Tracking Humanity: The Quantified Self Movement

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Tracking Humanity
Tracking Humanity
The Quantified Self Movement
by Maggie Appleton
April 2013
Whitman College
Thesis in Anthropology
Maggie Appleton
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Maggie Appleton
Table of Contents
Introduction
Autoethnography
Chapter One The Quantified Self Movement
10
Chapter Two Born of Western Cosmology
36
Chapter Three New Science, New Medicine, New World
64
Chapter Four Technological Embodiment
80
Chapter Five Watch Your Data Before it Watches You
125
Chapter Six Becoming Gods of Capitalism
156
Conclusion Evolving Humanity
192
Bibliography
196
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Introduction
Introduction
The Quantified Self movement is concerned with exactly what you might expect
quantifying the self. Aligning their identity with units of measurement and numerical data, they
seek a self-knowledge that will lead to the improvement of both the individual, and implicitly,
the greater society the supposed ultimate goal of progressing humanity forward. The ideology
of the Quantified Self movement is important to us because it is not only theirs, in many ways it
is our own. Based in ideas native to the Western world that have now reigned for centuries, their
curious conceptions about the body and self are ones we share. Understanding the historical
emergence, beliefs, concerns, and interests of this community will teach us about ourselves as
much as it does about them.
Beginning with an exploration of the historical foundations of the West, my theory builds
off the work of Marshall Sahlins in bringing attention to how we have a very particularly
constructed idea of the self, as a need-driven and imperfect being living within a dualistically
divided body and mind. Seeking to fix our supposed imperfections, we cultivated the dominance
of science and medicine over our natural bodies by beginning to understand our physical form
within the metaphor of machinery. While the Quantified Self movement in many ways ascribes
to these beliefs, and is clearly built upon these foundations of imbuing objective, empirical and
quantifiable data with legitimacy, they also challenge and seek to revolutionise the modern
institutions of science and biomedicine. Primarily concerned with the generalised knowledge that
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Introduction
the two impose upon individual bodies, the Quantified Self ideology believes each singular
person should be able to determine their own personal truths and treatments, leading them to
establish and advocate for the joint concepts of personal science and personalised medicine.
I then move to discuss how the technological devices pervasively used within the
Quantified Self community are leading them to new experiences of embodiment a
technological embodiment that redefines the boundaries of the self, and engaging us in debates
over animated agency, emotional intimacy, and holistically interdependent and interconnected
systems that challenge many of our default anthropocentric attitudes towards the world. These
emerging relationships with technology are indicative of those going on within our greater
society, yet Quantified Selfers could be considered the frontier of those fully embracing these
new embodiments. They construct new identities and ways of being through technology,
especially through the medium of data. Massive troves of immaterial online information become
representations of selves in the public sphere, as well as potential channels for manipulation and
domination on a socio-political level. Though many have read the data-collection practices of the
Quantified Self community as solely self-surveillance, we find they are actually choosing to
generate and control their own information rather than wait for greater social and political forces
to do it for them. We are now all implicated in acts of self-quantification and the rise of dataselves by nature of being digitally connected, a state which raises a plethora of political and
personal complications for us to navigate. If we are already intertwined in a system of data
surveillance, self-trackers may be the ones turning the system into a source of identity, positive
meaning and empowerment.
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Introduction
Though they are politically resistant in the field of data surveillance, their underlying
ideologies still inherently tie them to fulfilling the needs of a capitalist economy. They strive to
be optimal citizens: organised, productive, timely, fit, and responsible, giving off the social
perception of a well-ordered and lived life. This pursuit is driven by a conviction in the natural
goodness of capitalism that resembles religious belief, yet one that fails to result in the
transcendent state implicitly promised. The existence of the Quantified Self movement, a
collection of individuals seeking to improve and upgrade themselves in order to manage the
unreasonably demanding requirements of the capitalist economy using the same ideological base
that brought it into being, should lead us to critically question what they mean by seeking
improvement in the interests of progress. We should ask what we they progressing towards
and whether it truly serves their own interests.
Throughout this critical exploration, and despite the occasional bold conclusion, I do not
mean to other the Quantified Selfers. When taken in cultural context, their practices and beliefs
are reasonable and rational. The ways we enact these same beliefs are simply more familiar to us
we have been performing them for so long they do not seem alien or absurd to our eyes.
Whereas amassing, meticulously graphing, and developing formulas based on the data points of
a morning routine puts these convictions into such a stark light that we react with shock, and
often quickly move to ridicule those who practice it. Out of a lack of empathetic understanding
(and perhaps some confusion and fear), many have defaulted to portraying Quantified Selfers as
a misguided, fringe population numerically desecrating the sanctity of the human self. My
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Introduction
research explores and challenges both this inaccurate portrayal of the community, as well as the
notion that we have a sacred pre-defined human nature in need of defending. The movement is
not what many take it as. They are often holistically humanistic rather than reductively
mechanical, diverse rather than monolithic, evolving and dynamic rather than static, and
critically questioning rather than passively complying. Above all other qualities, I found the
Quantified Self movement to be defined by a diversity and complexity of opinions. Members
expressed wide varieties of dynamic, evolving ideas and contradictory ideologies. To study,
think, and write about the movement as a whole concept and bound community was a
challenging and confusing task on numerous occasions. Despite these rifts and differences, the
Quantified Self community indeed shares fundamental and core beliefs about the value of selfimprovement through quantified self-knowledge, providing them with enough common ground
to engage in building a meaningful social world.
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Autoethnography
AutoEthnography
I should begin by stating that I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Quantified
Self movement. My relationship to the community is definitely an etic one, I am an outsider
looking in. However, I argue we are all increasingly becoming degrees of quantified selfers,
whether through small actions of intentional tracking or passive interpellation into the
unavoidable data streams flowing from modern digital life. Many aspects of my life are tracked,
just as many of yours are but it is not a significant, intentional or purposeful goal of mine to
quantify my life. I admit to having a few applications embedded in my digital realm that reflect
quantified aspects of my life back to me a GPS location tracker on my iPhone, a Google
Chrome add-on that track and graphs my internet browsing patterns, and for a short period while
I was writing this thesis I used the tracking software Daytum (an online system quite popular
amongst the Quantified Self community) to record each time I consumed a cup of coffee.
Intended as a minor and lighthearted foray into intentional tracking, I lasted about two weeks
before routinely forgetting and losing interest in the practice. The motivating values that drive
this community and their practices indeed require more, and run far deeper, than a passing sense
of intrigue in aesthetic applications.
A collusion of factors brought me to study the topic of the Quantified Self movement.
First, I knew I wanted to closely examine an issue that critically examined neoliberal values and
the assumption that capitalism is a natural and organically formed system. As a cultural
cosmology, capitalism is a fascinating construction, one I feel many people miss the great many
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Autoethnography
intricacies and ironies of because they cannot step back from it and see it for what it is. Of all the
things anthropology has given me, the encouragement to dig around the roots of all human
cultural systems, especially ones I am implicated and intertwined in, has been most meaningful.
My second interest revolved around our technological relationships. As a generation x, digital
native, with an emotionally-burdensome attachment to my iPhone that fascinates me as much as
it concerns me, I wanted to explore the vast and visible influences of technology on the culture of
everyday life that I have seen come about even in my short lifetime.
My final impetus is far more challengingly personal to write about. I experienced a
turbulent and extensive period wherein I became firmly convinced that the realness,
significance, and consequential gravity of numbers trumped that of my own embodied
experience of being. I gripped to them, dependent upon the illusion of control they provided.
Quantitative data constructed by the legacy of science and medicine spun a web over my cosmos,
present in nearly all my moments of consciousness. The gradual shift back to validating my
internal world was not quick, simple, or comfortable, and took many forces of love and support
to get me there. It is a mountain I am still summiting.
The problem was obviously not the numbers themselves; the situation was complicated.
But it got me wondering how many other people in complicated intersections of their lives, who
were taught the things I was taught about the world, ended up turning to numbers as an outlet for
distress. It had me wonder whether their distress resembled mine, bound to ideals of achievement
and transcendence propagated by the same historical cosmology that determined their irrationally
rationalist expression. Perhaps I was looking for some culturally-situated companions who used
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Autoethnography
methodical maths to manage their pain. Much of me wanted to consider the different ways of
living numerically, to understand how others found satisfaction where I found struggle.
Watching the world through the lens of data is all at once saliently addicting, affirming,
and invoking of self-achieved power. Yet this viewpoint is narrow, its walls built by a forceful
history that make them difficult to peer over, difficult to step back from and gain clarity. I was
drawn to examine the Quantified Self ideology because I felt deep empathy for the practice of
chasing self-improvement at all costs, and concern for the sometimes strict empiricism it relies
upon. Empathy is perhaps the greatest tool we have for understanding; having felt some degree
of the powerful force of quantification myself, I feel able to understand the underlying beliefs
driving this social movement on an individual level. They were once my beliefs too.
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Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self
Chapter One
Introduction to the Quantified Self
Heart rate: 67bpm. Blood pressure: 110/74. Blood-oxygenation: 97%. Weight: 126.3lbs.
Hours of sleep: 7.23. Quality of sleep: 83%. REM cycles: 5. Caffeine intake: 126mg. Steps
taken: 2,405. Calories expended: 809. Emails received: 54. Emails sent: 13. Motivation level: 4.
Stress level: 7.3. Location: the world of the Quantified Self the self understood and expressed
through numbers, data, and quantified statistics. Summed up by their tagline self-knowledge
through numbers, the concept of the Quantified Self encompasses a both a cultural ideology
and a community of people who congregate both online and offline that ascribe to it
(Quantified Self 2013). This distinction between the Quantified Self movement or phenomenon,
and the Quantified Self community is an important one. There is an understanding of a greater
movement taking place on a social level, believed to be a historical force in itself, with some
trackers even calling it our millenniums renaissance (Top Coder Inc 2012). The movement is
driven by specific and historically-located ideas and beliefs guiding this technologically-oriented
approach to self-tracking. With it comes an international community whose members selfidentify and connect through self-tracking.
Self-Tracking
What members of this community hold in common is the practice of self-tracking: they
collect and store data and information about particular aspects of their life and self. This practice
revolves around designing projects that target specific variables. The kind of things that people
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choose to track is seemingly infinite ranging from the common areas of sleep, time, physical
exercise, and food intake, to the more creative variable of monitoring of Twitter activity, shower
temperatures, snoring, and perceived quality of social conversations (Quantified Self 2013). It is
a running joke within the community that any aspect of life you can imagine being tracked,
probably is being tracked a Quantified Selfer somewhere in the world. Keeping tabs on the self is
nothing terribly new: Benjamin Franklin is one historical figure known to have written of his
adherence to thirteen key values each day (Dembosky 2011).1 Self-trackers often like to harken
back to such historical individuals, attempting to convey the message that surveying the self in
pursuit of improvement has been a noble and worthwhile activity for hundreds of years (Kelly
2012b). The practice seems to have been an especially prevalent theme in the history of Western
culture, appearing everywhere from religious virtues to nationalistic demands of responsible
citizenship. Appreciating the influence of these historically-based ideas on the current Quantified
Self movement is central to understanding how and why it has emerged. In many ways that is
part of the real significance of this movement: self-tracking has long been a part of ourselves and
our cultures. It is a practice that all of us can relate to, and engage with in small ways one that
is not only growing rapidly, but also shifting forms. Advancements in technology have now
infinitely expanded the realm of self-tracking making the practice exponentially easier
compared to the old pen-and-paper method. From body monitors to smartphone applications, we
are now enabling a new age of the measured self.
There now exists an iPhone application where you too can track Franklins thirteen prescribed virtues
over the course of your day (http://reasoninteractive.com/tools/benfranklin/about/index.html).
1
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History and Founding

