The Happiness Industry Read online

  If happiness resides in discovering relationships which are less ego-oriented, less purely hedonistic, than those which an individualistic society offers, then Facebook and similar forms of social media are rarely a recipe for happiness. It is true that there are specific uses of social media which lend themselves towards stronger, more fulfilling social relations. One study of Facebook use distinguishes between a type of ‘broadcast-and-consume’ model of usage (in which individuals are either on display, or watching others on display) which leads to greater feelings of isolation, and a more email-based usage, which can lead to cohesion through dialogue.24 A group of positive psychologists has drawn on their own evidence of what types of social relations lead to greater happiness, to create a new social media platform, ‘Happier’, designed around expressions of gratitude and generosity, which are recognized to be critical ingredients of mental well-being.

  What is left unquestioned by the science of happiness and any social media innovations that may spin off from it is the social logic in which relationships are there to be created, invested in and – potentially – abandoned, in pursuit of psychological optimization. The darker implication of strategically pursuing happiness via relationships is that the relationship is only as good as the psychic value or kick that it delivers. ‘Friend rosters’ may need to be ‘balanced’, if it turns out that one’s friends aren’t spreading enough pleasure or happiness. This logic undoubtedly has a hedonistic variant that may spiral into social addiction and narcissism, and a more Zen-like holistic version, which enjoys longer time horizons and fewer ups and downs. But the social serves an almost identical purpose in each case.

  Neoliberal socialism

  Our society is excessively individualistic. Markets reduce everything to a question of individual calculation and selfishness. We have become obsessed with money and acquisition at the expense of our social relationships and our own human fulfilment. Capitalism spreads a plague of materialism, which undermines our connectedness, leaving many of us isolated and lonely. Unless we can rediscover the art of sharing, our society will fragment altogether, making trust impossible. Unless we can recover the values associated with friendship and altruism, we will descend into a state of nihilistic ennui.

  These types of claim have animated various critiques of capitalism and markets for centuries. They have often provided the basis of arguments for political and economic reform, whether moderate attempts to restrain the reach of markets, or more wholesale demands to overhaul the capitalist system. Today, the same types of lament can be heard, but from some very different sources. Now, the gurus of marketing, self-help, behavioural economics, social media and management are first in line to attack the individualistic and materialist assumptions of the marketplace. But all they’re offering instead is a marginally different theory of individual psychology and behaviour.

  The depressed and the lonely, who have entered the purview of policy-making now that their problems have become visible to doctors and neuroscientists, exhibit much that has gone wrong under the neoliberal model of capitalism. Individuals want to escape relentless self-reliance and self-reflection. On this, the positive psychologists have a very clear understanding of the malaise of extreme individualism, which locks individuals into introverted, anxious questioning of their own worth relative to others. Their recommended therapy is for people to get out of themselves and immerse themselves in relationships with others. But in reducing the idea of society to the logic of psychology, the happiness gurus follow the same logic as Jacob Moreno, behavioural economics and Facebook. This means that the ‘social’ is an instrument for one’s own medical, emotional or monetary gain. The vicious circle of self-reflection and self-improvement continues.

  How would one break out of this trap? In some ways, the example of ‘social prescribing’ is an enticing one. While it starts from a utilitarian premise, that individuals can improve their well-being through joining associations and working collaboratively, it also points towards the institutions to make this happen, and not simply more cognitive tips and nudges. If people have become locked in themselves, gazing enviously at others, this poses questions that need institutional, political, collective answers. It cannot be alleviated simply with psychological appeals to the social, which can exacerbate the very problems they aim to alleviate, once combined with digital media and the egocentric model of connectivity which those media facilitate. There is a crucial question of how businesses, markets, policies, laws, political participation might be designed differently to sustain meaningful social relationships, but it is virtually never confronted by the doyens of ‘social’ capitalism.

  What we encounter in the current business, media and policy euphoria for being social is what might be called ‘neoliberal socialism’. Sharing is preferable to selling, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the financial interests of dominant corporations. Appealing to people’s moral and altruistic sense becomes the best way of nudging them into line with agendas that they had no say over. Brands and behaviours can be unleashed as social contagions, without money ever changing hands. Empathy and relationships are celebrated, but only as particular habits that happy individuals have learnt to practise. Everything that was once external to economic logic, such as friendship, is quietly brought within it; what was once the enemy of utilitarian logic, namely moral principle, is instrumentalized for utilitarian ends.

  The logic of neoliberalism, stating that ‘winners’ deserve whatever prizes they can grab, risks usurping the faint glimpse of social reform contained within this agenda. The ‘social neuroscience’ of Matt Lieberman, Paul Zak and others may prove most decisive here, because it offers a firm physiological basis on which to analyse social behaviour as a component of health, happiness and wealth. Focused resolutely on the individual brain and body, this science clearly offers as much – and probably more – to the powerful and rich as it does to the lonely and marginalized. Once social relationships can be viewed as medical and biological properties of the human body, they can become dragged into the limitless pursuit of self-optimization that counts for happiness in the age of neoliberalism.

