Influencer self-images are constructed commodities built on concealed material infrastructure

Evidence

An entire set of elaborate production techniques have emerged—techniques barely visible to the spectator, concealed by the photographer—that show how what once appeared to be selfies are, instead, elaborately constructed portraits designed to position the self as commodity. Like the material support essential for the self-portrait, the images and videos we see online only represent “selves” against a range of specific material infrastructure. These backgrounds against which the “self” appears are essential for influencer culture and allow us to turn to a constellation that links political economy, technology, and the cultivation of identity. If we look closely into what once were thought of as selfies, of YouTube videos, of all forms of internet-based self-representation, what we find is an entire, barely obscured, capitalist infrastructure in which the means of production become the means of production of the self, a self that becomes a commodity, representative of a society in which community has been subsumed by technological capital. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 68

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Corpocene thesis: if the self becomes commodity via concealed infrastructure (house, car, market, warehouse), then the influencer’s labor and its realization map onto the labor theory of value.