The Quantified Self movement does not begin or end with any single individual or set of
people. Instead of being founded, its origin story is told as a natural emergence out of the way
human interaction with technology were already taking shape. It would be more accurate to say
certain leaders emerged who encouraged and facilitated the rise of the culture, shaping the
phenomenon by giving it a name and a central digital space where they could communicate,
organise, and establish their identity. These leaders were Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly who set up
Quantifiedself.com the website acting as the online hub of the movement. The two were
journalists already invested in exploring the social and personal meanings behind technology
when they met as co-workers at the forward-thinking magazine Wired in 2007. One an editor and
one a writer, they began to collaborate over their shared interest in a technologically-driven trend
both had noticed gaining ground among their social circles in the bay area of California; people
subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far
beyond the ordinary (Wolf 2010b). They attribute the rise of these habits to four factors; the
growing ubiquity of personal mobile devices allowing people to carry powerful computing
capacities around in their pockets; advances in the quality, affordability and miniaturisation of
electronic body sensors and tracking tools; social medias normalisation of perpetually sharing
intimate information; and the rise of the digital cloud the massive increase in capacity of
online data hosting and storage, making its collection seem immaterially infinite (Wolf 2010a;
Kelly 2011). By 2008, the community had grown enough for Kelly and Wolf to feel they needed
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to establish a supportive limited liability company: Quantified Self Labs (Quantified Self 2013).
Acting as an organisational support, the structure of the company is simple. There are no full
time employees and they have a stated goal of not making organising QS feel like
work (Butterfield 2012:16). The community aims to promote an egalitarian and democratic
power structure by downplaying officiality and hierarchy.
Community Organisation
The community aspect of the Quantified Self movement is intentional and active;
bounded together by voluntary, self-expressed membership, they connect through online hubs
that typically include forum posts, twitter conversations, blog entries with streams of discussion
comments, and informative resource pages such as wikis. On the central website
Quantifiedself.com, they define themselves as a collaboration of users and tool-makers who
share an interest in self-knowledge through self-tracking (Quantified Self 2013). As of April
2013, there are currently 111 registered meet-up groups consisting of 18,558 members across 31
nations in 89 citiesthese mini-communities are represented in New York, San Francisco,
London and Tokyo, and also extend to places such as Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, Beijing and Cape
Town (Meetup 2013). However, as a geographical trend, the the vast majority of tracking
communities are condensed within the Global North.
Meet-ups are regularly scheduled, organised events where members can share their
stories of self-experimentation. Run through the website Meetup.com, each geographical area
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has local voluntary leaders who facilitate the monthly gatherings. These meetings centre around
a series of slide-show presentations, called show-and-tells, which are usually filmed and later
uploaded to internet blogs and websites (Christensen 2013). Anthropologist Adam Butterfield
conducted his masters thesis specifically on Quantified Self community meet-up groups and
succinctly defined their content as personal stories of self-tracking projects (Butterfield 2012).
While this is a simplified description of how the ideology gets communicated between its
members and the general public, in a literal sense its is fairly accurate. The emphasis on
storytelling using meaningful data is a key component of the Quantified Self movement.
Understanding how and why these stories are told is central to understanding the Quantified Self
movement and the cultural forces driving and shaping it. Throughout this thesis I will cite many
tracking tales told through blog posts, personal websites, filmed presentations, and second-hand
accounts in articles. At meet-up presenters are advised to base their talk around three prime
questions; first, explain what you did; second, explain how you did it; and third, explain what
you learnt (Wolf 2011). Some meet-up communities further structure the story-telling form by
suggesting that speakers limit their talks to five minutes, encouraging simple and clear
communication (Christensen 2013). The purpose of these presentations is to offer ideas that
others might spark inspiration from: different tools and methods for self-tracking, different
variables to track, inventive solutions to common problems like trouble sleeping or stress at
work. The movement sees themselves as trying to cultivate a culture of sharing (Christensen
2013). The ultimate value they share is seeking self-improvement, and through sharing stories,
hope to collaboratively encourage and support one another in that goal. Conferences follow a
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similar structure but are much larger events, usually drawing members from all over a region
(such as Europe or the Pacific Northwest) instead of a single city.
The glue holding this community together is undeniably the website Quantifiedself.com.
Much like an ever-expanding family tree, it branches outwards connecting a seemingly infinite
number of links to online data logging tools, company pages for commercially produced tracking
devices and services, YouTube and Vimeo videos of presentations, reviews of smartphone
tracking applications, notable personal blogs of self-trackers, and relevant journalistic and
academic articles. It is the central hub of this internet-based society.
Quantifiedself.com features many aspects typical of websites that facilitate open and
interactive online societies; social forums, active commenting on blog postings, occasional
surveys, prompts for open discussions, frequent guest writers, and interviews with notable
community members (Quantified Self 2013). This includes a number of recurring features such
as: What Were Reading a compiled list of the latest publications and articles related to the
Quantified Self movement, Toolmaker Talks question and answer posts with the developers
of popular tracking devices and applications, and Numbers from Around the Web a showcase
of especially interesting self-experiments and the resulting data from community members
(Quantified Self 2013). This small slice of what type of content is posted should make apparent
this website is by no means written or controlled by a single or small handful of individuals.
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While Kevin Kelly, Gary Wolf, and Alexandria Carmichael are the official moderators, the
majority of the material is generated from a large and diverse number of contributors.2
Being an online social group, the nature of the Quantified Self community is fairly fluid,
with members interacting over multisited situations with complex, spatially diverse
geographies (Wilson and Peterson 2002:455). In their review of the Anthropology of Online
Communities, Wilson and Peterson point out that they are likely to be bound by asymmetrical,
indirect connections, as people are able to identify with the idea of being part of the community
without necessarily making direct personal connections with others (Wilson and Peterson
2002:455). They may simply feel engagement and membership by reading the thoughts and ideas
of other members on websites and blogs. The practices of connection can sometimes be socially
passive. This quality makes the Quantified Self community an imagined community, a concept
developed by political scientist Benedict Anderson to describe a socially-constructed unit where
its members understand themselves to be part of a bound whole even in the absence of face-toface interactions or social events. Becoming part of a community simply requires they imagine
themselves to be so, much like being a member of a nation (Anderson 1991). However, in the
case of the Quantified Self community, there are also many socially active and physically
interactive ways members are bound together. Though geographically spread out over nations
and internet cables, there is still a face-to-face aspect of the Quantified Self community in their
regularly organised physical meet-ups and conferences. Quantified Self has been described as a
grass-roots movement brought together by the internet (Harrell 2011), emphasising its nature as
Alexandria Carmichael is also the director of Quantified Self Labs, and co-founded the health tracking
website CureTogether; a health care company that brings patients with hundreds of conditions together
in overlapping data communities (CureTogether 2013).
2
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democratic and community-driven. This strengthens their resemblance to traditional, localised

