The influencer country retreat is pessimistic escape from urban impossibility, not idyll

Evidence

The distinction between city and country once again reappears when Star moves to Wyoming. “The pull of the idea of the country is toward old ways, human ways, natural ways,” says Raymond Williams. “The pull of the idea of the city is toward progress, modernisation, development.” Conflicts between the imaginary relationship of city to country, the seeming oppositions between the two, reveal negotiations of capitalist crisis in the lived reality of individuals. The retreat to the country in influencer culture is a pessimistic one. The city has become a space of impossibility, in which progress is prevented and belonging has waned. The precarity of influence, rather than an inevitable outcome of late capitalism, becomes a feature of urban excess. … The entrepreneurial subject is framed as “nature,” something only accessible when one moves beyond the decadent space of urbanity: I think one of my favorite things of living in Wyoming is how people really support each other. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 311

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Useful for the creator case study: distinguishing which of the four infrastructures ‘nature’/ranch is serving when an influencer relocates, and how ‘retreat’ still encodes capitalist tension.