Influencers synthesize individual identity with capitalist infrastructure such that personhood itself becomes corporate

Evidence

In the Corpocene, we see a deepening of the tendency described by Camatte: not only do collective forms of social organization repeat the logic of the corporation, but individuals now mirror the corporate form. The individual cannot be grasped as an entity that could possibly withstand the real subsumption of community by capital. What we have seen, over the course of this book, is how influencers should be grasped as a synthesis of an individual with the material reality of contemporary capitalism, with real estate, with markets, with supply chains. The appearance of an influencer as an individual distinct from these capitalist infrastructures only happens through a phenomenological apprehension that differentiates figure and ground, a differentiation that forever articulates influencer and infrastructure while rendering infrastructure obscure. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 394

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The figure-ground point — that the influencer only appears individual because infrastructure is rendered obscure — is the densest, most paradigm-shifting moment in the chapter.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reader’s planned case study: analyzing a real creator via the four infrastructures, showing how house/car/market/warehouse are obscured behind the person.
• XREF: Echoes the graft/tree ADDENDUM theme of infrastructure being rendered background to the apparent figure. — connects to: Corporate-controlled social knowledge reorders society in favor of corporations over citizens. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 368; Portfolio logic colonizes creative selfhood, treating personhood as vendor-able capital. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 451; A corporation created and operates a fake Instagram influencer to sell brands. — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe:…, 1187