  It is not very long since the internet offered hope for different forms of organization altogether. As the cultural and political theorist Jeremy Gilbert has argued, we should remember that it was only a few years ago that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was completely defeated in its efforts to turn Myspace into a profitable entity.25 The tension between the logic of the open network and the logic of private investment could not be resolved, and Murdoch lost half a billion dollars. Facebook has had to go to great lengths to ensure that the same mistakes are not made, in particular, anchoring online identities in ‘real’ offline identities, and tailoring its design around the interests of marketers and market researchers. Perhaps it is too early to say that it has succeeded. Resistance to Facebook’s techniques of psychological control gave rise to Ello, a social media platform with no immediately apparent commercial logic, and which includes the right to anonymity. Even if Ello turned out to be a false dawn, it at least highlighted the extent of public dissatisfaction with social networks that are analysed and manipulated for the benefit of marketers.

  The reduction of social life to psychology, as performed by Jacob Moreno and behavioural economists, or to physiology as achieved by social neuroscience, is not necessarily irreversible either. Karl Marx believed that by bringing workers together in the factory and forcing them to work together, capitalism was creating the very class formation that would eventually overwhelm it. This was despite the ‘bourgeois ideology’ which stressed the primacy of individuals transacting in a marketplace. Similarly, individuals today may be brought together for their own mental and physical health, or for their own private hedonistic kicks; but social congregations can develop their own logic, which is not reducible to that of individual well-being or pleasure. This is the hope that currently lies dormant in this new, neoliberal socialism.

  7

  Living in the Lab


  Business ideas and practices do not simply spread of their own accord, not even when they appear to yield clear profits. They need pushing. Sometimes they need cultural and political barriers to be forcefully broken down before they are later adopted, until eventually they come to appear entirely natural. The idea of ‘scientific advertising’, pioneered in the 1920s by the firm James Walter Thompson (JWT), with support from John B. Watson, is a case in point.

  JWT were the first of the large Madison Avenue firms to believe that advertising could target consumers scientifically thanks to psychological profiling techniques, such as surveys. They believed individuals could be influenced through such techniques to make purchases, even against their own better rationality. Today, the notion that advertising relies on detailed psychological insights into our intimate emotions and behaviours seems quite obvious. But its journey from Madison Avenue in the mid 1920s to the status of global common sense was not straight-forward.

  JWT would not have succeeded in exporting scientific advertising around the world had it not been for the contract they won with General Motors (GM) in 1927.1 By this time GM already had a powerful international presence, with production plants scattered across Europe. The deal that JWT struck with GM was that they would open an office in every country where GM was already located, so as to furnish the car giant with local marketing expertise. In return GM would grant JWT an exclusive account for all of its markets around the world. In 1927 alone, JWT opened offices in six European countries. Over the next four years, it would open further offices in India, South Africa, Australia, Canada and Japan. Thanks to the security offered by its corporate behemoth of a patron, JWT became an international player, and its particular style of marketing expertise went global. The capacity of US businesses to export to global markets, which surged after World War Two, was greatly aided by the fact that such networks of business intelligence had already permeated much of the capitalist world. Knowledge of foreign consumers was already on hand.

  Following the acquisition of the GM contract, JWT set about accumulating consumer insight on an unprecedented scale. In less than eighteen months, over 44,000 interviews were done around the world, many in relation to cars, but also on topics such as food and toiletry consumption.2 This was the most ambitious project of mass psychological profiling ever attempted. A detailed map of global consumer tastes was being built up from scratch. And yet this was not achieved without encountering some resistance.

  JWT researchers quickly discovered that their techniques were not widely understood or appreciated beyond their home market. The level of consumer intimacy that they were seeking was often simply refused. In Britain, several researchers were arrested for conducting door-to-door surveys.3 Another British interviewer found the job of consumer profiling so difficult that he was reduced to chasing people down the street shouting questions at them. A researcher conducting surveys in flats in Copenhagen in 1927 was met with such hostility that one resident threw him down a flight of stairs. And another, also in Copenhagen, was arrested for trying to get into people’s homes by impersonating an inspection officer. The German Automobile Manufacturer’s Association threatened to sue JWT for ‘business espionage’.

  The globalization of consumer intelligence required a combination of luck, guile and brute force. The challenge that JWT had set itself was deeply problematic. It wasn’t simply to observe people in public or invite public opinions, as magazines had been doing for some time. It was to acquire a new level of intimacy with the consumer, which often meant observing the housewife in her home. Researchers didn’t only want to know what these people thought or said about certain products, they also wanted to see the products in the home, watch how the consumer behaved. This knowledge could only be acquired through a degree of snooping around and asking somewhat personal questions.

