Social media influencers are key drivers in today’s complex culture of consuming media, goods, and identities. The majority of research on influencers has focused on individual creators, with extremely limited attention on the broader context of social media industries and the workers who support it. I argue that our current understanding of influencer work has displaced our ability to recognize the full spectrum of labor that goes into the industrial workflow of influencer media production. My research elucidates how the influencer ecosystem mobilizes racial, gendered, and classed labor from both its media and commodity supply chains. This ecosystem contains the entangled operations of waged and non-waged labor extraction from the chains of precarious workers in influencer media production, home management, e-commerce marketing, and retail logistics. By looking at an expanded notion of influencer industrial and infrastructural labor, this project rethinks labor value, forms and circuits of labor, and sites of production in digital culture as they relate to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This research further employs the concept of spectrality to reconsider how we engage with ubiquitous influencer media and confronts the social and cultural forces that made some labor spectral and certain laboring bodies into spectacle. In doing so, this dissertation accomplishes three goals: 1) to draw much-needed attention to obscured but resonant forms of labor; 2) to articulate the crucial roles of women and people of color, in the production of digital culture and economy; 3) to understand the logic behind the production, circulation, and management of influencer media. The organization of this dissertation roughly traces the consumption cycle of (im)material commodity production, circulation, and discard in influencer cultural production and e-commerce operation: from the process of constructing virtual influencers as digital beings and strategic marketing tools, to mobilizing influencers and logistic workers in selling and delivering physical goods, to the post-consumption stage of managing and tidying up overflowing items. Juxtaposing these three sites of value production and labor extraction carves out a relational space to excavate and assemble different forms of undervalued labor and infrastructure.

This dissertation is a historical and speculative study of the media, cultural, andtechnological infrastructures that anticipated and accompanied the staging of the Olympic Games in Tokyo (1964, 2020) and Beijing (2008, 2022). Combining comparative and synthetic perspectives, the project examines the Olympic Games as a vehicle of “soft power” diplomacy within global and regional Asian geopolitics from the Cold War to the present, using the concept of the “infrastructural event” as a corollary to and reworking of the familiar media studies notion of the “media event.” Building on existing analyses that primarily treat the Olympic Games and other large-scale broadcasting spectacles textually dramaturgically, this reconsideration centers the long- and short-term technical and aesthetic transformations emblematic of the Olympic preparation process. Through an infrastructural approach bringing together objects of study including undersea cables, railways, urban arts districts, and airports, this project argues that plans to bring the Olympics to Asia are not simply or principally motivated and rationalized by the desire to assert economic and symbolic parity with the west, as scholarship on the subject has often suggested. Rather, through case studies of infrastructural and symbolic linkages between Tokyo and Beijing, this project shows how the inauguration of Asian cities as “Olympic cities” also contributes to broader regional efforts to generate affective ties, mobility, and profitable exchange across Asian borders despite past and intermittent geopolitical antipathies.