You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. I'm joined today by the

sociologist and political economist William Davis, who teaches at Goldsmiths, and whose books

include the happiness industry and nervous states how feeling took over the world. He delivered the

first of this year's LRB winter lectures back after a three-year pandemic hiatus at Conway Hall

on the 10th of February, on the subject of the reaction economy. The lecture is available on our

YouTube channel and a version of the text appears in the current issue of the paper. the reaction economy. The lecture is available on our YouTube channel

and a version of the text appears in the current issue of the paper.

Hello, Will and thank you very much for joining me.

Thank you.

I don't want to ask you to repeat your entire lecture here again,

but perhaps we could begin,

you could explain briefly what you mean by the reaction economy.

Sure.

I think reactions of various kinds have become a prominent feature of how online culture works in various ways.

There are particular devices and instruments such as Facebook reactions.

There are things like reaction videos which might refer specifically

to a type of video that someone might release on Instagram to react to a particular event,

but there are actually technologically designed things called reaction videos within TikTok,

which are ways in which people can sort of instantly react to somebody else's video. So a lot of the entire architecture of social media platforms

in particular is organized around the idea of people who are constantly watching one another,

reacting to one another, and then reacting to the reactions of one another.

This is something that is, I think, quite noticeable when you're talking about things like social

...