10 December 2009: "Create your own HRO Post with this bloggable photo."

This post is about multitude. The text Carles has supplied for this post may disappear, consumed by its own premise, so I reproduce the salient portion below:

Since HRO has become so formulaic, I was gonna give yall an opportunity to ‘make ur own post.’ The Carles brand has been successful, embedding itself as the subconscious voice of so many people across the world. Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles. I thought I would give yall a chance to ‘get ur creativity on; this is an opportunity to construct your own HRO post.

This pseudo-democratic ploy is Carles's way of instantiating the end of democracy, and not merely because he goes on to provide the substance of the post pre-emptively, circumscribing the creative gesture he has solicited from readers. More significantly, Carles posits an audience of subjects who have merged to speak univocally rather than each in their own voice. The "formulaic" nature of Carles's discourse has provided a model through which a diverse body of individuals can unite as a "people" in the Hobbesian sense of the word.

Then Carles demands labor from readers without offering wage compensation, promising instead the uncertain reward of notoriety within the discursive space he himself controls entirely. The readers' immaterial labor serves to enhance the value of the Carles brand, to which Carles slyly begins his post with a paean.

The circuit Carles traces here is that of capital in the post-Fordist era. The culture and communications industry (represented with some irony in this depiction by Carles himself) produces the means of production for a new kind of labor force that works for no pay to produce its own notoriety, seeking its own distinction within mediatized reality to stand out from the teeming crowd of individuals. These efforts are harvested by the overarching industries and used to enhance the value of their capital. Readers become more insecure as they compete for attention; Carles becomes even more preeminent in his chosen matrix of cultural production.

So there is more than a little sarcasm in his admission that "Even though a lot of other ppl could probs write my blog, there is only 1 Carles." Carles wants to point out that "Carles" has become a corporate entity, an efficient synthesis of the immaterial labor of the cultural producers the weblog sets out to satirize. This of course is the meaning of the title Carles has chosen for his enterprise -- the "runoff" from the behavior of "hipsters" -- the value they create through their public acts of consumeption and self-fashioning -- becomes the precious fuel for the unlimited accumulation of capital under the banner of the Carles brand.