Mimetic desire in platform capitalism: Algorithms,the consumer culture,and influence capitalism

Abstract

This article develops a Girardian account of platform capitalism to show how mimetic desire has become a core infrastructural resource in contemporary consumer culture. Bringing Consumer Culture Theory into dialogue with René Girard’s concepts of mimesis, mediation and rivalry, it traces a genealogy from mass consumer society to the algorithmic architectures that organise visibility and recognition on social media. Methodologically, the essay offers an interpretive analysis of Facebook as a global mimetic device, the Labubu blind-box phenomenon as a paradigmatic case of “memetic” collecting, and the rise of influencers and finfluencers as key mediators of desire in retail finance, situating these cases within CCT scholarship on emotions, branding and digital labour. The article makes three main contributions. First, it reframes consumer culture as increasingly organised around the enhancement and commodification of mimetic relations between consumers, rather than around products alone, showing how platforms transform relationships, emotions and vulnerabilities into “emotional commodities” and sources of economic value. Second, it conceptualises recommendation algorithms as impersonal mediators that generate “mimesis without subjects”: infrastructures that learn, anticipate and redeploy imitation while distributing symbolic conflict within an attention economy and maintaining manageable mimetic tension. Third, it introduces the notion of “influence capitalism” to theorise the convergence of consumption, media and retail finance in a mimetic theatre, where human influencers, algorithmic agents and data platforms co-produce mimetic fields, from blind-box economies to meme stocks. By reading platform capitalism through the Girardian prism, the essay advances the theoretical agenda of Consumer Culture Theory, foregrounding visibility, rivalry and imitative vulnerability as constitutive dimensions of contemporary capitalism. It concludes by outlining normative and political implications around inequalities of visibility, the governance of mimetic infrastructures and the responsibilities of platforms, brands and finfluencers, and by sketching directions for future empirical research on algorithmic mediation and emerging mimetic infrastructures of desire.