communities where members are more likely to make direct and personal connections with one
another.
Leadership, Power Structures & Cohesion

Although Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf are often referred to as the leaders of the
movement, the community tries to cultivate an open and democratic power structure where no
single person or set of people speak for everyone. There are, however, many members who are
more outspoken and active in publishing ideological writings on the Quantified Self, sometimes
referred to as thought leaders (Erwin 2012). These are individuals who usually run high-traffic
blogs about their Quantified Self lifestyles, regularly publishing advice, reflections, and
generally contributing content to the online community and the discussions happening within it.
Quantified Selfers may not exactly align their tracking beliefs and habits with members who
might be considered popular (who themselves hold a diverse range of beliefs around selftracking), yet these individuals may have greater power and sway within the community thanks
to their ability to influence the opinions of their readers. These informal leaders are frequently
featured in interviews, articles, and publications about the movement. They appear to be
prominent and well-respected figures within the community, with smaller self-tracking blogs
frequently referring to and citing them in posts. However, they should not themselves be taken as
absolute representations of the movement, nor should they be assumed to speak on behalf of the
entire community (Erwin 2012). In his ethnographic work, Butterfield found it is certainly not a
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monolithic community where everyone involved shares the same ideas about, and interests in,
self-tracking (Butterfield 212:49). Though Kelly and Wolf may have run the first Quantified
Self meet-up, both believe the movement has taken on a life of its own, and in some ways,
taken on a different meaning (Butterfield 2012:16). The Quantified Self ideology itself has
evolved in its short six year history, with different philosophies, values, and areas of focus rising
and falling in popularity none consistent throughout or representative of the whole community,
but fluctuating and developing through community discussions and dialogues. Above all other
qualities of the movement, this lack of deterministic authority and communal openness to change
maturation, and development of what it means to be a Quantified Selfer might be of the most
seminal importance to understanding it authentically.
On Ethnographic Sources
The vast majority of my ethnographic material is drawn from blog postings, essays,
interviews in journalistic publications and newspapers, and filmed presentations created by
people who make up the dedicated core of the movement. They are the leaders and avid
participants, the organisers and enthusiasts, the writers and researchers. You will notice a
repetition of names throughout my work: individuals like Kevin Kelly, Gary Wolf, Ernesto
Ramirez, Konstantin Augemberg, Larry Smarr, gwern branwen [sic], and Buster Benson, among
others, are all continuously cited across its chapters. The dominance of their voices is due to the
dominance of their influence across the Quantified Self community, and the extensive efforts
they put into writing and publishing about it. I recognise that this leaves my analysis vulnerable
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as an inaccurate representation of the more common or typical Quantified Selfer who may not
widely promote their beliefs and philosophies about self-tracking in publicly accessible places.
However, there is no normal when it comes to the Quantified Self movement its membership
is characterised by a wide diversity of opinions, habits, and levels of involvement. I have done
my best to cast my net wide in selecting blogs, recorded talks, and stories to quote from and
analyse presenting accounts ranging the thought leaders who upload every detail of their day
to public websites, to those who have only dabbled in a single experiment of self-quantification.
Yet I concede my sources are limited to those who have chosen to freely share their experiences
over the internet, a potentially self-selecting group. I have also likely left out the voices of many
slightly less prominent thought leaders, simply by limitation of the sheer number of them
heading up different factions of the community, and that their opinions overlapped with those
already represented. I have to some degree relied on the insights of anthropologists who are able
to be physically present at Quantified Self meet-ups and conferences, primarily the work of
Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman, and Adam Butterfield. Their expressed insights about the
community, after engaging with people face-to-face and conducting many interviews, I believe
grants them considerable legitimacy as second-hand ethnographic sources.
The Self-Tracker Identity

