Storage-unit haul videos resolve luxury’s wastefulness contradiction by reframing excess as salvaged trash

Evidence

On social media, aspiration (the desire to appear and live as if one is a member of the “super-rich”) realizes itself in the contradiction between social responsibility and wasteful annihilation—a seeming synthesis of both Bataille and Veblen. Social responsibility, the second dimension of contemporary luxury, hasn’t featured much in our discussion so far, but contemporary luxury “saves” itself by pretending that excess can be a social good, though the pleasure of luxury is one of total annihilation. Luxury is, in this context, the willingness to represent excess, to show excess—which, as we will see, is often deployed to strangely undermine the seeming “wastefulness” of luxury. There is a simple solution to this seeming “problem” of the visualization of excess and luxury, of the contradiction between extreme wealth, social responsibility, and the pleasure of annihilation—not the route taken by Star but one closer to people like Ryan Kaji and even Emma Chamberlain (at least in the videos described above). One must embrace the stream of excess as, from the outset, always-already trash, always-already garbage, always-already waste. This embrace, while seen in glimmers when Chamberlain unpacks her bedroom closet or when Kaji bursts open an egg filled with toys, becomes a central feature of another kind of video that begins with waste: the purchasing and display of the contents of storage units, of lost cargo, of Amazon returns. These videos, which begin with waste, operate under a pretense in which “garbage” is “saved” by the influencer. An alchemical reaction, the lead of other people’s trash becomes gold—to be resold on peer-to-peer marketplaces like Depop or, at the very least, donated to a thrift shop for a tax write-off. This permits, on one hand, a view of excessive luxury as socially responsible but, on the other, necessarily relies on the belief that all physical commodities, in some way, start and end in a landfill. … In a MrBeast video from December 1, 2017, we watch Jimmy Donaldson travel from his base in Greenville to Raleigh. The video is titled, “I Bought an Abandoned Storage Unit and Found This …” Donaldson and his crew are going to a storage unit auction (which, we hear, they were not allowed to film), purchase the contents of an abandoned unit (which, we hear, cost $350), and then show us, the audience, what was inside. That’s it. That’s the premise of this video, which has garnered more than thirty-five million views. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 247

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Corpocene framework: the alchemy of trash-to-gold is a concrete mechanism of how the influencer’s surplus is realized against the market/warehouse infrastructure.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the warehouse infrastructure and the commodity cycle at the core of the reader’s four-infrastructure analysis; also echoes the consumer waste theme of the trees/grafting ecology framing.