Waste becomes social responsibility through donation while the real commodity is MrBeast himself

Evidence

In this MrBeast video, we can see sketches of how the three-part understanding of luxury and waste above informs the market on YouTube—luxury as a signifier of elite class distinction, luxury as social responsibility, luxury as destruction. While the name-brand excesses of someone like Jeffree Star are nowhere in sight, the idea of class distinction is performed in the very setup of the video. Donaldson can purchase something that someone else has sacrificed as a result of their inability to maintain rental fees. The point is not in the specific value of any one object but in the appearance of many, many objects. Additionally, the destruction and wasting of these objects is essential. Neither Donaldson nor any of his friends need—or even can use—anything from the storage unit. But the nihilism inherent in this destruction, the pointlessness of the acts to which we are witness, cannot be fully embraced. Donaldson feels bad about the video, even suggesting that, in some way, these goods have been stolen from their rightful owner. Yet the video exists. This bad feeling is not enough to prevent this “theft” from becoming content, from these belongings becoming waste. Rather than total destruction, these objects are reabsorbed into a chain of circulation through their donation to a thrift store. Waste is made into a form of social responsibility—not a pure squandering—through the assumption that a donation means that these objects will return, in some way, to someone who “really” needs them. Regardless, the real product, above all, is the content, is MrBeast himself, is the promise of more to come in the future. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 254

Categorization

• DEFINE: Caps the three-part luxury model (distinction, responsibility, destruction) and shows how each operates in the storage-unit genre.
• SEED: Direct material for the reader’s planned case-study article: ‘the real product is MrBeast himself, the promise of more to come’ — the influencer as a firm whose output is a continuous self.