Identifying as a Quantified Selfer (the predominant self-referentially used term)
requires two things; first, a lifestyle based around tracking data about oneself, and second, a
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conscious willingness to identity as such.3 Being an identified Quantified Selfer is voluntary and
self-assigned, an ownership of their tracking activity as a significant aspect of who they believe
themselves to be. It is a public expression of a set of values and ideals that privately can hold a
wide variety of meanings. Beyond the core belief in seeking self-improvement through collecting
data, the rest is left up to the individual: track what you want, how you want, and do what you
like with the data (Wolf 2010a). This open-ended invitation to have total agency of your own
self-tracking lifestyle makes involvement and membership in the movement exceedingly
undefined. What exactly it means to be a Quantified Selfer falls on a wide spectrum, and there
are degrees to which a person can identify with and be involved in the community. Those who
present at conferences and actively organise meet-ups likely take the identity more seriously than
those who simply wear a popular commercial tracking device and occasionally read the
Quantifiedself.com blog posts. Essentially, the level of involvement is flexible and the line
between being a Quantified Selfer or not is fuzzy at best. This grey-area around what counts as
being a member of the tracking movement requires some clarification as to who exactly I am
discussing in this research. Therefore, I wish to clarify that am considering the baseline of
membership to be an explicit, public and purposeful ownership of being a Quantified Selfer.
Despite the wide variety of forms being a Quantified Selfer can take, and the insistence
by community members that there is no such thing as an average self-tracker, they certainly
perceive a certain type of person to be drawn to the movement (Augemberg 2013a). They
Throughout this thesis I will use the terms Quantified Selfer, Self Quantifier, quantifier, selftracker, and tracker interchangeably. This is based on the way I found those five terms to be used
within the ethnographic material of the Quantified Self community. For the purposes of this paper you
should assume they all refer to the same social identity being discussed here.
3
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describe people who join as curious and goal-oriented or problem-solving

oriented (Christensen 2013). Many come from a science-minded perspective and are interested
in poking, prodding, and measuring as a way to go about the world (Cornell 2010). Though
inspired by scientific curiosity, they also revel in questioning existing mainstream social
institutions like biomedicine and technoscience, believing their practices go against the grain of
normal society. They repeatedly speak about themselves in narratives and terms that imply
independence, difference, rebelliousness, radical thinking, and being defiant of the status quo,
such as being self-proclaimed pioneers (Kelly 2011; Wolf 2010a). Joining the movement
seems to be more likely if you possess these certain character traits, but community members
also suggest being part of the movement strengthens these qualities and subsequently changes
the kind of lives people lead. Augemberg argues that the practice of self-tracking, Quantified
Selfers become different from other people with regard to mentality, psychological traits,
lifestyle, and behaviours (Augemberg 2013a). There is no doubt the movement understands
itself as a social collective of like-minded individuals sharing an established set of values,
qualifying them as a community.
Demographics
The demographics of the Quantified Self movement are hard to come by there is hardly
a centralised registration system keeping tabs on membership. We can tell the vast majority of
those who at least participate in meet-ups and conferences live in densely populated, highlydeveloped, economically-wealthy and usually technologically-inclined urban centres. We might
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categorise them under the WEIRD acronym now popular in psychology research Western,
Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (Henrich, et al. 2010). Journalists who attend
these gatherings report participants who are mostly middle to upper class, mostly white, as
well as being predominantly male and occupationally involved in technology. They describe two
typical age varieties of nerdy men the young under 30 and the older population pushing
45 (Dembosky 2011). In a recent survey of the New York meet-up group, they found the mean
age of attendees to be 36.2 (ranging from 23 to 74) and 67% of attendees to be male (Paulus
2013). The largest meet-up community by far, with over 3,000 members, is based out of the
original location of San Francisco and the bay area of California (Meetup 2013).4 The notoriety
of this area as a professional hub for cutting-edge and powerful institutions of technology makes
it unsurprising that the Quantified Self movement has been so successfully established there.
Cities where Quantified Self groups have become especially popular tend to have active
technology communities, such as a large number of start-up companies or hacker
spaces (Butterfield 2012:42). The majority of journalistic articles that discuss the kind of
people who involve themselves in the Quantified Self movement focus on the young
professionals working in high tech companies, usually with occupations like internet
entrepreneur, or web programmer (Long 2013; Dembosky 2011). The unofficial hypothesis is
that those involved in technology and tracking in their careers are the most willing to let it
overflow into their personal lives. Butterfield referred to the identity as geek elite (Butterfield
2012:1). With this label comes the adjoining culture associated with the Silicon Valley and bay
New York is the next most populous community at 1,580 (Meetup 2013).
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area of Lululemon wearers, yoga-practitioners, and vegans, who shop at farmers markets and
bike to work, alluding to the liberal and crunchy stereotypes of a population concerned with
embracing idealised natural ways of living while enjoying the lavish comforts of capitalist
consumption and technological privilege (Maqubela 2012).
Gender in the Movement

