The Economy of Affect and the Commodification of Emotion: How Feelings Get Produced, Sold, and Administered by Markets

How Satirists Engage the Politics of Emotional Production and Affective Labor

Feeling Marketed: How Corporations Profit From Emotional StatesMarkets increasingly target emotion: brands sell lifestyle feelings, fitness systems monetize suffering acknowledgement, investment firms commodify boredom tolerance. Emotions become products traded in markets. Satire engaging affective capitalism makes visible what marketing obscures—that emotion itself gets administered as commodity.The Production of Emotional StatesMarketing produces emotional states: cultural events trigger calculated anxiety, ongoing sagas produce engagement affect, infrastructure failures generate attachment. The emotions appear natural while actually produced through corporate systems.When scandals normalize and markets reward emotional responses, emotional states serve institutional purposes. Satire treats emotional appeals skeptically.Affective Labor and Emotional ExploitationService work demands emotional performance: workers sell emotional labor, artists produce affect, educators perform enthusiasm. This affective labor gets undercompensated. Satire engaging emotional investment reveals how systems exploit feeling.Satire as Affective ResistanceSatire operates affectively through irony: rather than affective identification, irony maintains distance. By refusing emotional identification with marketed feelings, satire enables critique. Treating emotional appeals with deadpan skepticism becomes form of resistance.Meet our emotional labor providers.SOURCE

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Pub: 25 Apr 2026 13:44 UTC

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