Emotional Technologies

Technology is conventionally viewed as dehumanizing. Yet, as this concise book shows, it has become uniquely emotional, continuously tapping into and eliciting a great variety of emotions. From emojis, GIFs, likes, influencers, meditation apps and virtual worlds, technology increasingly mimics and extends emotional life, turning feelings into quantifiable data and yielding extraordinary profits. Techno-capitalism, Eva Illouz argues, no longer mines the soil by extracts value from the self and subjectivity, transforming emotional energy into capital. This machinic intimacy between humans and technology integrates economy, culture and psychology into one single matrix, making emotions into the new economic pipelines of techno-capitalism. These claims are backed by economic data that reveal the extraordinary profitability of emotions.

The emotionalism of technology has profound effects: the loss of experience, loneliness crowded with vicarious interactions and leisure, and the replacement of reality by the performance of authenticity. Through a variety of examples - social media, gaming, and TV series like Black Mirror - Illouz explores the mechanisms through which the emotional self has become the main economic resource of capitalism, a world where out feelings pass through machines and are manufactured, measured and sold by them.