The predominance of men who are actively involved and visible in the Quantified Self
movement compared to the number of women has become an acknowledged issue within the
community. Fewer women in attendance at meet-up sessions, and the notable absence of tracking
tools for menstrual periods (a cycle that would otherwise lend itself well to improvement through
experimentation) are often provided as evidence of the movements gender gap (Christensen
2013; Cornell 2010; Eaves 2012). In surveying the gender of posters, commenters, and filmed
presentation videos on QuantifiedSelf.com, one blogger found the male-to-female ratio to be
80/20 (Cornell 2010). Indeed, in articles and publications written about the movement, the selftracking individuals highlighted are usually male. I found only a handful of stories about women
involved in the Quantified Self movement in over thirty popular journalism pieces surveyed for
this thesis. Those who have noticed this trend attribute it to factors that align with gender
stereotypes pervasively familiar throughout Western culture: men like tools, while women like
connection and community. Members of the movement express beliefs such as a smaller
percentage of women are really interested in data. They want narrative (Christensen 2013), and
that women would never want to look at relationships as experiments (Cornell 2010). These
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opinions focus solely on the use of technology in Quantified Self practices and disregard the
strong community aspect of the movement, making them poor explanations for the gender
discrepancy. However, there is the possibility female outsiders to the movement might perceive it
as a gadget-fuelled boys club (despite the inaccuracy of this understanding), deterring them from
attending meet-ups. There are also speculations that the social realms the movement tends to
draw members from are already male-dominated fields such as science and technology (Cornell
2010).
Public Awareness
The rapid growth of the Quantified Self community is in no small part due to the
generous attention it has received from a variety of major news publications. The beliefs and
practices of the Quantified Self culture have been introduced to a wide audience by numerous
journalistic investigations portraying its inner workings. Usually framed as a human interest
piece, it has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, Fast Company,
BBC.com, The Atlantic, and The Economist, among many others (Bowden 2012; Christensen
2013; Harrell 2011; Hunt 2010; The Economist 2012; Weintraub 2013; Wolf 2012a; Wortham
2012). The first news articles began to appear in 2009, and have seemingly snowballed since
then. Subsequently, the term Quantified Self and awareness about the social movement have
become increasingly visible in the public sphere. Especially over the course of the past year,
many journalists have referred to the mainstreaming of the movement, of it having exploded
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in both size and scope (Snyder 2013; Christensen 2013). Considering the movement a fringe
phenomenon is a fading opinion.
The double-edged sword of the range of publicity that the Quantified Self movement has
received is that they have undoubtedly been presented inaccurately more than once.
Anthropologists with Intel Labs, Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman have spent the past year and a
half conducting research on the Quantified Self community, and point out the common reductive
presentation of a self-absorbed technical elite who [use] arsenals of gadgets to enact a kind of
self-imposed panopticon, generating data for datas sake is a falsity (Nafus and Sherman
2012b). The true Quantified Self movement is far more complex and nuanced, a social
movement with specific social dynamics, people, and practices rather than the generalised
brand name it has purportedly become (Nafus and Sherman 2012b). They argue the name is
thrown around to allude to the use of novel and flashy digital gadgets, without the accompanying
social context of who is using them and why. Below I describe this generalised use of tracking
technology in society, much of which occurs outside and apart from Quantified Selfers. My
discussion of it serves to place the specific community of the Quantified Self within a larger
context of social patterns, and consider how the ideology that leads them to self-track might also
be pervasive in a wider population. Indeed, we perhaps should be more concerned for those
individuals who attach data-trackers to their bodies without also engaging in philosophical
conversations about why they do so.
The media and public fascination with this community speaks to the importance of
understanding how and why it came to be. As a society we clearly find the beliefs behind it
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intriguing and relevant to the future of our technologically-intertwined lives. Its expansion is also
leading to a shift in its perception; the more people hear about the practice of self-tracking and
perhaps the range of diverse approaches that it encompasses, the more it becomes normalised
and begins to seem commonplace.
Shifting Norms
Back in 2010 the relative early years of the movement Wolf wrote of extreme
quantifiers considering their behaviour to be abnormal, and calling themselves outliers (Wolf
2010a). While the community still associates with leading lifestyles that deviate from the norm,
many are experiencing a shift in the previously bizarre becoming more acceptable. Compulsive
recordings of bodily numbers are no longer necessarily characterised as some form of anxiety
disorder or signal of a lack of mental stability (Wolf 2010a). Still, in his ethnography Butterfield
found self-trackers reported reluctance to divulge the full extent their tracking habits to those
outside the movement, fearing they may be stigmatised and labeled obsessive compulsive, selfabsorbed, or a hypochondriac (Butterfield 2012: 60). They report others in their lives label them
weird, and yet simultaneously are assured that soon everybody is going to be doing this, and
you wont even notice (Wolf 2010a). The movements expansion seemingly instills confience
that greater social acceptance is on the way. It therefore greatly serves the interests of those
within the movement to promote the self-tracking lifestyle as increasingly normal and ordinary.
Many of the outspoken leaders of the movement are, naturally, quite optimistic about its
potential rising popularity. Kelly sees the next century as leading us into an age of quantification;
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he believes industry will spur a new side to science and a new kind of lifestyle. He sees new
money, new tools, and a new philosophy stemming from measuring your whole life... It will be
the new normal (Kelly 2011). As this shift continues, it creates an interesting interplay with the
dominant narratives that Quantified Selfers tell themselves about being pioneering selftrackers (Kelly 2011). How they will maintain this core aspect of their collective identity if
indeed their prediction of going mainstream is fulfilled remains to be seen.
Self-Producing Pioneers
Fittingly, one intriguing quality of Quantified Selfers is the high number who are also the
creators, inventors, and developers of self-tracking tools. In line with their philosophy of selfcustomisation and personalisation in the practice of self-tracking, it makes sense that many feel it
is worth developing their own tools to serve their own specific interests and needs. Described as
technophiles, founders, and early adopters, they engage in both the production and the use of
their technological tools a continuous, circular feedback system (Dembosky 2011; Maqubela
2012). As most work in the industry of producing technological goods, they already have the
skills and knowledge to do so. The New York meet-up survey cited earlier found that 30% of
their members either work for a self-tracking related company or have created a selfquantification tool (Paulus 2013). Being both the creators and consumers of cutting edge tools
and technological advancements legitimises their pioneer self-image to an extent. They closely
follow not only the new commodified gadgets and software applications that emerge on the
market, but also the advances in computational power systems one step removed from the public
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eye inventions that could lead to possible new ways of integrating technologies into the self.
They are inventing entirely new devices to integrate into their bodies, leading the frontier of
technological development in an effort to be even more enmeshed in the digital age of
enhancement. In this role they are shaping the forms and purposes of the technology that
trickles down to the rest of us in the mainstream hordes of technological consumerism. We
should especially care about what they find significant, important, and meaningful - because to
an extent they hold the power to determine what kind of technology we will use, and what we
will use it for. There are concerns that should be raised around this form of power, especially
considering the limited demographic of WEIRD individuals that currently make up the majority
of the community. The political and social repercussions in areas such as healthcare and access
across socioeconomic lines will be expanded upon later on.
Trackings Rising Ubiquity

As part of the justification for the significance of this topic, I would like to briefly
consider the extent to which self-tracking is rapidly increasing throughout the general population
beyond the dedicated community that identify as Quantified Selfers. Active and involved
Quantified Selfers intensely track their physical bodies and lived functionality to such an extent
that they represent the extremes fringes of the population. However, milder practices of tracking
the self using technology are also expanding into the public sphere. There has recently been an
explosion of consumer goods and services designed to facilitate tracking all manner of lived
human experiences there are over 500 listed on the organised and searchable Guide to Self-
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Tracking hosted by the Quantified Self website (Quantified Self 2013). Falling into a range of
categories, they encompass smartphone applications, wearable sensor devices, and online
websites, with many of them being comprehensive systems made up of a combination of these
three. The popular variables that get tracked include physical activity, dietary intake,
geographical locations, and sleep cycles. Some of the more widely-used products may already be
familiar names to many; the Nike+ Fuelband, the Zeo Sleep Manager, the Fitbit Activity Tracker,
and the Jawbone UP wristband number among the more popular tracking commodities available
on the international market.
Getting hard data on the number of people engaging in self-tracking practices is actually
quite difficult. Ironically, the personal nature of deciding to quantify ones self makes it hard to
quantify on a widespread social scale. This is partially because some people who engage in selftracking practices do not identify with, or are perhaps not even aware of the Quantified Self
movement and social community, and therefore would not be counted among the numbers
attending meet-ups and conferences. We can see there are vastly more people who have
purchased commercial tracking devices than there are self-identified Quantified Selfers. Thirty
million wearable sensors were shipped their new owners just in 2012, a statistic that only
begins to speak to the accessibility and increasing commonality of this practice in our global
society (Comstock 2012). On the latest call in 2012, Nike reported there were over 11 million
people who has joined their online fitness tracking community connected to the Nike+ system
(Laird 2013). The phenomenon shows no sign of slowing down, with one market research firm
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predicting that by 2018 over 485 million people will own wearable computing devices, which
includes the rise of entirely new tracking and recording gadgets like Apples iWatch and Google
Glass (ABI Research 2013). The future potential of the tracking lifestyle seems rather promising
in light of these numbers.
Another broad indicator we can use is a Pew Research Centre report released in January
of 2013 entitled Tracking for Health. According to the study, 69% of American adults report
tracking a health indicator such as weight, diet, exercise, routine, or symptoms using any given
method (including on paper or in their heads). The report gives us a variety of numbers that
should be taken with a grain of salt but nonetheless provide an outline of the rising popularity of
self-tracking. It noted a rise in the development and use of tracking applications on phones, as
well as a significant increase in smartphone ownership up 20% just over the course of last year.
Of the 69% of Americans tracking themselves, 21% reported using a form of technology such
as apps or devices to track that data, and 34% reported sharing their information with other
people (Pew Research Centre 2013). The limitations of this Pew report are two-fold their
definition of a tracker is far more generalised than the social identity being discussed
throughout this paper. Secondly, they failed to consider the wide variety of trackable life aspects
that fall outside the general category of health. The report preemptively assumed health to be
a primary and perhaps singular motivator for self-tracking. In response to the Pew research, a
post went up on Quantifiedself.com arguing that the report would not have captured the majority
of tracking that goes on amongst the Quantified Self population (Ramirez and Wolf 2013). Even
with these qualifiers, we can see ample evidence of a growing popularity around the practice.
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We should remain cognisant of the fact that these patterns of rising popularity are
assuredly taking place predominantly within the developed Global North, rather than as a
genuinely worldwide phenomenon. We should question claims stating that we, meaning to
implicate all of humanity, will imminently be embedding powerful tracking devices into our
lives. While these forms of technology are certainly getting cheaper and expanding into new
global markets, the vast majority of humanity does not own an iPhone and will not have their
lives transformed by its many available tracking applications anytime soon. While the great
benefits seemingly made possible by the quantified life may be saliently tangible to the
technologically-elite and relatively small Quantified Self communities of Silicon Valley, New
York, and London, this says little about the actual state of affairs in the rest of the world. It seems
far more likely the technological revolution enabling this supposed self-empowerment will
remain with the economically privileged for a while yet.
Establishing Cyborg Technologies

