The car confers only apparent autonomy that still requires self-commodification

Evidence

Highlighting the anxieties of #carlife requires us to rethink the so-called democratic potentials of the car as background in influencer culture. When the house becomes an impossibility, when spaces of private intimacy become a financial liability, the generic openness of the car becomes an apparent background that allows for access to mobility, access to intimacy, access to seeming “authority” as one sits in the sovereign position behind the wheel. This, of course, both conceals and reveals the lived precarity of many of those streaming from the car but is nonetheless presented as a route of mobility elsewhere. The car may become a house, if only one can sell themselves. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 205

Categorization

• DEFINE: Qualifies the ‘car as background’ infrastructure: it offers sovereignty behind the wheel while demanding the self become saleable to actually convert that mobility into a house.