Influencers convert waste into content that is itself livable surplus

Evidence

In a video where Allen purchases around four hundred pounds of Target returns, she marvels at how everything she received appears new and, since a lot of the goods have clearance tags on them, were never sold prior to their liquidation. Allen suggests that this is a way to “rescue” products from being trashed: “If you’re in the resale business you could probably make a killing from boxes like this.” But because she is in the content generation business, she cannot figure out what she is supposed to do with all these items. She makes snow angels in piles of secondhand underwear (fig. 8) and suggests that she’ll make mystery boxes to sell on the resale website Poshmark for her fans. The ruse is that the influencer can “save” trash, turn it into excess, and then still waste it; but because the wasting of this trash takes the form of a donation, or a “mystery box” for fans, then it is not truly wasted but, instead, is reused, perhaps even “sustainable.” — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core labor-theory-of-value angle: the commodity here is the waste-turned-content, and its surplus is realized as viewer attention/revenue rather than via resale. — connects to: Socially necessary waste rationalizes science and technique — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 230
• SEED: Angle: how ‘sustainability’ functions as ideological cover for the influencer’s own complicity in the waste economy — the donation/mystery-box as surplus realization disguised as ethics.