Beginning with examples of selfies that were deliberately falsified to appear as if a photo was taken in a mirror, the introduction replaces the idea of social media "self-presentation" and "self-fashioning" with the examination of the backgrounds of social media. Through an examination of selfies and their backgrounds, the introduction turns to what the Marxist theorist Jacques Camatte called "the domestication of humanity" in a time of social media celebrity, the process that "comes about when capital constitutes itself as a human community." This book argues instead that the backgrounds and techniques of selfies reveal the strictures of contemporary capital, and how capital today demands the production of identity. When we look to the background of influencer culture, the introduction argues, capital appears not only as a set of contingent but reified social relations; it appears as social, communal existence as such.

Beginning with examples of selfies that were deliberately falsified to appear as if a photo was taken in a mirror, the introduction replaces the idea of social media "self-presentation" and "self-fashioning" with the examination of the backgrounds of social media. Through an examination of selfies and their backgrounds, the introduction turns to what the Marxist theorist Jacques Camatte called "the domestication of humanity" in a time of social media celebrity, the process that "comes about when capital constitutes itself as a human community." This book argues instead that the backgrounds and techniques of selfies reveal the strictures of contemporary capital, and how capital today demands the production of identity. When we look to the background of influencer culture, the introduction argues, capital appears not only as a set of contingent but reified social relations; it appears as social, communal existence as such.

On YouTube, the ruse of many influencers, maybe even most of them, is that we are seeing into the backgrounds of private lives. This chapter examines the home as a background, foregrounding its function as both private space and property. Domesticity, when subsumed by capital, becomes an alibi for conflating person with property. This chapter follows the elaborate ownership of production involved in the daily life of an influencer and how the influencer and their home—how the person and their property—have been sutured together to assume a coherence between the two. It contrasts this ownership of production with past understandings of stardom and fame. It argues that we are not inherently engaging in the pleasure of private intimacy, but we are engaging in the spectacle of consuming images of private property, images of things which have become interchangeable with personhood.

On YouTube the car has become a background for monologues, for dialogues, for commentary and criticism. The car is a mobile and flexible encapsulation of privacy. This chapter examines how the car is framed both as an intimate space and a space that permits one access to an egalitarian, democratic space of broadcast. Instead of an intimacy determined by specificity, the car is a space for intimacy premised on the generic and the fungible. The intimacy of the car appears "democratic" and "populist" only because this democratic populism presumes that the primary measure of citizenship and equality is a generic exchangeability of information. This chapter places car videos in the context of the spatial architecture of the house and the garage, in which the garage emerged as an anonymous, generic space attached to, but differentiated from the domestic intimacy of the home, opening the home towards industry, entrepreneurship, and capital.

This chapter examines spaces of excessive exchange, videos dominated by massive quantities of objects and things. It is this excess of exchange and consumption that this book terms the "market" on YouTube. This chapter examines how the function of exchange, in influencer culture, becomes a background in which people become commodities with value—not the objects in videos that would seem to be, traditionally, the commodities represented. The representation of exchange is a background upon which an entirely different process of exchange emerges. This chapter draws out how value of influencer content depends on constant waste that appears as luxury. It draws on different understandings of waste and luxury and emphasizes how even videos that display "responsible" forms of consumer practices are ultimately dedicated to the constant generation of waste and excess.

The warehouse is the book's final background, moving from the emergence of the warehouse as a space to store influencer excess towards its remaking as a space of business, a space of storage, and even a space replacing the domestic interior of the home. In influencer culture, the warehouse is the point where home, car, and market converge. This chapter follows two cases: first, the massively successful influencer and makeup magnate Jeffree Star, and second, the extremely popular YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, examining how warehouses and supply chains are central to their existence as influencers. It concludes with a discussion of how the warehouse is replacing the home and garage in videos where individuals renovate and live in warehouses, where warehouses are purchased and remade as locations for excessive videos recreating scenes from film and television, spaces for large-scale stunts that cannot be filmed elsewhere.

