This other atmosphere: against human resources, emoji and devices

Frequently humans are invited to engage with modern visual forms: emoji, emoticons, pictograms. Some of these forms are finding their way into the workplace, understood as augmentations to workplace atmospheres. What has been called the ‘quantified workplace’ requires its workers to log their rates of stress, wellbeing and subjective sense of productivity on a scale of 1–5 or by emoji, in a context in which Human Resources (HR) professionals develop a vocabulary of Workforce Analytics, People Analytics, Human Capital Analytics or Talent Analytics, and all this in the context of managing the work environment or its atmosphere. Atmosphere is mood, a compote of emotions. Emotions are a part of a human package characterized as ‘the quantified self’, a self intertwined with – subject to but also compliant with – tracking and archiving. The logical step for managing atmospheres is to track emotions at a granular and large-scale level. Through the concept of the digital crowd, rated and self-rating, as well as emotion-tracking strategies, the human resource (as worker and consumer) engages in a new politics of the crowd, organized around what political philosopher Jodi Dean calls, affirmatively, ‘secondary visuality’, high-circulation communication fusing speech, writing and image as a new form. This is the visuality of communicative, or social media, capitalism. But to the extent that it is captured by HR, is it an exposure less to crowd-sourced democracy, and more a stage in turning the employee into an on-the-shelf item in a digital economy warehouse, assessed by Likert scales? While HR works on new atmospheres of work, what other atmospheres pervade the context of labour, and can these be deployed in the generation of other types of affect, ones that work towards the free association of labour and life?