On YouTube the market form survives even where exchange unlinks from capitalist value

Evidence

We know a market can be a place where people gather to purchase and sell commodities, an arena in which commercial dealings are conducted, a means of promoting, advertising, selling anything and everything. On social media, a market might be defined as a relational configuration of people, platforms, and environments where excessive exchange happens—something like eBay or Etsy, for instance, or any number of the newer, more niche versions of these peer-to-peer online marketplaces (Poshmark, Depop, thredUP, etc.). But on YouTube, a market always contains more—more things to buy, more money to spend, more objects to circulate, more excess to discard. A market may be a thrift store, where we watch a camera attached to a shopping cart pan over racks of vintage and used clothing. It may be an Amazon return center, where boxes and bins are filled with countless semianonymous objects. It may be an apartment that becomes a “market” through an unboxing video, in which an influencer pulls myriad products from a container or advertises their Depop page under the guise of a closet cleanout; it may be a backyard where a child pulls seemingly ineffable objects from giant eggs. It may simply be a place where vast sums of money are given away, in which “exchange” becomes unlinked from traditional norms of capitalist value. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 209

Categorization

• DEFINE: Catalogues the concrete YouTube market genres — thrift hauls, Amazon returns, unboxing, closet cleanouts, giveaways — as spaces of excessive exchange.