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.
Keywords
Introduction
The Girardian theory offers a useful key for understanding the genealogy of contemporary consumerism. While classical economics bases market dynamics on the encounter between needs and utility, Girard identifies the desire for the other as the true driving force of social systems (Girard, 1972, 1982), according to which an object is not sought after for its intrinsic features, but rather because others desire it (Girard, 1961, 1972, 1982). In Girard’s model, desire is triangular rather than dyadic: the subject comes to desire the object through the mediation of a model, whose exemplary relation to the object can turn into rivalry when access, recognition or symbolic ownership becomes scarce or contested. In the view of the French anthropologist the dynamics of desire are triangular and arise from the relationship between subject, model and object. (Girard, 1961) Consumer society has turned this anthropological structure into a productive system to sustain growth. Consumerism does not only produce goods, but above all desires, therefore continuing and radicalising the logic already intuited by Veblen in his theory of ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Veblen, 1899). Advertising, cinema, fashion and mass media have constructed models of life that replace real needs with the fascination of a reflected identity. Every advertising message can be read as a Girardian triangle: the consumer (subject) desires a product (object) because a visible figure – the model, celebrity or influencer – possesses or embodies it. The commodity is no longer a mere good and becomes a sign within a distinction-based system (Baudrillard, 1970; Debord, 1967); Consumer Culture Theory has shown how such signs are organised into brand publics and spaces of symbolic circulation (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Arnould and Thompson, 2005). Mimetic theory allows us to integrate the perspective of semiotics and construct a model that describes how to participate in the desire of others, to access a status of recognition within fields of social distinction and ‘debatable’ value systems (Belk, 2013). Considering this nuance and using Girard’s categories, consumerism is configured as a device for the symbolic regulation of mimetic conflict. While many archaic societies contained conflict through ritual devices of symbolic conflict regulation, modernity has decided to turn it into peaceful competition, where purchases are used instead of sacrifices, while fashion both replaces and sublimates social competition. However, such a solution remains unstable and ‘restless’ because mimetic desire is structurally insatiable and every object loses value as soon as the model changes its references. Consumerism then functions as a controlled mimetic conflict, that is to say a system that ceaselessly generates new objects and new models in order to prevent the collective desire from collapsing onto a single good or object that can generate forms of antagonism. The literature on the commodification of emotions and relationships shows how such a dynamic increasingly affects the affective register, giving rise to real ‘emotional commodities’ or emodities (Illouz, 2009; Illouz, 2018; Kuruoğlu and Ger, 2014), states where the emotional experience in itself becomes an object of exchange. The transition from industrial capitalism to digital capitalism has brought this dynamic to a head. Mediation is no longer exercised only by distant heroes or unattainable stars, but by ordinary individuals within our social networks. Internal mediation, theorised by Girard in Dostoevsky’s novels, becomes the dominant form of contemporary sociality. Social profiles, user-generated content and the aspirational work of creators and micro-influencers are able to transform ordinary individuals into imitable models (Duffy, 2017), while platforms collect and organise these flows into data infrastructures (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). In parallel, Consumer Culture Theory has shown how consumption is a language of belonging, distinction and affectivity, where the value of goods depends on their ability to set up relationships, identities and emotions (Belk, 2013; Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Illouz, 2009). Within this context, the contribution by Girard may very well be read as a radical integration into the sociology of consumption, since by using his theoretical framework one can see how not only products, but also mimetic relationships between consumers can become the direct object of economic valorisation. Recent studies on marketing and branding have begun to explicitly explore this connection between the mimetic desire and market practices, showing how the discipline of marketing is increasingly based on the strategic management of imitation and the design of fields of visibility in which consumers act as models for each other (Burns and Smith, 2022; Choi et al., 2025; Kim and Park, 2023). This is the trajectory taken by Facebook: the platform that has institutionalised internal mediation on a global scale, transforming every user into a potential model for others and turning every interaction into an element that acts on what is desirable, preparing its translation into algorithmic infrastructure, which we will analyse in the following sections. From a methodological point of view, the article develops a theoretical-critical analysis rooted in the cultural sociology of consumption and René Girard’s mimetic theory, placing itself within the horizon of Consumer Culture Theory (Arnould and Thompson, 2005, 2019). The argument is intentionally interpretative and genealogical, as it aims to follow the trajectory of mimetic desire from mass consumption to platform capitalism, without advancing hypotheses to be tested empirically or aspiring to statistical generalisation. In line with the contextual epistemology of Consumer Culture Theory (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011), the focus of the research is on reconstructing the socio-technical devices that organise desire, rather than on measuring individual variables. Facebook is taken as a paradigmatic and strategic case, selected for its theoretical relevance in making observable the link between desire and algorithmic infrastructure, rather than for its exclusively empirical value. The method is conceptual-comparative in nature: it mobilises the