The car masks housing precarity as a path to freedom

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

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Articulates how the car-infrastructure both hides and exposes the influencer’s precarity, central to the book’s Corpocene model.

Related

• Car-worship reflects physical homelessness, not mere self-avoidance (similarity 0.94)
• The car confers only apparent autonomy that still requires self-commodification (similarity 0.92)
• The car’s democratic image masks extreme precarity for influencers (similarity 0.90)
• The car-as-home lets influencers escape rent but conceals severe precarity (similarity 0.89)
• The car reads as more intimate than the staged private home (similarity 0.85)
• Car intimacy isolates one to produce the self as commodity (similarity 0.85)
• The generic car’s lack of staging reads as more intimate than home privacy (similarity 0.83)
• Within social media the house signals intimate specificity while the car signals generic interchangeability (similarity 0.83)
• The car functions as an infrastructure enabling self-production as commodity. (similarity 0.83)
• Car interiors generate a new intimacy by annihilating specificity of place (similarity 0.83)
• Car interior becomes a forced-confession space for authentic selfhood (similarity 0.82)
• The car doubles as private refuge and filming location for self-revelation (similarity 0.81)
• Bland, generic backgrounds make the self seem more authentic (similarity 0.80)
• Generic cars serve as controlled, risk-free stages for influencer authenticity (similarity 0.80)
• The car enables enclosure of social life into mediated spectacle (similarity 0.79)