The Corpocene names an era when individuals must become vertically integrated corporations

Evidence

Fox tells us that his warehouse—like Fiedler’s, like The Sensible Mama’s—was purchased because of his increasingly large merch shipping business. But in giving his tour, Fox reveals other aspirations, ones that come from owning a large, mostly empty space. “I’m talkin’ ramps, I’m talkin’ ziplines, I’m talkin’ foam pits, I’m talkin’ trampolines,” he says, excitedly. It’s going to be his own “Tannasy factory,” he states, before breaking down laughing, a reference to the MTV reality television show Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory, where Dyrdek, a renowned skateboarding icon, would use a large warehouse in Los Angeles as an indoor skatepark, as well as a space to stage strange stunts. Fox discusses plans for storing his cars and for constructing skateboard ramps. The dream, it would seem, is not just a warehouse as a space to store products to be shipped but to become a space, much like a garage, that can be used to fulfill the dreams of pleasure, excess, and domesticity. The warehouse becomes a dream home, a space to renovate into a “fantasy factory.” … A warehouse is, by definition, not a residential space. If we return to the beginning of this chapter, the fear of warehouses in Lehigh Valley comes from their subsumption of all other land, of all residential, commercial, and industrial space. What does it tell us that the “fantasy factory,” the “dream house” of influencer culture, is a warehouse? What does it mean that, in these videos, it seems that home, car, and market can all be located within warehouses, a specific kind of building—a generic building—that increasingly covers the planet, remaking geography to connect regions once beyond capital to urban centers through logistics, transportation, and information? What does it mean that this background is the ultimate one of influencer culture, in which individuals see themselves both as products and as owners of a corporate structure that is equivalent to “the self”? Our name for this context—in which corporations are valued more than everyday individuals, and to be worthy of rights, abilities, and “citizenship” today, one must render oneself indistinguishable from a vertically integrated corporation—is the Corpocene. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 341

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the book’s core definition of the Corpocene, with the self rendered indistinguishable from a vertically integrated corporation.
• SEED: The warehouse as the ‘fantasy factory’/‘dream house’ of influencer culture gives a concrete architectural lens to open the Corpocene essay.
• XREF: Connects to Weber’s iron cage and to the reader’s existing interest in corporate personhood (Hobby Lobby, Citizens United) as self-incorporation.