When the newly appointed executive director of the LIFE360 tracking application recently described the company as part of the “anxiety economy”, it sounded like a disposable phrase. But he was also surprisingly sincere.
The application, which allows families to track the whereabouts of their children (or parents) in real time, is in one in ten phones in the US, according to some reports. What began as a niche product has become part of the daily life of many homes.
Life360, together with Snapchat Snap Map and Find My Friends of Apple (or Stalk My Friends, as it is called in my family) is promoted as a tool for safety and tranquility.
But the fact that its executive director felt comfortable by explicitly linking the application with anxiety and its commercial exploitation highlights a much larger cultural phenomenon: we exist more and more in a world where our concern, surveillance and even our fault are used for profit.
Technology can take advantage of anxiety
From an evolutionary perspective, anxiety is mainly good. He evolved to prepare for potential threats, things like a whisper in the grass that keeps us awake at night. This bias means that negative or threatening information is processed easier and quickly.
The difficulty is that the world we live is now very different from that of the savanna. The same surveillance that once protected us from predators now keeps us updating applications, moving through the news and reviewing digital maps to reassure us.
But technology is not neutral. In fact, it can be used to amplify this instinct. A tracking application like Life360 sells you peace of mind, but you can also create new anxieties. If your child’s location point stops for ten minutes, you may feel forced to verify, call or worry. The tranquility is real, but so is restlessness.
The illusion of control offered by these products gives us the feeling that monitoring reduces risk, when it can actually serve to increase our technology dependence. In fact, some investigations suggest that the more we try to suppress anxiety, the worse it becomes.
Anxiety is often presented as a vague concern. The genius of marketing lies in focusing that concern; For example, it is possible that your home is not safe, that your child is not learning enough or that your skin is not radiant enough. Once the concern is named, a product can be offered as a solution. In the contemporary and commercial world, consumer products become the “arrangements” we use to defend ourselves from this constant instability.
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Marketing ploy of the “guilty mother”
The raising of children is an area of life that marketing specialists have been able to exploit with products to relieve and reinforce those fears. The trope of the “guilty mother” captures the way marketing explodes the gap between the real self (“I cannot always be there for my son”) and the self should/ideal (“a good mother must always know and protect”).
This gap produces guilt, which ultimately creates demand for products such as babies monitors, organic refrigeries and monitoring applications. And although relief is genuine, it is temporary, because underlying self -discrepancy remains.
This helps to explain why the events rarely calm us. Statistically, most children are safer today than at almost any other time in history with lower mortality rates, less violence and better medical attention. However, we are attracted to extreme and notable events, a bias that makes threats stand out more vividly than the most silent and ordinary safety evidence. And because parents do not feel safer, marketing specialists can take advantage of this gap between facts and feelings.
That is why calling it an “anxiety economy” is not a hyperbole. Economies arise when a resource can be cultivated, extracted, exchanged and climbing. Companies identify new triggers of anxiety, create tools to handle them and maintain the discomfort they claim to solve.
Then, algorithms capitalize this fear by testing millions of small interventions to determine what notifications, indications and stories more effectively press our emotional buttons. By accepting the terms and conditions, we become part of a broader experiment of corporate consumer behavior.
The concern with these applications is not that they are intrinsically bad. In fact, they can provide and provide a certain degree of comfort. However, the deepest problem is when anxiety exploitation is normalized. Once we believe in the need to monitor, it becomes difficult to resist. These convictions are initially framed through the commercial lens built around the personal choice, but they are filtered into the daily routines and eventually become part of the economy.
So, although the executive director of Life360 may have been unusually careless, her statement raises a deeper question: do we want a society that markets fear? Anxiety is a universal human emotion, but choosing to exploit it for profits is completely cultural.
Markets don’t care about us as people do. When even the financial press casually describes investment in a company like Life360 as a “lucrative roller coaster”, it is worth stopping to wonder if we want markets and investment economies that reward the monetization of anxiety.
*Paul Harrison is director of the Master’s Program in Business Administration (MBA) and co -director of the Better Consumption Laboratory at the University of Deakin.
This article was originally published in The Conversation/Reuters
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