In the ongoing discussions surrounding these tracking technological machines and
devices, we are still at a loss for established and common labels with which to refer to them.
They are spoken about using interchangeable names like ambient devices, prosthetics,
transitive technologies, tracking technologies, wearable computing, wearable sensors,
embedded technologies, tethered devices, information and communication technologies
(ICTs), and undoubtably many, many more buried in the literature (Clark 2003; Hogle 2005;
Katz 2003; Quantified Self 2013; Schll 2011; Turkle 2009). In seeking a unified term for all of
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the above categories, I will routinely refer to cyborg technologies throughout this thesis. As an
overarching definition, I understand these as tools, devices, systems, applications, trackers and
software that expand and enhance our cyborg-like qualities the extension of ourselves and
our capacities through the connective and expansive nature of modern technology. They rely
upon the reach of the internet, accessed by ambient connectivity systems like wi-fi and bluetooth,
to instantaneously and continuously both upload and download content from the digital cloud.
The practices of the Quantified Self community especially depend upon cyborg technologies and
use them actively in their daily lives and community culture, but they are not the only ones.
One ubiquitous category of devices which encompass many of the functions that are
significantly shifting our technological relationships is that of the smartphone. The smartphone
should perhaps be considered the ultimate cyborg technology, holding a special role in enabling
the rise of self-tracking as a now widespread social phenomenon. Gary Wolf claims the
smartphone has become the centre of [the] personal laboratory for self-trackers (Wolf 2010a).
With nearly half of all mobile subscribers using smartphones in the United States, their ubiquity
provides a huge number of people with easy and immediate access to tracking applications
(Butterfield 2012:15). We should be careful not be misled by the name we have for this kind of
device. Technological commentator Venkat Rao makes the important insight that our
smartphones are actually nothing like phones; voice is just one clunky feature grandfathered
into a handheld computer that is engineered to loosely resemble its nominal ancestor (Rao
2012). Smartphones have very little in common with the land-line, large-and-clunky handset
receivers plugged into the wall of your grandmothers living room. We now use our phones for
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one-to-one voice communication for only a tiny fraction of the total time we spend on them
(Katz 2003). Instead of initiating communication with a singular person, communication happens
on a massive diffused scale the devices are used to publish to or collect from the internet as a
public whole. They have essentially become portable computers, powerful devices simply
disguised as mobile phones and should be thought of as such (Wolf 2010a).
Having established that cyborg technologies have been central in enabling the formation
of the Quantified Self movement, it is important to now clarify that at the heart of the Quantified
Self ideology, its not about the tools (Ramirez 2012a; Wolf 2010a). Members of the
Quantified Self community are eager to dispel the belief they are simply a group of devicejunkies impulsively buying all the latest gadgets to attach to their bodies. The devices themselves
do not seem to be the motivating kick into self-tracking the experiences of a small trove of
journalists and researchers who have temporarily tried wearing an activity logger or sleep
monitor only to abandon the practice after their assignments end, support the insistence of the
Quantified Self community that their culture is truly about self-knowledge, rather than an
addiction to the tools that can sometimes be used for that end (Smolan and Erwitt 2012;
Wortham 2012). Wolf has argued that portrayals of the movement as solely defined by
consumerist gadget love are inaccurate and misguided (Wolf 2013a). The overemphasised role
of flashy devices distracts from the central philosophy of the Quantified Self culture, which
focuses on the collaborative interactions of people and technology rather than on the
technological gadgets themselves. Our technology evolves and changes rapidly; too often people
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become distracted by the barrage of novel devices, systems, and applications, forgetting to pay
attention to the meaningful way we integrate them into our lives and the implications of doing
so. Kelly and Wolf wanted this to be the driving focus of the community they were establishing
through their website. They envisioned a space both online and offline where people could
share their application of technology to personal projects (Butterfield 2012).
Self-Knowledge for Self-Improvement

A seemingly universal knee-jerk reaction to hearing of the Quantified Self movement is
to ask the obvious question why why self-track? Tracking can be an intensive commitment, a
vast amount of time and attention spent in the lives of those who believe the two are finite
resources. Given the growing pervasiveness of numbers in organised social institutions, many
might perceive the movement as a infiltration or imposition of quantification into that last sacred
realm of ones personal life. Yet, those who engage in self-tracking come to the practice
voluntarily, and appear to rapidly accumulate enthusiasm and enjoyment from the lifestyle.
When asked to explain what drives their tracking habits, most list what we might call practical
benefits. They name its ability to draw attention to and manage the struggles of life, and to
generally improve personal wellness and happiness (Dembosky 2011). What is deemed a
worthwhile life improvement varies among individuals. These might include increased physical
and mental energy, stamina, and strength; cognitive ability and clarity; better quality of sleep;
pain management; decreased anxiety and stress; increased productivity; and general smoother
operation of the self (Wolcott 2013). There are some who make grandiose claims about their
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success, claiming to have increased their IQ by 40 points or extended their lifespan by decades
(Dembosky 2011). All of these reasons lead us back to a singular, salient goal that lies at the
heart of all self-tracking self-improvement.
The ideology that knowing about the self, in intricate and quantified detail will inherently
lead to improving the self is a belief system rooted in Western thought. The importance of each
individual making self-improvement a central concern runs back through foundational religious
beliefs, the thinkers of the enlightenment, and up through the modern demands of capitalism. The
emphasis that Quantified Selfers place upon it, in conjunction with the development and
promotion of technology that serves that goal, brings a deeply embedded cultural conviction into
the light. The existence of this community is an opportunity to explore ideas that many of us take
for granted in the culture of Western modern capitalism.
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Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology
Chapter Two
Born of Western Cosmology
The Quantified Self movement appears as a quandary to many. A quagmire. What would
compel people to engrain pedantic and obsessively detailed, time-consuming quantification
habits into their lives? The activity can make little sense from outside its immediately
contextualised cultural sphere. I argue that the logic of the Quantified Self movement not only
makes perfect sense when taken within the historical context of the post-Enlightenment era, but
its development and rise in popularity could almost have been forecast considering the long-held
beliefs of the Western world. It is the logical extension of the idea of man as a dualistically
divided mind-over-body machine, striving for a higher goal of natural perfection by optimising
his functionality. It seems an inevitable response to our ideas of the self that were originally
Christian, co-opted by scientific rationalism, and eventually served the productive capitalist ideal
of the self-improving, self-made, and self-regulating man, all pursued through methods of
quantifiable empiricism. It is a set of very old and engrained ideas channeled through our new
technological world and distinctly shaped by our changing relationship to it. The Quantified Self
movement may be one of the most sincere adherences to the native beliefs of the West.
The functioning of the Quantified Self movement relies upon on an extensive

