Unboxing return-video influencers profit from supply chain waste the market cannot reabsorb

Evidence

To some extent, the glimpses we’ve seen inside the warehouse thus far rely on inevitable inefficiencies in supply chain capitalism, inevitable moments that a capitalism organized around the global movement of goods breaks down. The videos of HopeScope and Safiya Nygaard, unboxing or testing out Amazon returns, necessarily lead us toward the logistical infrastructures of supply chain capitalism. When these videos begin to visualize supply chains—depicting cargo ships, forklifts, and boxes on pallets, all of which contribute to the excesses of the market—influencers inherently draw out the “accursed share” of the supply chain; their videos focus on the waste that, otherwise, would not be reabsorbed into circulation or production. Allen and Nygaard are, in a sense, parasites of supply chain capitalism, producing content from the inevitable noise and inefficiency in the transmission of a product from one place to another. This is, of course, part of the nihilistic “luxury” of waste described in the previous chapter—ashes to ashes, waste to waste. The more of the market needs the supply chains to keep moving. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 291

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of analyzing a real creator via the four infrastructures — this locates the market’s waste as the source material the warehouse-adjacent influencer monetizes.
• DEFINE: Introduces the accursed share framing for supply-chain waste as the influencer’s raw content.