The car’s democratic image masks extreme precarity for influencers

Evidence

We conclude this chapter with one final suggestion: not only has the car opened the home and remade domesticity and its seeming “authenticity,” but, for some, the car has completely replaced the home. Yet this is not quite in line with the images of wealth, waste, abundance, and luxury we’ll be turning toward in the remainder of this book. If one direction for the car is a space of generic authenticity, a “democratic” equivalence falsely accessible to all, another is toward extreme precarity obscured by this equivalence, in which the promise of entrepreneurial selfhood and the “freedom” of influencer automobility leads toward constant work and constant struggle. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 202