Influencers internalize the culture industry so the person and image must remain fused

Evidence

The ruse of the influencer is that there is no real separation between image and person. The Hollywood “star” is an image produced by the entirety of the moviemaking apparatus; the Nashville “star” is a product of the music machine. These are alienated commodities distinct from the actor or musician seemingly represented by these image commodities, distinct because of their manufacture by the culture industry. But in influencer culture, the apparatus has been transferred to the influencer. What once was a product of the entirety of the Hollywood studio system, for instance, is now the product of the influencers themselves. Maples must maintain a link between herself and her image, and she is the one who must produce herself as the “star” to be consumed. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core distinction between the alienated Hollywood ‘star’ commodity (made by the studio machine) and the influencer, who is both the producer and the product — the person-as-firm circuit central to the Corpocene thesis.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the Corpocene framing: the influencer inverts corporate personhood by making the person a company rather than giving the company a person’s rights.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno/Horkheimer’s culture industry and Marx’s commodity fetishism treated elsewhere in the reader’s Frankfurt School corpus.