Suzanne Harrington: Private human moments now fair game online

Our emotions have made a tiny number of terrible tech lords terribly rich. File picture

In 2021, the model Bella Hadid posted a series of pictures of herself crying. She said it was because she was tired of posting perfection and wanted to post some authenticity instead, so she shared crying images to her millions of Instagram followers.

And lo, the crying selfie became a thing. An emotion traditionally expressed while locked in the loo with your fist in your mouth became mainstream shareable. Ugly crying — that is, crying using your whole face, rather than prettily dripping curated tears — took things a step further. 

Keen to participate in (and profit from) the attention economy, people started posting themselves ugly crying post break-up, the emotional equivalent of filming yourself naked in the frozen peas aisle in Tesco.

“The public exhibition of one’s tears is a dramatic breach of accepted norms about crying,” writes Eva Illouz, in her small, punchy book Emotional Technologies. “Technology has the power to induce new emotional behaviours.” Not half.

In 2004, and again in 2007, something else traditionally done behind closed doors — something way more fun than crying — launched the careers of two privileged but relatively unknown women. 

The Paris Hilton sex tape, followed by the sex tape of her former assistant, Kim Kardashian. Both women became stratospherically famous billionaires.

Hilton reverse-engineered celebrity by becoming famous first, then harnessing that fame to launch a global industry of branded commodities — pots, pans, perfumes...Kardashian did the same, her social media sex tape bypassing traditional advertising.

Some might say that a private activity — or rather the internet watching them engaged in a private activity — was the catalyst that catapulted the two women into our consciousness. 

They monetised our lust.

More recently, the name Nicola Peltz became instantly recognisable not from a sex tape with her husband, the elephant photographer Brooklyn Beckham, but for something else traditionally done behind closed doors — a massive inter-family bust-up. Like Hilton, Peltz was a formerly unknown heiress — not anymore.

Crying, shagging, fighting — three emotive human activities traditionally done in private — are now fair digital games to generate likes, shares, heart emojis, rage emojis, sad face emojis. Tech, argues Illouz, mines our emotions the way old-school industry mined the soil, to extract and transform for profit. 

Our emotions are now commodities, to be harvested, manipulated, and sold back to us — with social networks the new pipelines: “Techno capitalism extracts value from the self to be consumed by the self itself.” A kind of ouroboros with a ring light.

In tandem, we have developed a viable digital language with its own visual vocabulary that bypasses traditional literacy — the emoji. Who doesn’t love an emoji? Smiley face! 

We use billions of them each day to convey emotion far more quickly than boring old words, bridging the gap between writing and speaking. Instant, simplistic, immediate. Thumbs up, heart emoji. Angry face. Shrug.

It’s not uncommon for Gen Z, who view emojis the same way their parents and grandparents view actual words, to use emojis to dump someone. Some 32% have admitted to this, according to Adobe research. (Which emoji though? The dumpster truck? Waving? Running?)

Our emotions have made a tiny number of terrible tech lords terribly rich. 

Rage and indignation, hoovered up by digital pipelines, then manipulated and redistributed, have resulted in the extraordinary phenomenon of people with four teeth defending people with four yachts. 

This has become as commonplace as oversharing what has traditionally been unshareable. Pretty sure this wasn’t Tim Berners-Lee’s vision when he was dreaming up the internet four short decades ago. Scream emoji.