Influencers embody the perpetual desire commodity culture can never satisfy.

Evidence

It’s as if the lessons of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its interpretation of the death drive have been internalized in a particularly novel way. The object itself, we seem to know from the outset, will inevitably fail to satisfy our desire, fail to make us whole again. What we really want is to perpetually desire; and the influencer, appearing against a background of waste, of a stream of endless commodities, is the realization of this desire. We know commodity culture will perpetually fail to make us happy; but we also know of particular kinds of people, particular kinds of subjects, who may never be satisfied but who always can get more. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 232

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense synthesis: the influencer as living instance of Lacanian desire — a subject that always gets more yet is never satisfied — makes the abstract thesis visceral and re-readable.
• XREF: connects to: The culture industry offers only illusory promises of pleasure, never fulfillment — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110