The influencer home literalizes the household as the firm’s means of production.

Evidence

Star’s tour of his new home is particularly fascinating for our purposes here. Just as Mia Maples is willing to detail her production tricks and techniques, built into her home, techniques and tricks otherwise obscured, Star is completely willing to show the film crew he uses to produce his videos. His crew literally live with him in his massive house; there is an entire wing of his home for his personal assistant. We again see how the “domestic” space of the influencer becomes a studio, set, and stage for the recording of video. … Rather, Star directs our gaze toward those media workers who otherwise remain behind the scenes. In showing his employees, Star, like Chamberlain, like Maples, allows us to “see” into the private, domestic space of his life, but the specific content we observe asserts his difference and otherness to his audience. Star asserts his existence as a “star,” a separation of image and person, in which access to what appears to be intimate, private space uses the excess and expense of the home, its size and scale, to reassert distance while simultaneously permitting access. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 167

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core task: the creator’s house-as-firm where employees live in the home literalizes ‘the self becomes the firm’; also connects to labor theory of value via who among the crew realizes surplus.
• DEFINE: Concretely defines how the domestic space becomes a studio/stage — the home infrastructure in its most literal, material form.