Waste content videos transmute discarded objects into the influencer’s own commodity value

Evidence

The Amazon haul video, in the form taken by Nygaard and Allen, is quickly becoming a concretized genre of influencer video. In a YouTube video posted to Nygaard’s channel on June 25, 2022, she teams up with Allen to visit a lost luggage store. The store buys vast amounts of assumedly abandoned luggage from airlines. Toward the beginning of Nygaard’s video, she recaps her past videos in which she purchased Amazon returns and visited the Amazon liquidation center in Raleigh; she claims they are part of a new “alternative secondhand purchasing experience arena.” Later, she refers to these types of videos as “hustle-tok ventures.” Rather than a critical revelation, the influencer shows these things to tell us not how to fix consumer spending and waste, not how to take action but, inevitably, how to profit and, more directly, how to transmute waste into content through the excuse of “charity.” Nygaard distances herself from this “hustle” for profit; her point, she’s suggesting, is identifying the rise of videos that depict new forms of internet-based entrepreneurialism. Her videos have little direct interest in explaining ways to hack or profit off resale. Yet her videos inevitably tend toward the educational, illuminating something about contemporary capitalism through the depiction of infrastructures, of waste, of landfills, without ever leading toward the larger implications of an economy based on the constant circulation of waste. There is no critical function to this infrastructural unveiling here, merely a palliative belief that one can be simultaneously wasteful and socially responsible. … Picking through trash can be profitable, she seems to suggest. Allen is explicit about this profitability at times. Yet neither Nygaard nor Allen—like Chamberlain above—rely on the profits from picking through and flipping trash. They merely start and end with waste, waste that appears only as a background against which the influencer appears as a commodity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 265

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Continues the Corpocene waste-analysis thread: waste and discarded objects function as conveyor of value that the self-as-commodity extracts, relevant to applying the four-infrastructures framework (warehouse) to a real creator.