Influencers are more than social media personalities who attract attention for brands, argue Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness in their new book The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube. Influencers 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 labouring 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 labour 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 of digital media at the University of Queensland. He is author of Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection; Theorizing Digital Cultures; and Materialist Media Theory.

Katherine Guinness is a theorist and historian of contemporary art. She is assistant professor and director of art history in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

Stanford University Press, 254pp, 15cm x 23cm, paperback, 2024