[Commlist] New book: The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube

*The Influencer Factory***

A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube

*Grant Bollmer & Katherine Guinness***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781503638792/the-influencer-factory/_*

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*Receive a 20% discount online*:**LLS24*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 31^st December 2024. Discount only applies to 
the CAP website.

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"/A dazzling and organic application of cultural theory, The Influencer 
Factory is a lively and provocative read for anyone invested in 
understanding how a new, expansive, and important sector of our cultural 
economy works."—/Michael Palm, The University of North Carolina at 
Chapel Hill

Influencers are more than social media personalities who attract 
attention for brands, argue Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness. They 
are figures of a new transformation in capitalism, in which the logic of 
the self is indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation.

Influencers are emblematic of what Bollmer and Guinness call the 
"Corpocene": a moment in capitalism in which individuals achieve the 
status of living, breathing, talking corporations. Behind the veneer of 
leisure and indulgence, most influencers are laboring daily, usually for 
pittance wages, to manufacture a commodity called "the self"—a raw 
material for brands to use—with the dream of becoming corporations in 
human form by owning and investing in the products they sell. Refuting 
the theory that digital labor and economies are immaterial, Bollmer and 
Guinness search influencer content for evidence of the material 
infrastructure of capitalism. Each chapter looks to what literally 
appears in the backgrounds of videos and images: the houses, cars, 
warehouses, and spaces of the market that point back to the 
manufacturing and circulation of consumer goods. Demonstrating the 
material reality of producing the self as a commodity, /The Influencer 
Factory/makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of 
contemporary economic life.

*Grant Bollmer*is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, and Katherine 
Guinness is Lecturer in Art History, at the University of Queensland.



*Stanford University Press**| April 2024 | 254pp | 9781503638792 | PB | 
£23.99**

*Price subject to change.

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