Along such lines, in Hacking H(app)iness: Why Your Personal Data Counts and How Tracking It Can Change the World, journalist and social media guru John C. Havens reports enthusiastically on a variety of monitoring and surveillance devices, such as fitness activity trackers, that offer increasingly refined bits of information for users to ponder as they craft their lives. Some of these devices track emotional states:

 

a research team at the University of Cambridge built in Emotion Sense for Android, an app that lets you "explore how your mood relates to the data your smart phone can invisibly capture as you carry it throughout the day." Using the highly articulated microphone and an Android phone, the app identifies multiple emotional states from users based on the inflections of their voices. (xxvi)

 

We like the verbal slippage latent in “Emotion Sense”—from sense to cents—for surely part of the attraction of all of these technologies is “optimization” toward increased productivity. You become more efficient, your employer becomes more efficient, the economy becomes more efficient, and more wealth trickles down and out to all. At least that is the narrative we are invited to believe, to participate in, and to coauthor with those around us.

 

But we want to go further. We question this story.