The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity

Evidence

Influencers are more than people we see and interact with on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Influencers are an integral category for the reproduction of the social relation that is capitalism. When an influencer labors to become interesting, relatable, or worthy of attention, the internet becomes a factory to produce the self as commodity. This book examines this articulation of capital and selfhood. It employs influencer culture as an entry point into a set of relations that far exceed social media. In attending to the videos and images of influencers, it draws out numerous obscured infrastructures of contemporary capital, infrastructures that relate to a deeply questionable reinvention of subjectivity and social existence. In these pages, we will sketch the emergence of an economic context in which “successful” individuals achieve wealth, fame, and luxury by imagining themselves and acting not as individuals but as if their existence is equivalent to that of a vertically integrated corporation, a context in which rights and abilities are denied human citizens and transferred to corporate entities—a historical moment we term the Corpocene. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18

Influencers are more than people we see and interact with on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Influencers are an integral category for the reproduction of the social relation that is capitalism. When an influencer labors to become interesting, relatable, or worthy of attention, the internet becomes a factory to produce the self as commodity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of the Corpocene: selves acted as vertically integrated corporations, with rights transferred from citizens to corporate entities.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — a person gains recognition not as a human individual but by assuming the form of a corporation, while rights move the opposite direction — is the book’s paradigm-shifting central claim.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reading purpose: analyze a real creator through house, car, market, warehouse infrastructures; the ‘self becomes the firm’ completes the corporate-personhood circuit. — connects to: Production-process forms increasingly colonize private leisure time; Internet connectivity reduces everything and everyone to a resource for use — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1022; Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40 (+16 more)
• ADDENDUM: The self-as-commodity produced through affective labor extends the sacrifice ‘For the Real Kind’ logic into surveillance-capital selfhood, and parallels the grafted-self theme in ‘Grafting and Growth’.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 18