By Fernando Buen Abad – Nov 2, 2026

We are not looking at a merely technological mutation of “celebrities.” We are looking at a transformation in the relationships among labor, consciousness, commodities, and power.

The influencer is a semiotic device that concentrates a material contradiction in their personal image as they compete to shape meaning: they produce signs but do not fully control the conditions under which those signs circulate. They generate attention, but private infrastructure determines how that attention is valued. They offer their lives as content, even though the value those lives produce enters circuits of accumulation that extend far beyond their control. Their face may legally belong to them; the political economy of their visibility belongs to a far more powerful structure.

The most glaring contradiction of the influencer is this: they appear to embody the free individual precisely when they express, with relative effectiveness, the contemporary form of our dependence. The more they proclaim, “Be yourself,” the more rigorously they embody a market that needs to turn every singularity into a commodity. The more they seem to speak from their private lives, the more they speak from an economic structure that has learned to extract market value from subjectivity. The more personal their success appears, the more social the conditions that produce it are.

Millions of people produce images, comments, videos, desires, emotions, and stories. A small number of platforms control the infrastructure where this labor comes together, is classified and measured, and is monetized. The crowd produces the torrent of signs; capital manages the sluice gates. This is one of the most refined contradictions of our time: the symbolic production is socialized on a vast scale, while the conditions for turning it into value remain privately concentrated.

The screen can hide this relationship precisely because it shows individuals. Where we should see an economic and ideological structure, we see profiles. Where there is labor, we see charm. Where there is exploitation, we see entrepreneurship. Where there is inequality, we see differences in lifestyle. The language of individualism then acts as a semiotic curtain. Everyone seems responsible for their own fate because everyone is invited to turn their life into a business project. Society disappears behind biography.

A self-made influencer represents the most extreme form of this denial. They become an entrepreneur of themselves because they have learned to treat their personality as an asset, their private life as content, their relationships as social capital, their body as advertising space, and their ability to inspire identification as a productive force. Yet this apparent autonomy contains a historical irony: to be an entrepreneur of oneself, one must constantly work on oneself.

They rarely stop producing. Rest can become a post; leisure, a recommendation; travel, a showcase; love, a storyline; outrage, engagement. Life ceases to exist outside work and begins to function as one of its raw materials.

There is no pure figure here. That very impurity is what makes the influencer theoretically interesting. Classes do not disappear because their subjective boundaries become blurred. Instead, the ways class relations shape consciousness become more sophisticated. Content creators face a more perverse situation: the working day can coincide with life. Their productive force lies not only in their hands but also in their voice, appearance, habits, responsiveness, emotional availability, and constant presence. Exploitation takes on an anthropological dimension.

Workers no longer give only their hours; they may give up parts of their personality. When personality becomes a productive instrument, alienation reaches a new depth: what should be an intimate sphere of human fulfillment can become material for generating value.

Yet while millions work to build visibility, a few own the technical conditions that turn this scattered production into economic power. Here lies a contradiction that the rhetoric of “individual success” tries to erase: production is increasingly collective, while appropriation remains concentrated. Every video depends on infrastructure; every interaction produces data; every trend emerges from millions of acts of participation; every second of attention feeds systems capable of accumulating information and profit. The crowd produces immense semiotic wealth. Who owns it? Who sets the rules? Who sets the price of visibility? Who decides which labor is rewarded and which is buried beneath the noise?

Any answer requires us to look beyond the influencer. The real power lies in the architecture that turns human activity into data, data into prediction, prediction into influence, and influence into accumulation. The algorithm is not a metaphysical cause of our behavior. It is a technical intermediary within property relations. Its ability to organize attention has economic significance because a structure that can appropriate the results of that organization exists. Technology amplifies a social relationship. It does not replace the struggle for power; it makes that struggle harder to see.

An influencer’s most powerful commodity, however, is a social fiction: the fiction that success depends primarily on turning yourself into a more efficient version of yourself. This narrative has a devastating class consequence. It shifts attention away from material conditions and toward self-management. An inadequate wage becomes a mindset problem. Precarity becomes a lack of initiative. Inequality becomes a difference in effort. The concentration of wealth becomes a difference in talent. Exploitation disappears from the vocabulary just as it intensifies in the structure.

