Archive for publications, 2024

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

Fri Jul 12 07:02:41 GMT 2024




*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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