Everywhere we look, we see big tech platforms sold through the promise of happiness and positivity, from Facebook’s iconic thumbs up symbol (and former company logo) to Amazon’s smile arrow (“Warning: contents may cause happiness"). Positivity is not simply a marketing strategy; it is the corporate worldview built into the very infrastructure of social media (think “like” and “love” buttons, smiley reaction emojis). This talk will examine how the rhetoric and semiotics of positivity have been wielded to neutralize critique, in particular anti-capitalist and environmental resistance. Ultimately, it will ponder how tech optimism is an ideology of capitalist growth that has facilitated a trend toward “indifferent positivity,” the passive acceptance of corporate media spin--dire news in a moment when climate action has never been more urgent.
Anna Watkins Fisher is a cultural and media theorist, whose work focuses on the politics and aesthetics of resistance in contemporary visual and digital culture. She is the author The Play in the System (Duke U Press, 2020) and Safety Orange (U Minnesota Press, 2021); co-author with Precarity Lab of Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020); and co-editor with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2nd edition, 2015). Her current book project, Yes Machine: Relentless Positivity at the End of the World, explores how the ability to say "no" is being designed out of our everyday devices and infrastructures, as ceaseless engagement and energy use become the unquestioned default.
