The influencer’s real commodity is content produced from objects’ attention, not the objects themselves
Evidence
Thus, the reselling of personal belongings—or, even more minimally, the mere suggestion of resale—reveals at least two different economies, one of which requires that the objects Chamberlain finds in her closet are, essentially, useless to her. Some of these objects are ultimately waste—of value to nobody beyond the connection to the influencer. Some may possess value to someone, hence the possibility of resale online. This is a very traditional understanding of exchange, which follows how most of us judge the value of our own possessions, if we’ve ever had a garage sale or sold things on a peer-to-peer marketplace online. But this entire understanding of exchange is not the point, bringing us to the second economy. The first economy is an alibi for the real commodities produced, the real exchanges occurring in the making and viewing of Chamberlain’s video. The use value of the objects Chamberlain finds in her childhood bedroom is found in their ability to become content for the influencer, and this content depends not on Chamberlain’s ability to feature one or a couple of specific objects but in her ability to pull out different objects and things from her closet for around twenty minutes (most likely, she did this for much longer, but this specific video has been edited to twenty minutes). The things that Chamberlain examines do not matter, really. Their importance is in the attention they attract, which emerges only through their ability to be incorporated into an infinite series. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 217
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The two-economies argument — the apparent exchange of objects as an ‘alibi’ for the real production of the influencer-as-commodity — is the chapter’s paradigm-shifting core, central to the reader’s whole project.
- XREF: Directly answers the reader’s stated question ‘what exactly is the commodity’ for the Corpocene framework. — connects to: Objects and media messages interrogate consumers rather than being consumed — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 256; In the bioeconomy, informational signaling about assets, not product sales, constitutes firm value. — Kean Birch, Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy:…, 106