Social media promotes an ideal of privatizing the self into corporate form

Evidence

When we suggest that influencer culture and social media indicate a real subsumption of selfhood by capital, we do not suggest that there is literally no possibility of selfhood beyond social media. We are arguing that the space of social media requires a particular model of subjectivity to mitigate against precarity—one that looks not toward others for collective action but to the self, which is reinvented as if it were a collective body in the service of economic exchange: a corporation. This is, in practice, an ideal, an ideology perpetuated whenever the most successful influencers are viewed on YouTube. As a mode of subjectivity, almost nobody successfully conflates their very identity with a corporate form. Yet the desire to privatize, to conglomerate the self, remains. “Contemporary society is not shaped by multitude so much as solitude,” claims Byung-Chul Han. “The general collapse of the collective and the communal has engulfed it. Solidarity is vanishing. Privatization now reaches into the depths of the soul itself.” Privatization, we suggest, is not merely about being alone but about replacing models of citizenship and public selfhood with an ideal of privatized, secret, concealed corporate interests. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 354

When we suggest that influencer culture and social media indicate a real subsumption of selfhood by capital, we do not suggest that there is literally no possibility of selfhood beyond social media. We are arguing that the space of social media requires a particular model of subjectivity to mitigate against precarity—one that looks not toward others for collective action but to the self, which is reinvented as if it were a collective body in the service of economic exchange: a corporation. … Contemporary society is not shaped by multitude so much as solitude,” claims Byung-Chul Han. “The general collapse of the collective and the communal has engulfed it. Solidarity is vanishing. Privatization now reaches into the depths of the soul itself. … Privatization, we suggest, is not merely about being alone but about replacing models of citizenship and public selfhood with an ideal of privatized, secret, concealed corporate interests. The multitude is expressed only as an outgrowth of an individual, who sees in their own individuality the existence of a multiple and distributed corporate form. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 354

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of the Corpocene subjectivity ideal: the self as collective corporate body rather than entrepreneurial individual.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s stated goal of analyzing a real influencer through the four infrastructures; the ‘privatization reaching into the soul’ echoes the house/infrastructure axis. — connects to: The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34; Social media self-presentation is a technology of self-governance under neoliberal capitalism.; Ordinary users adopt corporate self-surveillance tactics to manage their social media presence — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 259 (+15 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 354