Emotional surveillance

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

We all know we are being surveilled 24/7. Entities like Palantir, Google, Meta, CIA,  etc., etc., you name it, we are lab rats generating income and personal info for the powers at be but now, along the lines of Brave New World, the age of emotional surveillance is being foisted on us in the way of "improving advertising revenue" and making the workplace even more positive as we speak.

The Rise of Emotional Surveillance

Companies are monitoring workers not just for productivity but for agreeability.

The good news, for me at least, is that the computer thinks I have a nice personality. According to an app called MorphCast, I was, in a recent meeting with my boss, generally “amused,” “determined,” and “interested,” though—sue me—occasionally “impatient.” MorphCast, you see, purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI. It found that my affect was “positive” and “active,” as opposed to negative and/or passive. My attention was reasonably high. Also, the AI informed me that I wear glasses—revelatory!

The bad news is that software now purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI, and it is coming to watch you. If it isn’t already: Morphcast, for example, has licensed its technology to a mental-health app, a program that monitors schoolchildren’s attention, and McDonald’s, which launched a promotional campaign in Portugal that scanned app users’ faces and offered them personalized coupons based on their (supposed) mood. It is one of many, many such companies doing similar work—the industry term is emotion AI or sometimes affective computing.

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which
the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers
control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."

...

"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."

...

"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."

...

"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."

...

"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."

...

"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."

...

"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."

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"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."

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"Stability was practically assured.”

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut