Corporations have always sold “happiness,” realizing psychology was key to the bottom line, but they did so with some guesswork involved, hoping that small focus groups were accurate, wishing that you would look at that advertisement in that magazine. They approximated as they preyed upon vanities and weaknesses.

Once the Internet made it possible to quantify eyeballs, there was a shift toward real-time engagement of what was going on inside of minds. Apps are just a further extension of that type of measurement. Corporations don’t want to estimate anymore–they want to know. 

In Vice, Rose Bretécher interviews William Davies about The Happiness Industry, his new book about the marketing of just about every moment of our lives. An excerpt:

Vice:

What techniques and technologies does the happiness industry use to monitor our emotions?

William Davies:

There are countless new apps and gadgets—way too many to name. To give a couple of examples, there’s Affectiva, which uses a webcam to track consumers’ smiles, and Beyond Verbal, which can analyze your tone of voice on the phone. Just this week I heard that IBM are working with a startup on a tool which analyzes your text messages in order to recommend you a therapist.

Then you’ve got wristbands like Jawbones and Fitbits, which seem to suggest that there’s a scientific answer to how to live: “If you start doing this, you’ll feel better.” And I think that’s very problematic, because there are complex reasons why people behave as they do—some people aren’t simply able to just change what they do in response to data. Sometimes you’ll just go and eat a McDonald’s because you’re feeling lonely. These gadgets claim to be completely evidence-based and have no philosophy in them, and I think that’s slightly disingenuous. Clearly there’s something missing in this data-led view of life—it doesn’t touch upon the transcendent, life-changing, life-affirming forms of happiness that really don’t lend themselves to science.

Vice:

And why is data about our happiness valuable to big business and governments?

William Davies:

Businesses have been trying to predict and influence how people will behave for over a hundred years now. But in the last 20 years there has been a surge of interest in happiness and positive emotion because there’s evidence that happiness in the workplace contributes to productivity, and because stress leads to absence from work. And there’s also growing awareness in the world of marketing—which has been supported by neuroscience since the 1990s—that the best way for brands to develop consumer loyalty is to illicit a positive emotional reaction from consumers.•