Emotions, education, and health become surplus value through formal subsumption

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. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 103

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete working examples of formal subsumption — the single load-bearing concept connecting pre-capitalist relations to influencer economics.
• XREF: connects to: Use-value is a purely formal, historically produced concept within political economy — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1285; The positive-normative split is a vehicle for exporting disciplinary values — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 582