For most of human history, happiness was a personal or familial matter. But new technology changed that for good — although not necessarily for the better. The rise of social media, sentiment analysis, artificial intelligence, and biometrics have turned happiness into its own metric — one that obsesses over nations, businesses, marketers. And then there’s Will Davies, who does not approve of this new faux-happiness economy. A senior lecturer at the University of London, Davies is the author of The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, a critical history of efforts to quantify and manipulate happiness, which reads a bit like a call to arms.
What concerns Davies is the historical anomaly of engineered happiness, and the reason it concerns him is that it’s disingenuous: an attempt to leverage conviviality and positivity into productivity.