Girardian categories (such as mimesis, mediation, rivalry) and makes them interact with some key concepts from the sociology of consumption and studies on the commodification of emotions (Belk, 2013; Illouz, 2019), mostly in order to interpret the practices of visibility, recognition and polarisation within socio-technical ecosystems. However, rather than providing quantitative evidence, the paper proposes an explanatory framework that makes its audience understand how technical mediation reproduces and restructures the mimetic dynamics of contemporary consumption, contributing to the theoretical dimension of CCT (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). Such a stance is reflective and methodologically explicit: the epistemological assumptions, the case selection criteria and the limits of the general application of the theory, something in line with the discussions on the researcher’s position and on the ‘context in itself’, when CCT research is concerned (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011). Thus configured, the contribution aims to offer an interpretative basis for future empirical investigations into algorithmic media and emerging forms of mimetic infrastructure of desire.The specific gap addressed by this article is therefore the insufficient integration between CCT accounts of symbolic consumption and platform-studies accounts of algorithmic power. CCT has examined identity work, brand publics and affective value (Arnould and Thompson, 2005, 2019; Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Belk, 2013), while platform scholarship has analysed data extraction and algorithmic governance (Srnicek, 2017; Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). What remains under-theorised is how platforms organise imitation itself as an economic resource. The objective of the article is to show that algorithms, influencers and market devices do not simply represent consumer desire; they mediate, amplify and monetise the relations through which consumers come to desire what others desire. This reflexive position also clarifies the role of the cases discussed below: Facebook, Labubu and finfluencers are treated as theoretical objects that make visible a broader mimetic logic, not as statistically representative empirical cases. They are mobilised to clarify how platform infrastructures organise desire, rivalry and recognition within consumer culture.
The mimetic violence within social networks
Building on Girard’s notion of the double and the crisis of undifferentiation, this section shows how social media platforms turn mimetic rivalry into a structural feature of digital consumer culture. We focus on how engagement-driven architectures distribute conflict and attention, making mimetic violence a resource for the attention economy. Consumer society had already transformed mimesis into a productive mechanism; digital capitalism represents the phase during which this logic becomes algorithmic. Social platforms operate as semiotic machines and data extraction infrastructures that capture, measure and redistribute human desire, translating the Girardian dynamics into computer code (Srnicek, 2017; Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). Desire no longer spreads only through the collective imagination of traditional media, but through automated recommendation architectures that organise visibility in real time. Every ‘like’, share or comment constitutes a micro-act of imitation that the system records, processes and re-inserts into the flow, generating new circuits of similarity and differentiation. In this sense, mimesis is no longer just an intersubjective dynamic, but rather an emergent property of the platform infrastructure. The radical novelty of this regime is that the circulation of desire is centreless and without explicit mediation: no subject directly decides which content will be the focus of collective attention. The algorithm learns patterns of desire and replicates them, producing ecosystems of affinity and community that reinforce dominant preferences and amplify the visibility of the most contested content. Therefore, social networks function as devices for the symbolic regulation of conflict, as they do not eliminate rivalry, but rather distribute it ubiquitously, keeping the mimetic tension that fuels the attention-based economy constantly up (Fuchs, 2021; Illouz, 2019). Girard showed how mimesis is intrinsically ambivalent, as it generates social cohesion even as it constantly tends towards crisis, because identification with the model leads to rivalry and the ‘violence of the double’ (Girard, 1972, 1982). When desire becomes reciprocal — when each person desires what the other desires — the relationship leads to competition, jealousy and symbolic violence. Social networks bring this dynamic to a head: Facebook in particular is a laboratory of mimetic violence, where the violence of the double translates into digital polarisation, exclusion and online scapegoating (Burns and Smith, 2022; Rosa, 2023). The architecture of the platform — built on the visibility of consensus, public confrontation and popularity metrics — amplifies differences to the point of transforming them into identity clashes. The logic of the algorithm, as it privileges engagement, favours content that elicits strong reactions: indignation, sarcasm, antagonism. Violence, which in archaic societies was concentrated in ritual devices of symbolic conflict regulation, is now administered as attention; indeed, now, every controversy, every flame, every viral outrage functions as an opportunity to strengthen community bonds through shared tension, while the platform captures its economic value. Under such a perspective, mimesis becomes a socio-technical dynamic of automated regulation: a form of governance of relationships through code. Recent studies on patterns of influence on Instagram show how the interaction between social networks and algorithmic infrastructures produces real mimetic fields, where the probability of imitation is technically modelled and can be measured with computational tools (Etienne and Charton, 2024). Therefore, digital capitalism has discovered that rivalry, when managed with algorithmic precision, is a stable source of symbolic and economic profit. Therefore, the conflictual energy is not suppressed, but rather gets continuously reactivated and valorised within an infrastructure that transforms desire into data, and data into capital.
