LRB Winter Lectures:
William Davies: The Reaction Economy

Reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – are the main currency of the digital public sphere. Ubiquitous surveillance and smartphones have made the spontaneous reaction a thing to be cultivated, collected and stored. How did we come to endow reaction with such significance, and what might an escape from the reaction economy look like?

William Davies, a sociologist and political economist, teaches at Goldsmiths and has written extensively on subjects such as neoliberalism and the ‘happiness industry’. This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain includes several of his essays for the London Review of Books.