This ideology is most effective when it no longer appears to be ideology. When an influencer sees a life of luxury and thinks not about the property structure that makes that accumulation possible but about how to reproduce its outward signs individually, the social relationship has penetrated desire. When an exhausted worker consumes content every day promising that they, too, can “be their own boss,” the contradiction between labor and capital has found an imaginary solution: there are no exploiters and exploited, only people who have not yet learned how to monetize their lives properly.

The screen then offers a second reading. Where ideology promises that everyone can become the owner of themselves, material reality shows that people do not have equal amounts of time, education, capital, infrastructure, social networks, emotional stability, or ability to take risks.

Apparently universal competition begins from radically unequal positions. Formal equality of access exists alongside material inequality of opportunity. Everyone can post; not everyone can become visible. Everyone can start a business; not everyone can endure months without income. Everyone can build a personal brand; not everyone can afford the time required to turn their personality into a commodity.

This reveals a truth that the aesthetics of success try to keep out of frame: behind every triumphant biography lies a social geography. There are families, inheritances, education, connections, available time, working conditions, infrastructure, economic capital, and cultural capital. Meritocracy often works as a story that individualizes historical advantages. Privilege appears as talent. Prior accumulation appears as effort.

Class position manages to present itself as personality. Aesthetics play an active role in that process. Luxury is shown not only as wealth but as a desirable normality. The disciplined body is shown not only as the result of material conditions and available time but as willpower. The house, car, trip, clothing, and food become signs of alleged personal superiority. This creates a quiet pedagogy of inequality: it teaches people to admire the results without asking how they were produced.

In response, an emancipatory semiotics would have to learn to read what is absent. Who cleans the immaculate house? Who cooks the food presented as healthy? Who makes the clothes? Who drives the vehicle? Who packages the product? Who extracts the raw materials? Who programs the infrastructure? Who moderates the content? Who works while someone else displays their leisure?

Ethics and aesthetics meet at this point. The aesthetics of commodities tend to show results and hide relationships. Critical aesthetics can do the opposite: restore visibility to what has been pushed out of the frame. Make invisible labor visible. Restore history to what seems natural. Show the social chain behind an object. Restore conflict where advertising offers harmony. The point is not to destroy beauty, but to stop beauty from functioning as an anesthetic.

A key task in the revolution of consciousness lies in an apparently simple, profoundly subversive act: learning to ask who is working when someone seems simply to be living. That question can dismantle a great many contemporary fictions.

The life that appears private often rests on other people’s labor. The freedom that appears individual may depend on collective relationships. The wealth that appears to be merit may embody accumulated social labor; and the influence that appears to be a personal attribute may depend on privately owned infrastructure.

The influencer is therefore a privileged subject for a semiotics of class struggle: in a seductive form, they make visible the contradiction between social production and private appropriation. Their image helps us understand that today’s struggle over meaning is inseparable from the economy. Every image takes part in a dispute over which lives deserve admiration, which desires should become the norm, which forms of labor can remain invisible, and which inequalities can be accepted as natural.

A truly radical question is who owns the material conditions needed to turn influence into power. More than that: who turns that power into the ability to define reality? A ruling class preserves its dominance not only by controlling material resources; it must also contest how the world is interpreted. It needs inequality to seem reasonable, competition to seem like freedom, precarity to seem like opportunity, consumption to seem like fulfillment, and accumulation to seem like merit.

When we recognize this process, something breaks. The influencer stops appearing as an exceptional individual and begins to appear as a symptom.

The screen stops showing us only people and starts showing us relationships. Luxury stops being merely an image and reveals the labor that sustains it. Virality stops being just a number and reveals a power structure. The algorithm stops seeming like an autonomous creature and appears within property relations. Success stops being an isolated biography and regains its class geography.

Then comes the real critical experience: we discover that what seemed most intimate was profoundly social, and that what seemed like personal choice was shaped by historical relationships. What seemed like a conversation could contain an operation of value creation. What seemed like freedom could be a sophisticated form of dependence. And we finally understand that the struggle over meaning is not a secondary arena of social struggle: a fundamental part of our ability to imagine another world is decided there.

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Those who manage to colonize desire can rule without giving orders. Those who turn their interests into common sense can make the dominated participate actively in reproducing the conditions that dominate them. The revolution of consciousness begins precisely when that fate stops seeming natural and is revealed once again as a historical contradiction. When thought recognizes that the world does not have to be as it appears, the concrete possibility of transforming it begins.

(Alma Plus)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

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