Storage-unit salvage videos make financial precarity into disposable spectacle

Evidence

As the video continues, a fact becomes inescapable: Donaldson and his friends cannot simply treat the objects they are unpacking and wasting as fully detached, alienated commodities. These objects refuse to reside completely in the background. The shoes, clothing, toys, jewelry, it becomes painfully clear, were at one point owned by someone. The influencers, in unpacking their unit, find dozens of debit cards. What better haul? What better content for our late capitalist society? Never mind these cards, inscribed with the name of a person unable to pay the monthly rental fee for their storage unit, bear witness to the precarity and tragedy of financialization and debt. The influencers find a series of business cards for shoe stores. The goods in the storage unit attest to a real life obscured through capitalist alienation mediated by commodities, mediated by spectacle. Donaldson realizes he is digging through the remnants of someone’s life. “I feel horrible,” Donaldson says while smiling. “I don’t see how this is legal to just, like, steal stuff like this from people.” It is only a brief commentary on the real implications of this video before Donaldson goes back to ripping open more boxes. The storage unit is a grave, a monument to loss and death indexed by the presence of so many, too many objects, all marked with the trace of one who couldn’t afford to maintain the rent, who couldn’t maintain the financialized relations on which their life was otherwise based. Yet we want to watch the exhumation of this grave of capitalist loss. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 253

Categorization

• QUESTION: How does the influencer’s ‘it’s a tax write-off’ donation framing reconcile with the labor theory of value being developed here? The surplus seems captured at the donation level, not by the thrift store recipient.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the sacrifice piece — this is sacrifice inverted (someone else’s storage failure as the influencer’s raw content material), and to the trees/grafting piece in that waste is reabsorbed into circulation rather than destroyed.