Going off scripts: emotional labor and technoliberal managerialism

ABSTRACT

Originally conceived to highlight problematic labor relations that required emotions, the term emotional labor is now deployed to describe emotional relations that require problematic labor. In this paper, we identify how digital platforms have amplified this inverted form of emotional labor and spawned a phenomenon we term technoliberal managerialism, or the use of the connection, quantification, control, tracking, and optimization capacities of technology to manage everyday interactions. Through the analysis of viral self-help Twitter threads, a mobile application, and an algorithmic prototype we trace how the resulting habituation rewards happiness, efficiency, and uniformity at the expense of moodiness, messiness, and difference. Ultimately, we argue that going off scripts and embracing the “fuck up” can help resist technoliberalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• digital infrastructure
• mobile applications
• algorithms
• neuroqueering

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editorial team at Critical Studies in Media Communication for their thoughtful feedback. They’d also like to thank Damien Pfister and his Contemporary Rhetorical Theory seminar, participants in the 2020 UMD Graduate English Organization Conference, Aaron Zeiler, Chase Aunspach, Victoria Ledford, and Shelby Sturm for supporting this project. Any fuck ups are our own.

Notes

1 These features were available on the iPhone app when it was downloaded on January 12, 2021.

2 Twilio provides technology that facilitates communication with tens of thousands of companies including Airbnb, Lyft, and Netflix. For example, if you have used the ride sharing app Lyft, Twilio makes it possible for you and your driver to exchange messages within the app.