The Post-Fordist World Of An Influencer.

Understanding the paradigm shift of labour through social media content creators.

“Teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read – slogan recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane.”

• Mark Fisher

The developing world lives in a strange chasm, where the industrial and the post-industrial world co-exist (take India for example, as it moves from an industrial/manufacturing/production economy to a service/information oriented one, about 44% of the workforce is still employed in agriculture although it contributes just 15% of the economic output.) In the same way, a post-Fordist society exists in tandem with a Fordist one.

The origins of the assembly line, a key feature of Henry Ford’s labour module can be traced back to the meat-processing industry where an overhead mobile conveyer belt delivered carcasses from worker to worker. Stationary workers concentrated on one task and performed it at a pace dictated by the machine, thereby minimizing unnecessary movement and dramatically increasing productivity.

On January 5th, 1914 Ford revealed that Ford Motor Company will be paying their workers a whooping five dollars (approximately 120 dollars in todays money) a day. Almost double the wages at the time. Many attributed this action to Ford expressing his desire for all his workers to be able to afford the products they helped build and bring to fruition, expanding the consumer base of his products to all his workers. Although Fords 5 dollar a day scheme had loopholes, and his ulterior motive was to curb the excruciatingly high turnover rate, (Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000) his policy did build a foundation for the industrial middle class.

Fordism, a term coined based on Ford’s practices of micro-scale organization of mass production were pivotal to work and worker culture for hundreds of years. The assembly line was fundamental in the shift from work being structured around the labourer to it being structured around the machine, the machine rather than the worker controlled the rate of production. The workforce was tethered to the control of the machine.

The Fordist way led to labourers with extremely precise, menial and monotonous jobs, a lot of Marxist theory was driven by themes of alienation that industrialised work created, one Ford union activist told federal investigators: “You see, the principle of the Ford plant is like making machines, he attempts to standardize the machines, and so he does with labor.”

Today, after the proliferation of neoliberal global supply chains, post-Fordism has replaced Fordism. Post-Fordism is the successor to Fordism but doesn’t share any of its production and consumption patterns. The post-Fordist labour market is usually defined by its individuality and its fluidity. To participate in this new economic framework, flexibility, nomadism and spontaneity are absolutely essential.

Mark Fisher defined it as a continuous oscillation between working from home and homing from work. A system so pervasive and complex that the consequence of this ‘indefinite’ mode of power is that external surveillance is succeeded by internal policing. Control only works if you are complicit with it.

Fisher’s critique of capitalism in his work Capitalist Realism (2009) increases in relevance with the current environment of influencers and its extended environs of content creators, bloggers, vloggers or whatever term the most dominantly online age group of the time come up with.

According to an American survey (because accessing data from any other region on the internet is an herculean task) of 2,000 individuals between the age groups of 13–38, 86% are willing to post sponsored content for money. Dissecting data that is publicly available about the different social media apps that are popular influencer breeding grounds, it is easy to see that this superfluous and hedonistic term (and job) can generate an easy buck for many if pursued within the guidelines of what is “trending” and what is “acceptable” by other users and the app alike (tech lords of cyberspace don’t know what to do with those espousing unpopular opinions yet, usually shadow banning problematic figures with only juggernauts of charisma and endearment like Alex Jones having the prowess to seep through).

On Youtube (the cyberspace where most men engage with influencers), channels must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 month period in order to be eligible to apply to the YouTube Partner Program. On YouTube around 6 million accounts have 1,000 subscribers, not all of whom are monetising their content but are still “eligible” to live the for profit lifestyle.

On Instagram (the cyberspace where most women engage with influencers), since the birth of this genre of work the term influencer has been synonymous with fame, but the last couple of years has seen an increase in the popularity of “nano-influencers” who can have anywhere between 1,000 to 5,000 followers and can even drop as low as 600 followers in smaller, scarcely populated countries, making 46.38% (53.62% of Instagram users have less than 1,000 followers) of users “eligible” to live the for profit lifestyle.

The data dump was pivotal in tethering the likeliness that more people than one expects is looped into cyberspace (used interchangeably with social media) not for entertainment purposes but for work and the form of labour that comes with the job of being an influencer is a great example of post-fordism (from Fisher’s lexicon). Work bleeds into life and life bleeds into work.

Fisher in his work Capitalist Realism highlights the lack of escape from the matrix of capitalism. There is no way out, or even space to consider any alternative economic system because of the interwoven nature of the post-fordist labour module. The constant stimulation that is offered (in cyberspace) by ones labour being enthralled by gratification of not only ones actions but also of the intangible self which is displayed through what “you stand for” or what “you represent”.

Fisher points out through his experience as a professor :

“Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.”

Be it the gamer-twitch streamer who loves to mock the “liberal snowflake” or the fashion content creator on instagram who is a staunch advocate for mental health, character is currency today.

Although not many people take a Kylie Jenner, a Jeffree Star or a Ninja seriously and many might dub being an influencer as being a bullshit job (David Graeber lens). There is no way to opt out of this style of consumption. From consuming. Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) to consuming content produced by a substack writer with a mere 30 subscribers, everything is consumption even if it is a critique of the system in place.

Fisher mentions:

“ ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.”

Fisher recalls everybody’s favourite angsty pop star (intentional use of pop rather than rock) Kurt Cobain. Fisher states:

“Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliche scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche.”

Cobain wasn’t a voice of a generation but a symbol inside the construct of capitalism, to like Cobain and to get behind his message pacified vast audiences and listening to Nirvana replaced real action. Cobain also didn’t live in oblivion and was self-aware to know the situation he was in. “A detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement”.

“[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

-Marx and Engels

The Communist Manifesto.

It is difficult for a developing country like India to inhabit people who indulge in labour from opposite sides of the spectrum leading to an abysmal lack of collective consciousness, leading to the trials and tribulations of a harmonious social fabric that is required for a well functioning civil society.