Professional mirror selfies are staged fakes where the phone serves as a prop

Evidence

Many mirror selfies today, at least those made by the seemingly more “professional” influencers, have no mirror. They contain the hallmark of the subject holding a phone and looking into it, as if their gaze is merely directed toward the screen and, by extension, the image of their own self—but the phone is a prop. The selfie, Del Toro reveals, is a cheap trick. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 86

Categorization

• XREF: The staged production of a ‘natural’ mirror selfie directly supports the Corpocene claim that the self, like the corporate person, is a constructed public persona produced through deliberate infra-architecture rather than authentic expression.
• SEED: Angle: the no-mirror mirror selfie as the ur-example of manufactured authenticity — the influencer marketing era’s version of the staged documentary shot — worth an essay on how ‘the real’ is now itself industrial output.
• QUESTION: If the selfie’s constitutive prop is the phone (looked into, not used), what happens to the labor-theory-of-value accounting when the visible ‘instrument of labor’ is itself a fake?