foundational cosmology of givens and assumptions about the way the world works native to the
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traditions of the West5 a set of beliefs I will refer to as Western Cosmology. Thinking
about Western Cosmology is a theoretical lens borrowed from Marshall Sahlins in his 1994
lecture The Sadness of Sweetness. In it he approaches the belief systems of the West as we
would any other taking them apart as indigenous conceptions of human existence...at a
particular historical juncture (Sahlins 1996). Given the general demographics of the Quantified
Self movement as centred in technologically-advanced and devoutly capitalist social frameworks
of the Global North, how their world views have been shaped by the forces of Western
Cosmology would appear to be key to understanding how and why this movement has emerged.
Constructing the Self

Considering the centrality of the concept of the self in the label the Quantified Self, it
serves us to briefly review the legacy of this idea. Thinkers in the Quantified Self movement
have expressed considerable interest in understanding their own constructions of the self. In
his keynote presentation at the 2012 Quantified Self conference, Kevin Kelly began by drawing
attention to the concept of the self as a recent invention which for most of our time on earth
as a species...was not present (Kelly 2012b). By this he means that the modern individual is
undoubtably a cultural construction, having been formed by the influence of a great many
historical thinkers and notions. There is also a strong narrative in Quantified Self circles on the
nature of the self as still changing and evolving, as a process rather than a destiny (Kelly
Problematic though that term may be, I mean to refer to it as a particular historical tradition that
primarily emerged from Western Europe and the United States, encompassing much of what we
consider the dominant ways of thinking in many powerful social institutions that the Quantified Self
movement finds itself intertwined with today.
5
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2012b). Indeed it sometimes seems our experiences of embodiment and conceptions of self are
shifting more rapidly now than ever before, driven by our new relationships with technology and
its integration into everyday life.
Conceptions and narratives of the self in Western Cosmology always seem to lead us
back to a broad hundred year period between the seventeenth and eighteenth century referred to
as the Enlightenment. We place a great deal of importance on the ideas of a few men living
within that time period and those later influenced by their legacy Rene Decartes, Francis
Bacon, Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, and Adam Smith, to
name a few. We credit them for laying down the foundation for modern scientific,
technological, and social progress (Merchant 1979: 99). They established our dependence on
concepts such as Cartesian Dualism, rational materialism, the scientific method, paid wagelabour, Laissez-faire economics, and freeing society from narrow religious doctrines. Today, we
are still living in the shadow of the Enlightenment in far more ways than we routinely reflect on.
Constructing Human Nature

In outlining the fundamental beliefs about the self that we seem to hold as unquestionably
true in the Western world, Sahlins begins even further back than the Enlightenment, with the
Judeo-Christian story of the Garden of Eden. He presents the idea that since our primary origin
myth we have held onto a number of notions about the way humans are in the world. What we
first believed about humans was said to be handed down from the authority of God. Once we
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entered an age of replacing religious doctrines with natural science, we changed very little of our
beliefs about the self, but re-labelled them as human nature justified by the forces of the
natural world instead of a deity this time (Sahlins 1996). Rational science was the one to provide
us with this narrative about natural man. We now hold onto a pattern of explaining our cultural
forms using nature, despite the fact that human nature as we know it has been determined by
culture (Sahlins 1996: 403). That which is thought of as natural is in actual fact a projection
of human perceptions of self and society onto the cosmos, as Caroline Merchant aptly puts it
(Merchant 1979: 69). Our own blindness to how we constructed and then affirmed this idea of
human nature is argued by Sahlins to have prevented many generations of theorists from seeing
the classic bourgeois subject embedded in it (Sahlins 2008: 2). Modern capitalism is then
affirmed and upheld by these ideas about mans nature that we continue to perpetuate, as a
cosmology that serves the needs of a growth-driven market and the self-regulatory
republic (Sahlins 2008; 63).
Human Imperfection
Sahlins theory centres around the notion of human imperfection as a central concern in
Western thought. The biblical tale of Adam and Eves fall from grace teaches that humans ruined
the perfection bestowed on them by God. Eves original sin of eating the forbidden apple was
the first act of impurity driven by need, and condemned man to struggle in a world of physical
toil and eventual mortality. This story provides us with the foundational premise that all human
action is driven by human need by either an avoidance of pain or a seeking of pleasure, and
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usually some combination of the two interests (Sahlins 1996: 395-398). The search for
satisfaction, or the melioration of our pains, becomes the focus of our inner will, a belief that
could only have emerged from some very singular ideas of humanity, society, and
nature (Sahlins 1996). In Sahlins mind, the significance of this belief to the eventual
dominance of the capitalist economic system cannot be overstated. The presumed nature of
mankind as insatiably chasing after an elusive satiation through happiness and pleasure defines
modern capitalism, and aligns with the stated desires of quantified selfers. The intertwined
relationship of Quantified Self and capitalist ideologies is expanded upon in chapter six. For
now, we only need to consider how mans imperfect state of need becomes the baseline for the
Western conception of the self.
Dividing Bodies and Minds