Facebook as a global mimetic device
Facebook represents the culmination of the aforementioned logic. Far from being a simple social tool, it is a machine for capturing desire that organises imitation and competition on a global scale. Every profile, every post, every gesture of approval becomes part of a recognition circuit that connects the symbolic dimension to the economic one: visibility is converted into data, data into market value, according to a model of platform capitalism and data expropriation that transforms social relations into proprietary infrastructure (Srnicek, 2017; Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). In terms of Consumer Culture Theory, Facebook functions as an environment in which the digital extended self is constantly performed, measured and monetised (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Belk, 2013). The intellectual history of Facebook shows that this mimetic function is not purely contingent in nature. Its main early-stage investor, Peter Thiel, was a student of René Girard at Stanford and has repeatedly acknowledged the influence of mimetic desire theory on his own vision of markets and technological entrepreneurship (Thiel, 2014). In various interviews and speeches, Thiel presents competition as the pathological outcome of imitative processes and defends monopoly as the only feasible way out of the ‘mimetic war’ of competitive markets, translating Girard’s diagnosis of the violence of desire into economic terms (Burns and Smith, 2022; Girard, 1972, 1982). In this context, investing in Facebook appears to be a real ‘bet on mimesis’, since the relational structure of this platform allows it to be observed and interpreted as a device capable of making the imitative flows that structure collective behaviours and consumer cultures visible, measurable and profitable fully visible. From this perspective, the social network becomes the laboratory in which the Girardian model becomes the economic infrastructure of a market of desire in which imitation is programmed and rivalry is the very condition of social connections. Facebook’s strength lies not so much in its ability to connect individuals as in its ability to orchestrate collective desire. All users, while believing they are expressing personal preferences, act within a network that shapes and informs their inclinations through signals of approval, trends and visibility metrics instead; the emotions and bonds produced in this space become ‘emotional commodities’, i.e. affective resources mobilised and exchanged in an attention economy (Illouz, 2019). The violent nature of mimesis does not disappear, but is transformed into digital polarisation and symbolic exclusion. The platform produces a form of widespread violence, not destructive but incessant, namely a violence of confrontation, judgement and exposure, which permeates both political conflicts and practices of consumption and self-presentation (Fuchs, 2021; Rosa, 2023). Wall posts become spaces of social exposure in which symbolic micro-conflicts are fought, keeping the system in a state of permanent mobilisation. Access to these spaces is differential: some subjects are systematically marginalised in terms of visibility, excluded from the circuits of recognition and influence, in an ecosystem that needs hierarchies of attention in order to function (Duffy, 2017; Mata De Vasconcelos, 2025). In this sense, Facebook functions as a device for the symbolic regulation of conflict, replacing sacrifice with performance, physical violence with visibility, blood with attention. Silicon Valley, viewed through Girard’s eyes, represents the full convergence of anthropology, technology and finance, where platforms produce not only innovations but actual infrastructures of desire, environments that make mimesis measurable, replicable and capitalisable, integrating the circuits of social recognition with those of economic valorisation (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2019).
