On YouTube the influencer’s self is the real commodity while showcased objects are wasted

Evidence

A market is an infrastructural background of contemporary capital, much like the house and the car. It names a material technique of creating and producing a self as commodity. What we’re interested in is how the function of exchange, in influencer culture, becomes a background in which people become commodities with value—not the objects in videos that would seem to be, traditionally, the commodities represented. The representation of exchange is a background against which an entirely different process of exchange emerges. YouTube is the factory where influencers work to forge themselves, but it is also the marketplace where those selves are traded. The influencers themselves are both product and producer, worker and widget. For this chapter, we will, among other things, discuss how any other commodities beyond the self are only bought and sold in service of enlarging the power of the self as a commodity. The representation of exchange on YouTube is an alibi to produce a different commodity that is exchanged: a self. At the same time, things and objects, traditional commodities that are bought and sold to appear on YouTube, are, in fact, wasted. The self appears only against a background of waste, of trash, of useless excess, as objects are rendered valueless beyond their appearance as one part of an infinite, everlasting series—a series that only ends in complete and total exhaustion. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 208

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the market as the fourth infrastructure and its central inversion: the self is the commodity, goods are mere waste/background.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s stated purpose of explaining the Corpocene and analyzing a creator through the four infrastructures — this is the market infrastructure’s core definition.
• QUESTION: If objects shown on YouTube are wasted, what precisely is exchanged in the self-as-commodity transaction — attention, subscribers, ad revenue — and who is the buyer?