The most-asked question of a midlevel influencer is her living situation

Evidence

In a video from August 14, 2020, roughly eight years into her YouTube career, Maples participated in the popular “AMA” video format. Allowing fans to “ask me anything,” she took on a backlog of questions that had been accumulating for years. “So, I think I will start off with probably the second most asked question,” she began. “And that is, what in the world is your living situation?” Where do you live? Does Maples, who was twenty-one at the time of this video’s release, still live with her parents? Does she still live in the same house as when she started her streaming career? What happened to some of the rooms featured in her earlier videos but no longer appear? Why have the backgrounds for her makeup tutorials changed? What happened to the house she renovated for her grandparents? What happened to the kitchen she renovated for herself? What happened to her brother, Tate, who occasionally appears in Maples’s videos and with whom she bought yet another house? Where does he live? Where do you live? — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 126

Categorization

• SHARE: Concrete evidence that the domestic space is THE load-bearing claim to authenticity for influencer fans — the question ‘where do you live’ recurs as organizing device.
• SEED: The ‘where do you live’ question as an investigative angle: asking the influencer where they actually live breaks the authenticity ruse and exposes the factory.