The final chapter of The Influencer Factory synthesizes the claims of the rest of the book and examines the demands on subjectivity of contemporary capitalism. The Corpocene is a derivation from "Anthropocene" intended to name the moment in which corporate logic replaces and remakes the possibility of community, where all forms of struggle and conflict must begin from a position that understands "community" over social media as a social relation produced by late capitalism, offering few direct routes to resist capital. This chapter examines influencers being "cancelled" due to their choices during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as how the potential of "cancellation" relates to the vertical integration of personal identity. The chapter examines the history of "corporate personhood" to contrast influencers, as vertically integrated corporate persons, with traditional senses implied by the legal fiction of corporate personhood.Chapter keywords: corporate personhood, cancel culture, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, risk, vertical integration, subjectivity

The final chapter of The Influencer Factory synthesizes the claims of the rest of the book and examines the demands on subjectivity of contemporary capitalism. The Corpocene is a derivation from "Anthropocene" intended to name the moment in which corporate logic replaces and remakes the possibility of community, where all forms of struggle and conflict must begin from a position that understands "community" over social media as a social relation produced by late capitalism, offering few direct routes to resist capital. This chapter examines influencers being "cancelled" due to their choices during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as how the potential of "cancellation" relates to the vertical integration of personal identity. The chapter examines the history of "corporate personhood" to contrast influencers, as vertically integrated corporate persons, with traditional senses implied by the legal fiction of corporate personhood.Chapter keywords: corporate personhood, cancel culture, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, risk, vertical integration, subjectivity

The final chapter of The Influencer Factory synthesizes the claims of the rest of the book and examines the demands on subjectivity of contemporary capitalism. The Corpocene is a derivation from "Anthropocene" intended to name the moment in which corporate logic replaces and remakes the possibility of community, where all forms of struggle and conflict must begin from a position that understands "community" over social media as a social relation produced by late capitalism, offering few direct routes to resist capital. This chapter examines influencers being "cancelled" due to their choices during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as how the potential of "cancellation" relates to the vertical integration of personal identity. The chapter examines the history of "corporate personhood" to contrast influencers, as vertically integrated corporate persons, with traditional senses implied by the legal fiction of corporate personhood.Chapter keywords: corporate personhood, cancel culture, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, risk, vertical integration, subjectivity

The final chapter of The Influencer Factory synthesizes the claims of the rest of the book and examines the demands on subjectivity of contemporary capitalism. The Corpocene is a derivation from "Anthropocene" intended to name the moment in which corporate logic replaces and remakes the possibility of community, where all forms of struggle and conflict must begin from a position that understands "community" over social media as a social relation produced by late capitalism, offering few direct routes to resist capital. This chapter examines influencers being "cancelled" due to their choices during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as how the potential of "cancellation" relates to the vertical integration of personal identity. The chapter examines the history of "corporate personhood" to contrast influencers, as vertically integrated corporate persons, with traditional senses implied by the legal fiction of corporate personhood.Chapter keywords: corporate personhood, cancel culture, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, risk, vertical integration, subjectivity

The final chapter of The Influencer Factory synthesizes the claims of the rest of the book and examines the demands on subjectivity of contemporary capitalism. The Corpocene is a derivation from "Anthropocene" intended to name the moment in which corporate logic replaces and remakes the possibility of community, where all forms of struggle and conflict must begin from a position that understands "community" over social media as a social relation produced by late capitalism, offering few direct routes to resist capital. This chapter examines influencers being "cancelled" due to their choices during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as how the potential of "cancellation" relates to the vertical integration of personal identity. The chapter examines the history of "corporate personhood" to contrast influencers, as vertically integrated corporate persons, with traditional senses implied by the legal fiction of corporate personhood.Chapter keywords: corporate personhood, cancel culture, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, risk, vertical integration, subjectivity