The standard means of telling a group or individual’s stance in a market is by monitoring and analyzing responses to price change. What Will Davies is suggesting in his book is that soon, with the growth of wearable technology and real-time emotional analysis through facial scanning, people’s intentions, wants, and sentiments will be able to be measured, quantified, and used to replace the litmus test of years prior. Emotion and feeling are being transmogrified from personal experiences into collectible and exploitable data which can then be used to cater specific advertising to people whose emotional data matches parameters determined by businesses.
He goes on to state than businesses are beginning to respond to workplace dissatisfaction and unhappiness, not by changing the way the business is run day to day, but instead by subtly changing employees’ perceptions of their environment so that they are either more willing to accept an unsatisfactory atmosphere or just less aware that things are unsatisfactory in the first place. Not to be overly dramatic, but in a lot of ways this reminds me of Ingsoc in 1984; people are only happy because they are told they should be. That, coupled with the idea of the “womb fantasy” of a smart city, shows a potential move towards the complete sterilization and emotional disconnect of human civilization in the pursuit of happiness. So, let’s try to keep things from spiraling too quickly.
Antoine Bolden
Link to the video: http://www.c-span.org/video/?326601-1/book-discussion-happiness-industry
The Cabinet of Doctor Costanza 