The algorithm as an impersonal mediator
According to Girard’s thinking, the mediator of desire is originally a human figure: a model that the subject observes, imitates and sometimes attempts to equal or replace (Girard, 1961, 1972). With the advent of digital platforms, this figure has been partly replaced by the algorithm, itself an impersonal, opaque and omnipresent mediator that filters reality, selects stimuli and circumscribes the horizon of the desirable. In line with analyses of datafication and the power of platforms (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2019), the algorithm can be understood as a device able to translate the mimetic desire into computable patterns, reorganising social mediation in probabilistic terms. The recommendation algorithm operates on the basis of a structurally Girardian principle: it shows what others, similar to the user, have already desired. It does not merely observe mimesis, but rather it learns and reproduces it; it is, in a strong sense, performative (Gillespie, 2013; Bucher, 2018). Therefore, every gesture of approval, sharing or comment becomes a signal of desire that feeds a network of automated mimetic relationships. The result is a kind of mimesis without subjects, since no one consciously chooses who to imitate anymore, even as everyone ends up imitating each other within cycles of algorithmic feedback. Conceptualising algorithms as impersonal mediators that generate ‘mimesis without subjects’ is one of the article’s key theoretical contributions to Consumer Culture Theory. It shifts attention from individual imitators to the infrastructural conditions under which mimetic fields are produced and maintained. Recent studies on patterns of influence on Instagram show how the interaction between social networks and algorithmic infrastructures produces actual mimetic fields, in which the probability of imitation is technically modelled and measured with computational tools (Etienne and Charton, 2024). Mediation, once embodied in individuals or groups, is now systemic. The algorithm does not impose desires directly, rather it predicts and anticipates them, shaping the environment of choice according to the statistical probabilities of collective desire (Beer, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). Girard warned that when mimesis loses its ritual regulation, there is a risk of undifferentiated crisis, the dissolution of differences and the generalisation of conflict (Girard, 1972, 1982). In digital society, this crisis takes on a homeostatic form: the algorithm maintains mimetic tension at constant levels, distributing content that generates friction in a calibrated manner without ever allowing the system to collapse. Polarisation and trolling thus become structural effects of an environment that needs permanent but manageable conflicts to fuel the attention economy (Fuchs, 2021; Rosa, 2023). Whereas modern disciplinary power was exercised through surveillance and norms (Foucault, 1975), digital power manifests itself as algorithmic mimetic power: it does not repress, but seduces; it does not prohibit, but guides. Instead of imposing behaviours, it suggests desires. We are faced with a veritable biopolitics of desire, which replaces law with recommendation and coercion with the curation of information flows (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Han, 2017). In this context, the algorithm acts as an algorithmic agent of cultural selection: it regulates access to the space of social exposure, decides who will be exposed and who will remain in the shadows, who can become a model and who will remain a spectator, contributing to the formation of brand publics and hierarchies of visibility within consumer cultures (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Duffy, 2017). The prediction society described by Zuboff (2019) represents the technological realisation of this diagnosis: capitalism no longer exploits only what we desire, but aspires to decide what we will desire. The algorithm becomes the supreme mediator, capable of anticipating mimesis and, to a certain extent, producing it on command. Envy, anxiety about comparison, fear of exclusion and the search for recognition – central elements of Girardian dynamics – are transformed into data, and data into profit. What was once expelled from the community – rivalry, anger, resentment – has now become the raw material of symbolic and affective production on digital platforms (Illouz, 2019; Mata De Vasconcelos, 2025), confirming that the heart of contemporary capitalism is a mimetic infrastructure governed by code.
