The commodified self-image conceals an underlying corporate apparatus

Evidence

In the sheer distribution of selfhood through all of these industries, along with not only representing the branded goods of others but conflating oneself with one’s own brand, a brand that makes numerous material products, is, we want to suggest, a method for corporatizing the self, for insulating against the precarity of life in which self-image appears to be the commodity most of value. Yet, what Kardashian really reveals is how this attention to self, this attention to image, is at least partially a distraction. The self only matters insofar as it conceals a corporate apparatus we mistake for an individual human being. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 371

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpest thesis statement of the Corpocene: image attention masks, rather than constitutes, the corporatized self.
• DEEPTHINKING: “The self only matters insofar as it conceals a corporate apparatus we mistake for an individual human being” condenses the whole Corpocene inversion into one claim.
• XREF: connects to: Corporate epistemic authority silences the people it constructs by branding them ignorant — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 221