CONCEPT
Emotional Technologies
Illouz’s analytical category for digital platforms and AI systems that, by design, continuously elicit genuine feelings, convert those feelings into data, and harvest them as productive fuel—collapsing the gap between authentic emotional experience and economic function that previous technologies of
emotional capitalism could only narrow.
Emotional technologies are the latest and most advanced chapter in the century-long development of
emotional capitalism—the cultural formation in which emotional and economic logic have become so thoroughly interpenetrating that genuine feeling and productive function are no longer distinguishable from inside the experience. Where earlier technologies of emotional management—the human resources department, the self-help book, the corporate mindfulness program, the dating platform—required some mediating space between the emotion and its productive function, emotional technologies eliminate that space. When a builder works with
Claude and tears up at prose that gave form to a shadow shape she had been carrying for years, the joy is simultaneously the emotional experience and the productive event: the carried-forward thought becomes an output, the output serves the project, the project serves the market, and the market is present in the moment of tears rather than downstream of it.
Illouz's concept, developed in her