Mirroring, vocal convergence, psychotropic stimulation and exposure to accelerated speech in television and Internet are proposed as key factors that influence our speech rate. Accelerated speech is posited as symptomatic of semiocapitalism. Voice is a locus of trauma, a sonic scar that sounds out the semiotic pressures of capitalism. Voice is proposed as a partial register of how we are as bodied subjects within affective environments with semiotic and communicative pressures. more This article examines how exposure to capitalist environments accelerates speech. This article examines how exposure to capitalist environments accelerates speech. Rather than being subject to the late capitalist organization of our empathy, psychopathy could be a means of escape. Sympathy, care, compassion and altruism are important The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy argues that it is a mistake to presuppose that empathy can achieve these. We are passionate and enthusiastic whilst keeping a professional distance. Capitalism pressures us to feign empathy and leverage social relationships on one hand, whilst being cold and pragmatic on the other.
This is amidst a virulent and exacerbating climate of competition and frenzied quantification. The affective blitz of work, flickering screens, emotive content, vibrating alerts and sounding alarms erode our sensitivities whilst we are modulated with attention stimulants, social lubricants and so called anti-anxiety drugs. When workers are required to either ignore their empathy to do a job, or dial it up to increase productivity, they are entering a psychopathic modality. In other cases capitalism requires empathy in spades – charming, friendly, sensitive and listening managers, customer service agents and carers. In some cases work calls for no empathy – characters who don’t blink or flinch in the face of danger nor crack under pressure. The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy examines how the requirements, stimuli, affects and environments of work condition our empathy. The conception of what defines a psychopath seems to be a morass of contradictions, the only consistency being the supposition of a lack of empathy. People who lack empathy, be they ruthless entrepreneurs or crazed ‘spree killers’ are frequently labeled psychopathic the charming socializer is just as suspect as the awkward anti-social loner.
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