The Happiness Industry by William Davies

its own right. The ‘quantified self’ movement, in which individuals measure and report on various aspects of their private lives – from their diets, to their moods, to their sex lives – began as an experimental group of software developers and artists. But it unearthed a surprising enthusiasm for self-surveillance that market researchers and behavioural scientists have carefully noted. Companies such as Nike are now exploring ways in which health and fitness products can be sold alongside quantified self apps, which will allow individuals to make constant reports of their behaviour (such as jogging), generating new data sets for the company in the process.
    There is a third development, the political and philosophical implications of which are potentially the most radical of all. This concerns the capability to ‘teach’ computers how to interpret human behaviour in terms of the emotions that are conveyed. For example, the field of ‘sentiment analysis’ involves the design of algorithms to interpret the sentiment that is expressed in a given sentence, for example, a single tweet. The MIT Affective Computing research centre is dedicated to exploring new ways in which computers might read people’s moods through evaluating their facial expressions, or might carry out ‘emotionallyintelligent’ conversations with people, to provide them with therapeutic support or friendship.
    Ways of reading an individual’s mood, through tracking his body, face and behaviour, are now expanding rapidly. Computer programmes designed to influence our feelings, once they have been gauged, are another way in which emotions and technology are becoming synched with each other. Already, computerized cognitive behavioural therapy is available thanks to software packages such as Beating the Blues and FearFighter. As affective computing advances, the capabilities of computers to judge and influence our feelings will grow.
    Facial scanning technologies hold out great promise for marketers and advertisers wanting to acquire an ‘objective’ grasp of human emotion. These are beginning to move beyond the limited realms of computing or psychology labs and permeate day-to-day life. The supermarket chain Tesco has already trialled technologies which advertise different products at different individuals, depending on what moods their faces are communicating. 8 Cameras can be used to recognize the faces of unique consumers in the street and market products at them based on their previous shopping behaviours. 9 But this may be just the beginning. One of the leading developers of face-reading software has piloted the technology in classrooms, to identify whether a student is bored or focused. 10
    The combination of big data, the narcissistic sharing of private feelings and thoughts, and more emotionally intelligent computers opens up possibilities for psychological tracking that Bentham and Watson could never have dreamed of. Add in smartphones and you have an extraordinary apparatus of data gathering, the like of which was previously only plausible within university laboratories or particularly high-surveillanceinstitutions such as prisons. The political, technological and cultural limits to psychological surveillance are dissolving. The great virtue of the market, for neoliberals such as the Chicago School, was that it acted as a constant survey of consumer preferences which extended across society. But mass digitization and data analytics now offer a rival mode of psychological audit that potentially extends even further, engulfing personal relations and feelings which markets do not ordinarily reach.
    In moving beyond survey techniques, researchers believe that they can now circumvent the quasi-democratic, political aspect of finding out what people value, but without simply depending on the market either. By analysing tweets, online behaviour or facial expressions in a largely clandestine fashion, a