{"id":21230,"date":"2016-05-06T10:44:58","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T14:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=21230"},"modified":"2016-05-06T11:01:14","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T15:01:14","slug":"grub-hug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/05\/06\/grub-hug\/","title":{"rendered":"Grub Hug"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Unknown\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Years ago, when I was a sales associate (fancy word for telemarketer, please don\u2019t hate me), my company sent us to a conference designed to improve sales and increase our quality of life. They put us up at a very fancy hotel\u2014probably the fanciest I have ever stayed at\u2014and promised that the trip would not only increase our success rate and commission, but also make us happier. For three days we sat through seminars and presentations that started at 7 am and ended at 6 pm. Corporate big wigs, motivational speakers, and customers all attested to the important work our sales associates did, how we were changing lives with our product, and how a positive mental attitude could help us change even more lives while making us rich. There was also a gala where we got gussied up. They gave us a few free drinks. Most people were pretty hammered.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When we got back to work, we were \u201cencouraged\u201d to take part in the computer-mediated seminar that the company had paid for; it consisted of weekly presentations from the headline speaker of the conference in conjunction with reading his book (which we were \u201cencouraged\u201d to buy) and doing activities like journaling, affirmation recording, and visualization exercises. The weirdest part? It totally worked. For about a month. Eventually our positivity soured and we were back where we started. We were, after all, telemarketers. I have wondered in the years since whether the company saw a return on their investment.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old advertising adage that sex sells. But I think a deeper truth is that happiness sells. The promise that products will improve your quality of life is fundamental to affective capitalism, and as advertising moves increasingly from billboards and magazines into our homes and pockets, we\u2019re surrounded by promises of future happiness.<\/p>\n

I love Grub Hub, but sometimes it weirds me out. When I first started using the food ordering service I was amused by the cutesy familiarity they use to update you on order statuses. It\u2019s endearing, and it\u2019s different from a lot of other similar services in so far as it\u2019s really over the top. For a while, their text messages consisted of a joke about deep-frying a crystal ball. But recently, I got this:<\/p>\n

\"ChfLGoKWkAAAfeF.jpg-large\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t say why, but I was immediately annoyed. There\u2019s too many exclamation points. There\u2019s a typo, which is not really a big deal I suppose. But it\u2019s the \u201cpretty soon\u201d that got to me. What kind of timeline is that? Grub Hub time estimates are almost always wrong, so what\u2019s stopping you from making up some ETA this time? Then, I got this:<\/p>\n

\"IMG_1462\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Really? Dreams coming true? Formatted as a book title? Look, this is too much.<\/p>\n

But I shouldn\u2019t beat up on Grub Hub too much. After all, my Birchbox subscription ships to \u201cThe Magnificent\/Majestic\/Glamorous Britney,\u201d ModCloth tells me how great my taste is when I buy\u2026 anything, and Taco Bell absolutely adores me<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2014 when Facebook released research on how it had altered users\u2019 moods, everyone was outraged. But how different is algorithmic mood manipulation from the cutesy familiarity or ego stroking and flattery that so many other companies engage in? Is it different because Facebook was deceptive? Or because it actively induced negative emotions? At the end of the day, whether it\u2019s Facebook selling more advertising or Grub Hub getting more orders, the fundamentals of this affective marketing are the same. Build positive associations with a brand in an attempt to increase profit.<\/p>\n

In The Happiness Industry<\/em>, William Davies outlines just how pervasive affective monitoring and communication is. For Enlightenment philosophers like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Bentham the primary goal of social institutions should be to improve upon the human experience as it exists in the \u201cstate of nature;\u201d that is, there should be a net gain of happiness and fulfillment that results from policy and market forces. Specifically in the case of Bentham\u2019s utilitarianism and the cost-benefit analysis of policy decisions, the role of governments and markets in regulating the pleasure-pain continuum remains prominent. According to Davies, the moral and political imperative to be happy \u201coriginates with the Enlightenment. But those who have exploited it best are those with an interest in social control, very often for private profit.\u201d<\/p>\n

As such, the inducing, measuring, and regulating of happiness is quite a weapon to wield. As Davies writes, \u201cthose with the technologies to produce the facts of happiness are in positions of considerable influence, and\u2026 the powerful are being seduced further by the promises of those technologies.\u201d Davies asks a somewhat provocative question: should we be against happiness?<\/p>\n

Recently my partner David ordered food from Grub Hub and, after about 20 minutes, received this unfortunate message:<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0327\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Aside from the gentle let down and the weird \u201cthank you bye\u201d follow up, it\u2019s a dramatically different message than the typical happy-go-lucky Grub Hub tone. Perhaps that\u2019s because this is such a grave matter that it would be inappropriate to make light of. For the record, they gave him $5 towards another purchase. Because if you can\u2019t generate customer happiness with cutesy familiarity then you can always resort to cold hard cash.<\/p>\n

How skeptical should we be with regards to services and technologies that try to induce happiness and familiarity in their customers? What meaning can we take away when Facebook, a behemoth corporation concerned primarily with advertising sales, tells us that it thought we might enjoy this memory from four years ago? Some examples are surely more insidious than others. While Grub Hub may be fairly benign, other services more heavily focused on surveillance demand greater scrutiny. For Davies, \u201cany critique of ubiquitous surveillance must now include a critique of the maximization of well-being, even at the risk of being less healthy, happy and wealthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I worked in sales, we had all kinds of tricks to put people at ease, to get them to have positive associations with us. If someone objected to the sales pitch, we\u2019d say \u201cI can appreciate that, but let me ask you\u2026\u201d and then forge ahead. We\u2019d ask about their kids, their jobs, their favorite TV shows\u2014whatever we could think of to keep them talking about themselves. People love to talk about themselves. We\u2019d make up stories whole cloth. I once told a woman my husband and I were building a house. At the time I had no husband, and definitely no house. I just wanted her to relate to me, to feel happy talking with me, and ultimately I wanted to make the sale. Maybe that\u2019s why Grub Hub\u2019s overly casual and friendly texts piss me off. They\u2019re transparent, and I know they\u2019re part of a larger game. So just bring me my sandwich. You don\u2019t have to be my friend.<\/p>\n

Britney is on Twitter<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Years ago, when I was a sales associate (fancy word for telemarketer, please don\u2019t hate me), my company sent us to a conference designed to improve sales and increase our quality of life. They put us up at a very fancy hotel\u2014probably the fanciest I have ever stayed at\u2014and promised that the trip would not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1931,"featured_media":21231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2016\/05\/Unknown.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1931"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21230"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21236,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21230\/revisions\/21236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}