Supply chain logistics, not imagery, drives the largest influencer’s corporate moves

Evidence

The point here, yet again, is the uneasy and unsteady relationship between influencer image and the corporate investments hidden behind this image. Wyoming has no personal income tax, and the constantly shifting and reinvented attempts to brand new products and new industries is, in some ways, a synthesis of the precarious influencer’s attempts to constantly “hustle” and invent new scams and new business opportunities with a murky corporate logic that obscures the vertical integration of the many diverse aspects of one’s life. Star is a vertically integrated individual, in which “he” becomes one part of a vast corporate body, though he refuses the complete conflation of self and corporation, maintaining a distinction between self and business through constantly shifting LLCs over which he claims ownership. In the turn to Wyoming, we begin to see how the image of the influencer, when it comes to vertically integrated individuals like Star, is one product manufactured by a larger conglomeration. The move out of the city, not merely a move to signify “authenticity,” to signal one’s desire to leave the decadence of the city behind, is a turn toward the inevitable geography of supply chain capitalism, to the dictates of formal subsumptions under late capitalism. Glamour and excess can be represented anywhere. But to be truly profitable requires a warehouse, requires the reduction of labor costs, the reduction of income tax, and the foregrounding of shipping and circulation. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 316

Categorization

• XREF: This is the crux of the reader’s Corpocene analysis — the influencer-image-as-product-of-conglomeration and the four infrastructures converging (warehouse foremost). Connects directly to the labor theory of value analysis: the commodity here is ambiguous between the image and the physical goods; circulation (shipping) is foregrounded.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion that the ‘authentic’ escape from the city is in fact submission to supply chain capitalism’s geography of warehouses, tax regimes, and labor-cost reduction encapsulates the book’s whole thesis in one move.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘vertically integrated individual’ — individual as one part of a corporate body — which is precisely the Corpocene concept the reader must teach.