Influencer unions fail by missing that top influencers are capitalists, not workers

Evidence

Our suggestion is that these attempts at unionization and worker organization are limited because they fail to grasp the specificity of class differentiation in influencer culture. Labor grievances are focused on the relative integration, or lack thereof, of individuals into the larger capitalist system. The framing of the labor politics of influencer culture in this way ignores how many of the most prominent and successful influencers are not creative workers but are themselves capitalists who conflate their own identities with corporations they found, own, and manage. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 47

Categorization

• DEFINE: The chapter’s core thesis statement: the self-as-firm inversion the reader is tracking, stated as the reason labor organization fails.
• XREF: Direct payoff of the reading purpose — the influencer-as-corporation completes the corporate-personhood circuit.