, at best, pseudo-individuality21—these precarious workers are precarious because they perpetually differentiate one from another, negating the possibility of class solidarity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 28

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of the book’s central claim: influencer labor = manufacturing the self as commodity; labor power and personal identity converge, blocking class organization.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s stated purpose — explaining how the influencer completes the circuit of corporate personhood, and to the Adorno/Horkheimer pseudo-individuality source being cited. — connects to: A private selfhood ideology actively undermines the formation of binding solidarity. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 645
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘influencer-as-firm’ thesis; the self-as-fungible-commodity point pairs with the sacrifice article’s logic of individuals dissolved into systems.