Catherine Lacey's new New Yorker story is titled 'Rate Your Happiness'. The conceit, per Lacey in her author discussion, is how natural it is to fail to decide, to remain in meaningless motion. Read it next to Rana el Kaliouby's career: the founder of Affectiva built a company that literally rates human emotion in real time, using facial recognition to quantify what Lacey's protagonist cannot name. The fiction and the startup are about the same thing. One finds it tragic. The other found a market.
Emotion as Interface: From Affectiva to the Echo
The Verge's deep history of the Amazon Echo reminds us that Jeff Bezos's original vision was a voice computer that could anticipate human needs before they were articulated. That is, a device for reading the emotional state of a household and responding to it. Affectiva trained on faces. Alexa trained on voice. The underlying project is identical: to turn subjective experience into a legible data stream. Ben Lerner, in his New Yorker interview this week, argues that smartphones 'charge the air around us' and that fiction can record what transcripts cannot. He means interiority. He means exactly what emotion AI is trying to capture and exactly what it keeps missing.
The Attention Economy's Latest Meter
The Atlantic's piece on hype aversion describes people who resist joining cultural consensus as a form of identity protection. 'Rate Your Happiness' as a title captures this perfectly: the moment you are asked to score your inner life, the score replaces the experience. TurboFund's founding thesis is that better signal filtering beats volume, which is the same argument Lacey is making about consciousness: less scoring, more attending. A 2023 paper in Psychological Science by Dunn and colleagues found that rating emotional experiences in real time consistently reduces the subjective intensity of those experiences. The meter doesn't measure happiness. It diminishes it.