Emotional Technologies: How Techno-Capitalism Exploits Our Subjectivity

Technology is conventionally viewed as dehumanizing. Yet, as Eva Illouz shows in this concise book, technology has become uniquely emotional, continuously tapping into and eliciting a great variety of emotions. From emojis, GIFs, and likes, to influencers, meditation apps, and virtual worlds, technology increasingly mimics and extends emotional life, turning feelings into quantifiable data and yielding extraordinary profits. Techno-capitalism, Illouz argues, no longer mines the soil, but 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.

The emotionalization 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, Illouz explores the mechanisms through which the emotional self has become the main economic resource of capitalism, a world where our feelings pass through machines and are manufactured, measured, and sold by them.