The Labubu dolls: The memetic economies of global collecting
To empirically grasp the logic of mimetic desire in digital capitalism, the Labubu phenomenon – an ugly cute creature inspired by characters from The Monsters books developed by Pop Mart – represents a paradigmatic case. Created as a niche art toy and integrated into the Pop Mart portfolio in 2019, such characters were quickly transformed into a transnational icon through the blind box format and an appealing marketing strategy. In the first half of 2023, Pop Mart recorded revenues of RMB 367.9 million, accounting for 5.8% of turnover and up 39.9% compared to 2022 (Pop Mart International Group, 2023). The management itself describes Labubu as an IP ‘of global significance’, capable of driving theme parks, exhibitions and fashion collaborations in China and abroad. This economic centrality is made possible by the unique nature of the blind box format, which combines probability, suspense and the creation of a fictitious ‘product rarity’. Studies on Pop Mart and the blind box economy in China have shown how series with extremely rare ‘hidden items’ or ‘secret figures’ – often with a probability of one in 72 or even less – institutionalise an artificial scarcity that transforms purchasing into a competitive game and a practice of aestheticized prosumption (Whyke et al., 2023). Recent market and press analyses confirm that this mechanism has moved beyond Pop Mart’s original blind-box model: major toy makers and retailers have expanded mystery-packaged products, while Labubu dolls have sold out rapidly and appeared on secondary markets at heavily inflated prices (DiNapoli, 2025). In Labubu’s case, artificial scarcity is amplified by platform circulation: AP News links its popularity to celebrity visibility, TikTok circulation, unboxing practices, short supply and resale mark-ups, while WIRED and Reuters document first-half 2025 revenue growth for THE MONSTERS, stock shortages, counterfeits and a record auction sale of 1.08 million yuan for a human-sized Labubu figure (Chapman, 2025; Yang, 2025; Yu and Goh, 2025).Market trend data confirm that blind boxes are now one of the fastest-growing marketing devices globally, supported by strong engagement from Gen Z and young adults, in line with forms of consumption inspired by video game loot boxes. The mimetic circulation of Labubu is primarily a circulation of images and mediatised rituals. Unboxing videos on TikTok and YouTube, vlogs of visits to flagship stores, clips from Pop Land and European and North American pop-up stores, along with fan-generated content (home collections, themed birthdays, outfits ‘accessorised’ with the soft toy), make up a visual grammar of desire that invites replication and competition for rarity. Recent analyses show that ‘Labubu unboxing’ generates hundreds of thousands of monthly searches and videos with several million views, while some rare or limited edition pieces fetch tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the secondary market. Press reports document hours-long queues at shops, digital booking systems, parallel markets where professional intermediaries buy stock in bulk to resell at inflated prices, and even the emergence of large-scale imitations and counterfeits. In this attention economy, value does not depend on the quality of use of the product, but on the object’s ability to condense membership of a community of imitators into a minimal form. Labubu is not simply a toy, but a symbolic unit of desire: a node in which mimesis, distinction and fear of exclusion converge. The mechanism is entirely Girardian: the subject does not desire the object itself, but the desire they see reflected in others – collectors, influencers, celebrities, online micro-communities – according to a pattern that literature on the culture of collecting and fan-based consumption has already described as probabilistic and elastic prosumption (Whyke et al., 2023). Pop Mart orchestrates this dynamic through a combination of experiential events, immersive exhibitions and the continuous introduction of variants, producing a ‘mimetic bubble’ that recalls the speculative logic of meme stocks and NFT collectibles, but in a materially tangible form. Recent literature on virtual consumption and digital generations in China interprets similar phenomena in terms of ‘mimetic homeland’ and, therefore, symbolic spaces in which identity and emotions are processed through aestheticised consumption and rituals of belonging, at the crossroads between online and offline (Zhang et al., 2025). Labubu fits into this picture as a hybrid interface between material consumption and digital imagery fuelled by physical figures circulating in social ecosystems that incessantly reproduce desire, making it a scalable and transnational business. Compared to phenomena such as Funko Pop! or NFTs, Labubu takes the self-referential nature of mimesis to the extreme, as what makes it desirable is, ultimately, the fact that others desire it, in a cycle of imitation that the algorithmic infrastructure of social media identifies, amplifies and monetises. From this perspective, Labubu is not a simple product but a process. A form of ritualised consumption that channels the energy of collective rivalry into peaceful competition for the possession of rare figures, a device for the symbolic regulation of conflict that transforms tensions, anxieties and the desire for distinction into participation in the global collecting game. To substantiate these market-trend claims, updated company data show that THE MONSTERS, the IP family to which Labubu belongs, generated RMB4.814 billion in the first half of 2025 and accounted for 34.7% of Pop Mart’s revenue by IP (Pop Mart International Group, 2025). Recent press analyses also connect Labubu’s popularity to celebrity visibility, blind-box scarcity, unboxing practices and resale dynamics (Broadway, 2025; Chapman, 2025).