  The story of JWT’s painful arrival in Europe points towards one of the gravest challenges that confronts the project of mass psychological measurement: how does one get ordinary people to cooperate? There is a political dimension to any social science, whereby the researcher must either negotiate with their research subjects in the hope of winning their consent, or else they must use some degree of force and privilege to oblige people to be studied and measured. Either that, or they operate in a more clandestine fashion.

  When Wilhelm Wundt established his psychology laboratory in Leipzig, he used his own students and assistants as the focus of his experiments. Their full consent was deemed necessary for the type of science he was seeking to carry out. More commonly today, psychologists offer monetary incentives to their research subjects, who are typically hard-up students from other disciplines. For a counter-example, consider the history of statistics, which (as the word indicates) has always been intimately entangled with the violent power of states in order to ensure that the population is measured accurately and objectively. States are able to do what JWT initially struggled to do in observing people en masse. Similarly, Frederick Taylor was dependent on his aristocratic connections in order to peer inside numerous Philadelphia workplaces during the 1870s and 1880s.

  The term ‘data’ derives from the Latin, datum, which literally means ‘that which is given’. It is often an outrageous lie. The data gathered by surveys and psychological experiments is scarcely ever just given. It is either seized through force of surveillance, thanks to some power inequality, or it is given in exchange for something else, such as a monetary reward or a chance to win a free iPad. Often, it is collected in a clandestine way, like the one-way mirrors through which focus groups are observed. In social sciences such as anthropology, the terms on which data is gained (in that case, through prolonged observation and participation) are a matter of constant reflection. But in the behavioural sciences, the innocent term ‘data’ usefully conceals a huge apparatus of power through which people can be studied, watched, measured and traced, with or without their consent.

  Evidently, this political dimension was still visible in the 1920s, when JWT were expanding oversees. In the years since, however, it has receded from view. Questions of what people think or feel, how they intend to vote, how they perceive certain brands, have become simple matters of fact. This is no less true of happiness. Gallup now surveys one thousand American adults on their happiness and well-being every single day, allowing them to trace public mood in great detail, from one day to the next. We are now so familiar with the idea that powerful institutions want to know what we’re feeling and thinking that it no longer appears as a political issue. But possibilities for psychological and behavioural data are heavily shaped by the power structures which facilitate them. The current explosion in happiness and well-being data is really an effect of new technologies and practices of surveillance. In turn, these depend on pre-existing power inequalities.

  Building the new laboratory

  In 2012, Harvard Business Review declared that ‘data scientist’ would be the ‘sexiest job of the twenty-first century’.4 We live during a time of tremendous optimism regarding the possibilities for data collection and analysis that is refuelling the behaviourist and utilitarian ambition to manage society purely through careful scientific observation of mind, body and brain. Whenever a behavioural economist or happiness guru stands up and declares that finally we can access the secrets of human motivation and satisfaction, they are implicitly referring to a number of technological and cultural changes which have transformed opportunities for psychological surveillance. Three in particular are worth highlighting.

  Firstly, there is the much-celebrated rise of ‘big data’.5 As our various everyday transactions with retailers, health-care providers, the urban environment, governments and each other become digitized, so they produce vast archival records that can be ‘mined’ with sufficient technological capability. Much of this data is viewed as a prized possession by the companies that acquire it, who believe that it holds untold riches for those wanting to predict how people will behave in future. Many, such as Facebook, are in
clined to keep it private, such that they can conduct analysis of it for their own purposes, or sell it on to market research companies.

  In other circumstances, this data is being ‘opened up’ on the basis that it is a public good. After all, we the public created it by swiping our smart cards, visiting websites, tweeting our thoughts, and so on. Big data should therefore be something available to all of us to analyse. What this more liberal approach tends to ignore is the fact that, even where data is being opened up, the tools to analyse it are not. As the ‘smart cities’ analyst Anthony Townsend has pointed out with regard to New York City’s open data regulations, they judiciously leave out the algorithms which are used by e-government contractors to analyse the data.6 While the liberal left continues to worry about the privatization of knowledge as enacted by intellectual property rights, a new problem of the privatization of theory has arisen, whereby algorithms which spot patterns and trends are shrouded in commercial secrecy. Entire businesses are now built on the capacity to interpret and make connections within big data.

  The second development is one that can only be truly understood in cultural terms. To put it simply, the spread of narcissism has been harnessed as research opportunity. When JWT first sought to profile European consumers in the 1920s, this was experienced as an invasion of privacy, as indeed it was. More recently, tolerance for surveys has fallen all over again, though more out of impatience on the part of potential participants than anything else.7 People simply cannot be bothered to share details of what they like, think or want with researchers holding clipboards any more. But when Facebook asks its one billion users that faux-innocent question ‘What’s on your mind?’, we pour our thoughts, tastes, likes, desires and opinions into the company’s massive databank without a further thought.