When Lauren Antonoff, the newly appointed CEO of the Life360 tracking app, recently described the company as part of the “anxiety economy,” it sounded like a phrase that didn’t make sense. But it was also surprisingly honest.
The app, which allows families to track the movements of children (or their parents) in real time, is on one in ten phones in the US, according to some reports. What started as a specialized product has become part of daily life for many households.
Life360, along with Snapchat’s Snap Map and Apple’s Find My Friends (or Stalk My Friends as it’s called in my family) is promoted as a tool for safety and peace of mind.
But the fact that Life360’s CEO had the audacity to explicitly link the app to anxiety and profit from it highlights a much larger cultural phenomenon: we increasingly live in a world where our anxiety, our vigilance, even our guilt, generate business and commercial gains.
Thus began an article in the establishment Asia Times on September 17, 2025, written by Paul Harrison, an Australian academic. Someone might comment: “Are you going to drive us crazy, Professor? Anxiety generates business and commercial profits NOW? And what have pharmaceutical companies been selling all these years? Not tranquilizers? They sell tissues?”
Ironic, but if anxieties are offered for profit, tested and guaranteed by pharmaceutical companies, there’s always the possibility of building one more floor. This time, a digital profit floor. On this floor, “anxieties” and “digitization” are entangled in a dialectic analogous to that of chemistry—but in a more aggressive way. While pills are for individual/personal use, “positioning” concerns the way someone controls someone else—because they are anxious about their fate or, simply, their position.
Anxiety or even fear of a threat could be considered something instinctively animal – provided that the threat is as specific as possible. Indeed, in the long pre-cultural history of our species, apart from seeing the threat right in front of him or smelling it in the nearby air, even a suspicious sound could mean alarm. This readiness (which is not “anxious” in the way we know…) can still be distinguished today in domestic animals – certainly in those that haven’t become… furniture.
We inherited this process because our brain’s core remains animalistic and pre-cultural. However, the creation of organized societies gradually reduced these “wild” threats for which it was necessary to perceive any specific threat. Hence, also the manifestations of anxiety. Only to ultimately be replaced, more and more intensively in “mature capitalism,” the specific from the abstract. And modern capitalist societies are the proof of this shift: the safer they become practically, the more anxious they grow. Against every kind of abstract risk.
The neoliberal phase of capitalism, primarily in the so-called “West,” not only theorized but essentially institutionalized anxiety as a method of self-improvement. Improvement in performance (and therefore improvement in the “recognition of self-worth” of the Self-Capital) primarily in many areas of work, where stress management became a commonplace. But also in everyday life: the abstract anxiety of the Ego-Capital about the “risk of being rejected” (that is, undervalued…) by whatever environment it finds itself in (social rejection, symbolic rejection, sexual rejection, etc.) was considered an elixir for continuous, aggressive self-investment.
It seems as if a “wild”, pre-cultural readiness against rather rare dangers has found a completely different (and completely opposite to its initial necessity…) economy. Since, as is known, the multiplication of anxieties feeds the rather explosive “growth” of at least two distinct capitalist sectors: psycho-something counselors and guardians, and neurological suppression drugs (tranquilizers, etc….)
Three stalks are better than two! Life360, whose CEO had no qualms (quite the opposite!) about including it in the “economy of anxiety,” sells neither light drugs nor psycho-something安慰剂. It sells the opposite: the ease of sharpening anxiety through a geolocation app of some “vulnerable” person. A child or elderly person.
While tracking seems reassuring, in reality the opposite is happening – and the CEO of Life360 knows it. The “dot” on the map corresponding to the monitored person, let’s say the child, may stop moving for 10 minutes. Isn’t that a serious cause for concern? Maybe they were hit? Maybe they hit someone? Maybe they’re being bullied? Maybe they were kidnapped? Call them!
Parental care, as shaped in the third decade of the 21st century through technological offerings, is a field where advertisers promote increasingly sophisticated products to relieve fears; but the real, not-so-hidden agenda of the entrepreneurs of the “anxiety economy” is to increase, not decrease, fears.
The stereotype of the “guilty mother” indicates how digital technology merchants exploit, and in practice widen, the gap between parental reality (“I can’t always be next to my child”) and the ideal (“a good parent must always know and protect”). To the extent that digital surveillance spreads, the “ideal” becomes suffocating: mobile phones have been aptly named the longest umbilical cord in the history of the human species. This suffocation is not necessarily experienced as what it is, especially if, as a “side effect,” carrying a mobile phone offers children (and by extension, parents) other opportunities. Not always parentally approved ones. So that once the next parental anxiety (will be) “what is he/she doing on the phone when I’m not around?” the implantation, under the skin, of a transponder might prove to be an even better solution for the “ideal” of geosurveillance.
The way to widen this gap is simple: the intensive projection of isolated and rare events, as extreme as possible. Threats, even the rarest, even the most extreme, even the biggest exceptions from everyday life, are projected intensively and repeatedly in order to cause generalizations. If a child “was eaten by a dragon” (!!!) then “every child can be eaten by a dragon”, therefore “all children – and especially mine – are at risk!”
This is the third floor of the “economy of anxiety,” built on the solid foundations of psycho-something and pharmaceutical trade and control. The CEO could show its blueprint: we construct and spread (irrational) fears with behaviorist methodology and, subsequently, we sell algorithms that manage thousands of microscopic interventions, notifications, alerts, prompts, even 24 hours 7 days a week, to soothe them—supposedly. What is needed is for risk and preventive surveillance to become an obsession.
Just a generation ago, children went to and from school, or went out to have fun, without having a “personal beacon” attached to them. They didn’t fall into wells, wouldn’t be hit by cars, nor did flower pots fall on their heads; certainly not more than now, with their “personal beacon.” Perhaps they even learned to pay better attention (instead of delegating their attention to electronic mediation). But a generation ago, adults (their parents now) didn’t live clinging to a remote control of daily life euphemistically called a “phone,” nor did they feel as though they’d sink into nonexistence if they “happened to lose constant contact” with anything.
It is not an exaggeration to claim that the mechanization – of everything (through digitization) has caused a serious ontological change in a considerable part of the human species, with an unknown outcome – if there ever is an “end” at all. Anxieties (and their capitalist exploitation) are not only the hefty price of this “progress” but, above all, the construction of justifications for permanent dependence on the substratum of the new capitalist “wild accumulation”, the accumulation of data and not only.
Z.S