The financial mimesis. From social influencers to “finfluencers”
Digital capitalism has turned influence into a central economic resource. While in the twentieth century the production of goods was the focus of accumulation, today it is the production of shared desire. Influencers represent the key anthropological figure of this new economy: mimetic mediators who embody the model of desire, translating the ability to be desired into economic value. On platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, influencers sell not only objects but also symbolic proximity: what they produce is the possibility of identifying with their desire, through forms of aspirational labour and permanent self-promotion that transform everyday life into a market resource (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017). In terms of Consumer Culture Theory, these figures operate as central nodes in brand publics where consumers, brands and platforms co-produce symbolic and affective value (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Belk, 2013). Recent research on the influencer economy explicitly shows how mimetic desire mediates between the attractiveness of the testimonial, brand attachment and purchase intentions. Kim and Park (2023) model mimetic desire as a mediator between the attractiveness of virtual influencers and purchase intention, highlighting that the effect of aesthetic appeal on the intention of purchasing passes through the desire to imitate the model and the affective bond with the brand (Kim and Park, 2023). Other studies highlight consumer mimicry towards sports influencers, showing how the perceived traits of the testimonial (credibility, competence, proximity) trigger imitative behaviour in sports consumption (De Araujo et al., 2024). Research on virtual influencers and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in fashion confirms that mimetic desire mediates the effect of brand coolness on the persuasive outcomes of campaigns (Kim et al., 2023), while work on food influence and food content shows that even everyday consumption choices are increasingly organised into structured fields of imitation (Ampornklinkaew, 2025). The logic is transversal: from fashion to sport, food and lifestyle finance, consumption appears to be a response to designed mimetic fields, in which platforms and brands orchestrate access to visibility and desirability (Etienne and Charton, 2024). This dynamic no longer concerns only the aesthetic or cultural sphere. It is increasingly extending to the financial dimension, where the logic of mimesis is combined with that of speculation. Retail finance has become an arena of imitative contagion: online forums, social trading and platforms such as Reddit, Robinhood and X have turned the market as a whole into a memetic environment, governed by signals of collective desire and narratives of FOMO (fear of missing out). Meme stocks — such as GameStop or AMC in 2021 — are the most obvious expression of this phenomenon: their rise was not determined by economic fundamentals, but by the desire to participate in a collective event of imitation and challenge, in which investment functions as a practice of belonging and symbolic resistance. In this context, ‘finfluencers’ emerge as new mimetic mediators of value. Their videos, threads and reels guide masses of investors, generating price fluctuations that are direct effects of imitative contagion. Studies on British ‘finfluencers’ show how financial content produced on TikTok and other platforms shapes expectations, sentiment and patterns of imitation that blur the line between education and promotion, raising regulatory questions about responsibility and the use of disclaimers (Ghadafi and Andriotis, 2025). Work on the phenomenon of ‘being under the finfluence’ highlights how these figures contribute to the financialisation of everyday life, transforming money management into public performance and platform-mediated identity practice (Hayes and Ben-Shmuel, 2024). Figures such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump take on a paradigmatic role in this scenario: their social media posts are not simply opinions, but acts of mimetic engineering that generate desire and fear, direct capital flows, and activate or deactivate speculative communities. A tweet about a cryptocurrency or a ‘meme’ stock can trigger price movements on a global scale, showing how the distinction between political leadership, entrepreneurial leadership and influencer status is now porous (Zuboff, 2019; Fuchs, 2021). In this perspective, politics, finance and consumption converge in a single mimetic theatre, where value depends on the ability to generate attention, visibility and imitation. Contemporary capitalism can thus be described as influence capitalism: a regime in which production, finance and culture share the same mimetic infrastructure, fuelled by the joint action of human influencers, algorithmic agents and data platforms.
