Mining the mind: emotional extraction, productivity, and predictability in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

Surveying recent developments in management and work culture, computing and social media, and science and psychology, this article speculates on the concept of emotional extraction. Emotional extraction is defined in two ways. One iteration involves the transfer of emotional resources from one individual or group to another, such as that which occurs in the work of caring for others, but which also increasingly occurs in the work of producing new technology, such as emotionally aware computers. A second instance of emotional extraction entails the use of emotion knowledge – or theories about emotions, such as emotional intelligence – to generate conclusions or predictions about human behaviour. Emotional extraction in service work, management, marketing, social media, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience are discussed. ‘Mining the mind’ focuses in particular on emotional extraction that enhances both productivity and predictability, in turn tracing how emotionally extractive sites are implicated within the production and hierarchical valuation of difference – especially racial and gendered, but also neural difference – in everyday life. The article aims to offer scholars in cultural studies, as well as critical race theory, feminist theory, and critical disability studies, ways to think about this newly intensifying resource extraction and the intersections of culture, capital, and human experience that such extraction indexes and makes possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• extraction
• emotional labour
• emotional intelligence
• predictability
• productivity

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge and thank the editors of this special issue for supporting the publication of this article and Daniel Greene for his extensive comments, suggestions, and references. All errors and weaknesses are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jan M. Padios is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on the intersection of political economy, social identity and difference, and culture. She is currently working on an ethnography of customer service call centres in the Philippines.

Notes

1. On neurmorphic computing, see Lambinet (2015).

2. On the marketization of private life, see Hochschild (2013).

3. The concept of ‘dead labor’ comes from Marx (1990 [1867], ‘The limits of the working day,’ p. 342).

4. One such example is Emotient, which was recently purchased by Apple. See Winkler et al. (2016).

5. I choose to use the term ‘emotion knowledge’ instead of ‘psychology’ to point specifically to the way that various groups and institutions – not just psychologists, who in any case study more than emotions – are using and targeting emotion in various ways.

6. In ‘Big Other,’ Shoshana Zuboff identifies the contemporary obsession with data extraction and predictability of human behaviour as indicative of the evolution of market capitalism towards what she calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. The latter is defined as a ‘new form of information capitalism’ that ‘aims to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market control.’ Unlike Zuboff, I do not venture to name a new phase in capitalism; rather, I hope to reveal more of the workings of the extraction process as it relates specifically to emotions, and to extend a discussion of predictability to cases of state power and law enforcement.

7. Neural difference refers to the categorization and marking of individuals based on their place on a scale of neurological aberrance, where autism occupies one extreme of the spectrum. See various public talks and forthcoming scholarship by Jigna Desai, on the subjects of neural knowledge, difference, and citizenship, which Desai frames within feminist crip of colour critique and biopolitics.

8. By now readers may be wondering why affect and affect theory have not been explicitly folded into the framework of this critique. While my analysis has been informed by affect theory, my exclusion of concentrated references to this scholarship stems from, on one hand, the tendency of affect theorists to define affect as categorically distinct from emotion and, on the other hand, the tendency of neurological and psychological scholarship to make very little distinction between affect and emotion. In the former, emotion is not addressed, while in the latter, the term ‘affect’ seems to merely describe the states that give rise to emotions. Furthermore, the areas that I consider in the essay all target emotion specifically – that is, they are interested in feelings that have already been congealed into a specific state and labelled as such, even as scholars admit that emotion theory produces an exceedingly wide range of definitions of emotion.

9. Ahmed locates herself in this scholarly arena, which includes Butler (1997), Berlant (1997), and Brown (1995).

10. For ‘affective economies’ see Grossberg (1992, 1997) and Ahmed (2004). Andrejevic (2011) also makes a case for a cultural studies reading of Henry Jenkins’s concept of affective economics. For ‘political feelings’ see Staiger et al. (2010); Berlant (1997); and Stewart (2007). For ‘structures of feeling’, a foundational concept in cultural studies of emotion, see Williams (1975, 1979).

11. See Bollmer (2014); on the concept of neurodiversity, see Singer (19 9 8), and the online writing of Kassiane Sibley.

12. On the micro-politics of capital, see Read (2003).

13. On emotional capitalism, see Illouz (2007) and Santa Ana (2015).

14. Other topics and titles include ‘The new science of customer emotions’ (Magids et al. 2015), ‘Measuring the return on character’ (Harvard Business Review 2015), and ‘When emotional reasoning trumps IQ’ (Gilkey et al. 2010).

15. On the relationship between worker refusal and the humane workplace, see Weeks (2011, p. 106) and Ross (2009; p. 5).

16. Beyond the clearly instrumental attention to emotions in the realm of marketing is the more ephemeral circulation of what might in the idiom of the Internet be called emotional ‘content.’ I am referring here to news items and especially YouTube videos whose primary purpose seems to be the evocation of emotion or empathy by the viewer, thus speaking to the way that social media has become central to expression and circulation of emotions in the public sphere. See Benski and Fisher (2013).

17. On content moderation, see Roberts (2014) and Chen (2014). For shadow labour, see Hochschild (1983, p. 167). For digital labor and women's work, see Jarrett (2014).

18. The language of ‘work society’ comes from Weeks (2011).

19. On the mutual imbrication of blackness and surveillance, see Browne (2015).