Internet self-representation conceals a capitalist infrastructure producing the self as commodity

Evidence

An entire set of elaborate production techniques have emerged—techniques barely visible to the spectator, concealed by the photographer—that show how what once appeared to be selfies are, instead, elaborately constructed portraits designed to position the self as commodity. Like the material support essential for the self-portrait, the images and videos we see online only represent “selves” against a range of specific material infrastructure. These backgrounds against which the “self” appears are essential for influencer culture and allow us to turn to a constellation that links political economy, technology, and the cultivation of identity. If we look closely into what once were thought of as selfies, of YouTube videos, of all forms of internet-based self-representation, what we find is an entire, barely obscured, capitalist infrastructure in which the means of production become the means of production of the self, a self that becomes a commodity, representative of a society in which community has been subsumed by technological capital. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 68

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: Core mechanism of the book: means of production become means of producing the self-as-commodity — the causal core of the Corpocene argument and directly relevant to the labor theory of value analysis.

Related

• Influencer self-images are constructed commodities built on concealed material infrastructure (similarity 0.94)
• The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity (similarity 0.89)
• Showing oneself as a self online begins the manufacturing of the self as commodity (similarity 0.89)
• Influencer images are self-portraits that produce a commodity identical to identity (similarity 0.86)
• The commodified self-image conceals an underlying corporate apparatus (similarity 0.85)
• Influencer self-portraits are commodities indistinguishable from the subject (similarity 0.84)
• The logic of selfhood becomes indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation (similarity 0.84)
• Influencer culture makes people aspire to live as if they are corporations (similarity 0.83)
• Capital production relations make crafted influencer images anything but vernacular culture (similarity 0.83)
• Mirror selfies only appear to be ordinary people’s disposable snapshots, not manufactured commodities (similarity 0.82)
• Successful individuals now act as if they were vertically integrated corporations (similarity 0.82)
• The belief in selfies obscures how capital has subsumed community and selfhood. (similarity 0.82)
• Believing in the selfie as a thing masks the class politics of influencer culture (similarity 0.82)
• Influencers synthesize individual identity with capitalist infrastructure such that personhood itself becomes corporate (similarity 0.82)
• Social media promotes an ideal of privatizing the self into corporate form (similarity 0.82)