Conclusions
This essay has proposed a genealogical reading of contemporary consumerism based on René Girard’s mimetic theory, showing how the transition from consumer society to digital capitalism does not mark a break, but rather the extreme manifestation of the same logic based on the valorisation of the desire of others. While industrial modernity had already transformed mimesis into the productive engine of consumerism, digital platforms now make it the organising principle of the algorithmic infrastructures that structure visibility, recognition and access to symbolic and economic resources. The analysis of Facebook as a global mimetic device has made this transformation visible. The platform does not merely collect interactions, but organises them into a machine for capturing and regenerating desire: every gesture of approval, every identity comparison, every symbolic micro-conflict is converted into data, and therefore into capital. The centrality of likes, popularity metrics and recommendation algorithms makes Girardian rivalry not a pathological outcome, but a structural condition of the ecosystem: the violence of the double translates into polarisation, exclusion and scapegoating processes administered as attention. In this perspective, the power of platforms appears as algorithmic mimetic power, a biopolitics of desire that governs relationships not through prohibitions, but through the probabilistic modulation of what is visible and desirable. The idea of the algorithm as an impersonal mediator constituted a second decisive theoretical step. In the classic Girardian model, the mediator is a recognisable human figure; in platform capitalism, mediation becomes systemic, opaque and automated. The algorithm learns patterns of imitation, stabilises them and relaunches them, producing what we have defined as mimesis without a subject: no one deliberately chooses who to imitate, and yet everyone imitates each other within feedback loops that continuously redistribute desire, envy and fear of exclusion. What is valued is no longer just the ability to produce goods, but the ability to anticipate and guide collective desire, deciding ‘upstream’ what will be desirable. The case of Labubu and the blind box economy has shown how these dynamics do not only concern the sphere of communication, but are condensed into specific forms of aestheticized consumption. The global success of a small, ‘ugly but cute’ character and the management infrastructure of its intellectual property (IP) reflects, albeit on a small scale, the overall logic of the system: planned scarcity, probabilistic uncertainty, collective unboxing rituals and parallel reselling economies construct a veritable mimetic field in which the value of the object depends on its ability to represent belonging to a community of imitators. Labubu is not simply a product, but a symbolic unit of desire: a device for the symbolic regulation of conflict that channels anxieties of distinction, fear of exclusion and rivalry into a pacified competition for rarity. The section on influence capitalism and financial mimesis has extended this framework beyond the domain of consumption in the strict sense. Social influencers and ‘finfluencers’ appear as anthropological reference figures within an order in which production, culture and finance share a single infrastructure of desire. From fashion to food, from sport to lifestyle finance, consumption is configured as a response to designed mimetic fields in which brands and platforms orchestrate access to visibility. In retail finance, the same logic translates into meme stocks, viral cryptocurrencies and investment communities organised around signals of collective desire and narratives of FOMO. The distinction between information, persuasion, and speculati s becomes porous and blurred. In this new mode of interaction, influence is converted into direct economic leverage, and the mimetic reactivity of individuals and groups is systematically exploited for profit. Overall, the essay makes three main contributions. First, it proposes reading Consumer Culture Theory through the Girardian prism, showing how it is not only products but also the mimetic relationships between consumers that become the direct object of economic valorisation. Secondly, it conceptualises digital platforms and their algorithms as mimetic infrastructures of desire, devices for the symbolic regulation of conflict that manage rivalry, polarisation and recognition within an attention economy. Thirdly, it introduces the notion of influence capitalism to describe the convergence of consumption, media and finance in a single mimetic theatre, in which human influencers, algorithmic agents and the architectures of digital platforms cooperate in the production of fields of desire. This perspective opens up a series of normative and political implications. If the heart of contemporary capitalism is a mimetic infrastructure governed by code, then inequalities of visibility, the algorithmic modulation of conflict and the imitative vulnerability of actors cannot be thought of as side effects, but as constitutive dimensions of the economic order. This raises questions about the modalities of algorithmic design, the responsibility of the actors who orchestrate mimetic fields (platforms, brands, ‘finfluencers’), and the possibility of imagining forms of reflexive or solidarity-based mimesis that interrupt cycles of permanent rivalry. The limitations of this contribution are linked to its eminently theoretical-genealogical nature. The essay does not provide systematic empirical evidence, but proposes an interpretative framework that needs to be tested through future research. Netnographies of collector communities and fan-based spaces, computational analyses of mimetic fields produced by recommendation systems, digital ethnographies of finfluencers and their audiences, and comparative studies between different national contexts could verify, articulate, and support the hypotheses put forward here. Similarly, greater attention to practices of awareness, creative appropriation and sometimes ‘mimetic sabotage’ by users would help to avoid an overly deterministic view of algorithmic power. Ultimately, reading platform capitalism in the light of Girardian theory means recognising that, at the heart of the most advanced technological transformations, there remains a profoundly human element: the desire to be seen, recognised and imitated. Platforms simply capture, modulate and capitalise on this primordial dynamic. Restoring visibility to this dimension, showing how it is structured and exploited, is the first step towards devising policies of desire – and not just data policies – that may rise to the challenges posed by influence capitalism.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.