Influencer luxury value emerges from waste as a sellable background

Evidence

Yet this emphasis on closeness, intimacy, and authenticity distracts from the key part of Marwick’s quote, which is, we want to suggest, the endless parade of commodities. It isn’t just that there is a specific instance of waste—or even that this waste is or is not genuine—but the representation of a potentially infinite waste. In this sense, Bataille hits on the essence of luxury and expenditure in a way that Veblen does not—that true “luxury” resides in the complete expenditure of all energy. Bataille makes it clear that there is only one limit point to this expenditure: death. The endless parade has only one end, which is the complete exhaustion of capital, of natural resources, of life itself. Because of luxury’s necessity of constant, infinite waste, its only real outcome is total destruction. Simultaneously, Veblen understands that this expenditure, rather than a complete squandering, has a potential use: the visible display of class distinction and privilege. Showing, on Instagram or YouTube, deceptively or not, that one is excessive and wasteful is an act that has value. As one manufactures oneself as commodity, waste becomes a background out of which a saleable identity emerges. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 245

Categorization

• XREF: Directly into reader’s project: influencer’s manufactured self is commodity and waste grounds a saleable identity, adjacent to the labor theory of value question.
• DEEPTHINKING: The synthesis that waste for Bataille leads only to death while for Veblen it is valorized display, and the book claims influencer culture holds both truths at once.
• QUESTION: Where does the surplus land if waste is both constructed display and genuinely infinite expenditure? This bears directly on the reader’s commodity question.