Emotions, education, and health become profitable once formally subsumed by capital.

Evidence

There is nothing intrinsic that links, say, having facial expressions to capitalism. But the moment facial-recognition software identifies your feelings to deliver advertising that supposedly will make you “happy,” your emotions have been formally subsumed by capital, transformed from a social, communicative relation into one that generates economic value. There is nothing intrinsic to, say, education that would make it mesh with the extraction of surplus value—or, for that matter, being healthy. Yet both things, today, generate surplus value for someone. Education has become an industry; medicine and wellness are big businesses. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 103

Categorization

• DEFINE: Formal subsumption is explained as the conversion of noncapitalist relations into value-generating ones.
• XREF: Directly the mechanism by which a person’s persona — their face, emotions, life — becomes the commodity the influencer sells; connects to the Corpocene reading goal. — connects to: Under knowledge capitalism, idleness gets absorbed into producing the person as Capital. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 115; Capital privatizes stress as illness then profits from treating it — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1500
• QUESTION: Given the reader’s labor-theory-of-value goal: what exactly is the commodity and who realizes the surplus when emotions are subsumed? Worth pressing.