Sustainability discourse masks the endless commodity churn of influencer markets

Evidence

We are obviously in a different space than we have been in the earlier parts of this chapter. Nothing seems truly “wasted.” The demand for more must be filtered through a seemingly contradictory demand to be “sustainable.” Luxury, especially the luxury of total expenditure and waste, is seemingly prohibited. Yet the demand for luxury and excess inevitably intrudes. This might be in videos where Phipps shops for other people; these appear as any other “thrift with me” video except that the excess can be visualized because it is inevitably offloaded to a paying customer elsewhere. But more often it is in videos where Phipps must clean out her closet, clean out her house, so she has more space for the things she purchases. She has several videos that deal with Phipps ridding herself “of half my clothes.” The fact that there are multiple videos in which she must rid herself of so many of her belongings demonstrates how sustainability cannot truly conceal the economy of waste inherent in YouTube’s market. In one of these videos, she tells us that “I have a lot of clothes that I’ve already accumulated and I’m only halfway done filming them, so I need to start getting rid of some of the clothes in here in order to get the clothes, you know, that I just thrifted in here after because there’s no room for them.” The necessity of content—of the endless stream of commodities to attract interest, that the market must always contain more—is inevitable. “I just feel like they [Phipps’s clothes] need a new owner, so I’ll be putting them on my website and selling them.” Sustainability becomes yet another lure obscuring the endless churn of market exchange, the endlessness of market potentiality, which requires more, more, more. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the reader’s earlier thinking on the house as infrastructure and the warehouse; closet-clearing videos stage the market directly inside the home.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the resale (Depop, website) of thrifted clothes mean the influencer is a merchant retailing commodities, or is the labor actually the curation consumed as content?