Watching influencers means consuming images of private property, not persons

Evidence

Envisioning domestic space presumes access to the private, but, as presented in the videos of influencers, the home also appears as a space inherently articulated with the late capitalist enterprise of property speculation. Of course, long-standing limits permit some the ability to invest in property and prohibit others; the ownership of real estate, in the United States, has long been linked with structures that discriminate on who can and who cannot own on the basis of race. Regardless, foregrounding the property that otherwise remains in the background is, perhaps, the most overt entry point into the factory that is influencer culture and how domesticity, when community is subsumed by capital, becomes an alibi for conflating person with property. What we will see, in foregrounding the home, is both the elaborate ownership of production involved in the daily life of an influencer and how the influencer and their home—person and property—have been sutured to assume a coherence between the two. We are not inherently engaging in the pleasure of watching another person and the private intimacy of their body in spaces inaccessible without mediated vision. Rather, we are engaging in the spectacle of consuming images of private property, images of things that have become interchangeable with personhood. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 124

Categorization

• SEED: Direct material for analyzing a real creator: the home-as-alibi framing gives testable criteria — does the creator’s branded house content conflate person and property, reading as spectacle of ownership rather than intimacy?
• DEFINE: Core of the Corpocene definition (first infrastructure — house): influential domestic space is sutured person-property, framed as private yet fully capital-articulated.