Influencer nostalgia rituals are continually undercut by impulse to sell personal objects

Evidence

Yet, for Chamberlain, this ritual of memory is continually undermined by capital. While the tour through her former bedroom is rife with commentary about childhood memories, Chamberlain keeps making asides about reselling the things she’s finding. “This is actually really cute,” she says of one discovery. “I feel like I could sell this online for a lot of money. I don’t know why I keep thinking about different ways that I could sell my old things on Depop.” Nostalgia is cut with the desire to sell, to profit, to liquidate one’s own past in the name of its ability to be exchanged. The indexicality of the trace links this object and this person; nostalgic longing for childhood necessarily resurrects an auratic articulation between person and thing. But the desire shifts, without a second thought, into the dispersion of memory for profit. The ritual leads elsewhere: Chamberlain’s video is a performance that transforms her childhood bedroom into content, while the objects we see are converted into waste. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 214

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s warehouse infrastructure thread — liquidation of personal objects as content; also echoes Marx’s alienated commodity logic. — connects to: Ironized nostalgia merchandise functions as unconscious crowd control — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1844
• SEED: Angle: ‘liquidating the self’ — how the influencer’s childhood is monetized as waste in the act of memorializing it.