The Western self is a split self each whole person is believed to be the sum of a
hierarchically stratified and dualistically opposed pair: the inferior, material body, and the
dominant, immaterial mind. While both components are needed to make up a person, the
internal experience of the self is understood as being located within the more powerful mind.
The body is cast as a materially sensing tool that the mind will use for immaterial experiences; a
lesser possession belonging to the far more valuable mind where the persons true identity lies.
The somatic division between our physical forms and our mental experiencing selves is known
as Cartesian Dualism, and was most famously propagated by the French thinker Rene Descartes.
While Descartes originated the idea, its rapidly pervasive trajectory was undoubtably the result
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of being adopted by the institutions of science and biomedicine, which built their knowledgebases around the cultural assumption. The repetition and affirmation of the idea across organised
systems of knowledge deeply embedded it in our understanding of the self, and casts a long
shadow over our experience of living in our bodies today.
Scheper-Hughes and Lock assert that one of the problematic fundamental divides
presented by the cartesian model is the opposition of the real tangible body and the unreal
aerial mind. This division of mental and corporeal also brings with it a mountain of associative
baggage in the form of dualistic and opposing pairs; seen and unseen, natural and supernatural,
rational and irrational, high and low, women and men, wisdom and ignorance, cultural and
natural, prudence and lewdness, wealth and poverty, and so on and so forth (Scheper-Hughes and
Lock 1987: 7; Federici 2004; 135). These pairs reinforce a perpetual need for hierarchy in
Western Cosmology, a constant evaluation of the world into distinct categories where one is
almost always preferable over the other. A state that drives us in very specific directions, chasing
after the presumed better qualities of the world. We will see this become especially significant
in the desire for progress, a belief in the need for constant improvement by moving ourselves
toward that which we are told is good in and of itself, often without much scrutiny or
questioning.
Lower Bodies
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It is significant that in our origin myth, the particular need displayed by Eve was a
dualistic hunger; both for the nourishment of an apple, and the wisdom it contained. Her physical
and intellectual desires satiated in a single bite. In that moment of consumption, she divided
them and condemned humankind to forever feel we lack enough of either. When we recount this
story, we accentuate that it was the fruit of knowledge, not simply a delicious apple that was
worth getting kicked out of Eden for. We can forgive the hunger for knowledge, but hunger from
the body is not seen as a worthy excuse. Having gained wisdom, the physical body immediately
become shameful, and since then has been portrayed as one of the most fundamental human
vulnerabilities throughout Western thought and writing. The western tradition finds the body to
be the source of epistemological error, moral error, and mortality (Csordas 1994; 8). We are
taught to experience discomfort with its functional needs and dependencies, as it links man to
the earth and birth and death, expressing his basic beastiality (Sahlins 1996: 401). While
corporeally weak, man was still assured his immaterial being was worthy of eventually rejoining
God in heaven, so long as he used it to keep the desires of his lesser material self in check. The
mind was put in charge of mastering bodily needs of exerting willpower and using its
dominance to control the needs, reactions, and reflexes of the body (Federici 2004; 149).
Progress was framed as any gains the systematic and controlling mind could make over the
chaotic and rebellious body. Constructing this dualism between the mind and body has
condemned man to a perpetual internal warfare of spirit and flesh (Sahlins 1996: 402). The
body became as a conflict zone between a reasoning, rational, immaterial mind and an unruly,
uncontrollable, physical body.
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Higher Minds
The intangible be it the soul or mind of man has long been affiliated with an
idealised higher realm, whether religious or intellectual. We think our minds are the gateway to
immortality in struggling to accept our eventual mortality, we relegate death to the body and
seek to live forever through the legacy of our thoughts. This existential strife of being half
animal and half symbolic has been articulated well by anthropologist Ernest Becker in his
reflections in The Denial of Death:
The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature: ...he is out of nature and hopelessly
in it; his is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body
that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a
material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways - the strangest and most
repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split
in two: has has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of
nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground for a few feet in
order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in
and to have to live with. [Becker 1973]
Becker refers to this as the fundamental human predicament of believing we are simultaneously
worms and gods (Becker 1973). (Or half angel and half beast as Sahlins chose to put it)
(Sahlins 1996: 401). We become overwhelmed by the fear of both our highest and our lowest
possibilities, as both intellectually considering ourselves divine Gods (indeed telling ourselves
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we were created in his image) and living within our animal-like earthly bodies. Bodies that we
resent for their simple needs such as sustenance and warmth and excretion and sexuality. These
needs are what has distinguished mankind from Gods self-sufficient perfection (Sahlins 1996;
397).
Metaphorical Bodies
Metaphor is one of the most influential cultural forms of constructing understandings in
its process of linking one domain of experience to another. Ideas about the body are continuously
projected into other realms of culture, as Mary Douglas once famously noted that just as it is
true that everything symbolises the body, so it is equally true that the body symbolises everything
else (Douglas 1996: 122). For Scheper-Lock and Hughes, this is encompassed in their theory of
the social body the idea that cultures use the body as a representational symbol to think with.
The body becomes a site of a constant exchange of meanings between the natural and the
social world (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). The stories we tell ourselves and the ideas we
hold to be true in regards to our bodies have profound effects on our experiences of embodiment.
The relationship between metaphors of the body and experiential embodiment then mirror and
play off one another. The power of the cultural metaphor is especially evident in the
ethnographic content of this thesis, as members of the Quantified Self movement equate their
bodies to functional machines, to sites of scientific experimentation, to battlefields of war, and to
collections of numerical data. These conceptions are constructed and defined in realms outside of
the human body and appropriated to them after the fact.
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Scientific Domination of the Natural Body

Since the Enlightenment, one of the dominant metaphors we have used to understand the
body is that of the mechanical machine. Before the Enlightenment and industrialisation, human
bodies were thought about as interconnected parts of the larger organism of nature the earth
represented the body and the body represented the earth (Merchant 1979: 1, 69-81; Giblett 2008:
20). Ideas about the body transitioned from being considered a holistically natural system to a
reductively mechanical one with the rise of rational science. Beginning in the sixteenth and
accelerating up through the seventeenth century, thinkers in the West become excessively
concerned with enforcing order over the natural world. Nature was seen as a disorderly and
chaotic realm to be subdued and controlled (Merchant 1979: 127). This order was enforced
through a new form of institutional power scientific rationalism, defined by the dominance of
empirical observation, materialism, the experimental scientific method, common sense logic,
and the prioritising of human progress above all else. In the mechanical viewpoint of science,
the natural world is broken down into its smallest possible parts elements, particles, atoms
segmented units of passive, inert matter that only move or change when external forces act upon
them (Merchant 1979: 184). This world was there to be observed and classified through the
scientific method, then dismantled and reconstructed into man-made creations. Becker believes
social institutions like science and medicine help us deny our discomfort with our creature-like
qualities by imagining we have secure power, made possible by unconsciously leaning on the
persons and things of [our] society (Becker 1973). This manipulation of nature was said to be
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the building of civilisation, the method through which man would achieve progress, improving
the world by suiting it to fit his needs rather than living within its existent forms a perceived
collective social good that would eventually sanction the rise of commercial capitalism
(Merchant 1979: 111, 172).
Mechanical Bodies
Within the framework of science, the natural body was subject to the same dismantling
into distinct parts, redefinition, and attempted alteration at the hands of objective knowledge,
quantified numbers, evidence empirically verified through experimentation, and scientifically
constructed facts. The preference for producing rigorous, logical, robust, hard, scientific
knowledge about the real world was applied to our bodies, a disposition the Quantified Self
movement has truly taken to heart (Martin 1992: 570). The mechanical body is entrenched into
our thinking by its adoption and extensive repetition by the biological sciences and biomedical
institutions, now widespread and explicit in our textbooks and literature. The parallels drawn
between the human body and mechanical machines are numerous and pervasive through the
writings of Western thinkers; from Descartes Discourse on Method to La Mettries Man a
Machine, the cultural metaphor has stuck hard and fast. As with any intellectual idea, the theory
has cycled through periods of popularity and irrelevance. It seems, however, that we are now
witnessing a revival of an increasingly mechanical view of the body in tandem with our
increasing dependence and integration of technology into our cultural lives (Hacking 2007). Just
as our machines have evolved, so too have these metaphors, as we now increasingly describe
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ourselves in terms of computer functions. Metaphors used in the language of Quantified Selfers
affirms this conception of the human body as a machine to be tested, tinkered with, fixed,
updated, optimised, repaired, serviced, and re-built. Along with the rest of Western society, they
refer to being turned on, tuned in, wound up, having their buttons pushed, blowing a
fuse, and then needing to recharge (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 23). A few trackers
preferred car analogies, explaining their data-checking to be like keeping an eye on a dashboard,
a way of caring for the locomotive body so that at 200,000 miles [it] runs just as well as the day
you bought it (Smarr 2012; Christensen 2013).
Divided Machines
Understanding our bodies as machines builds into them a number of assumed qualities.
First, that we are made up of divided and distinguishable parts and systems we speak of these
all the time: the various individual organs; the nervous, circulatory, lymphatic, and respiratory
systems; the sleep cycle; the appetite; the senseswhich can all be taken apart and classified in
all their components and possibilities (Federici 2004: 140). The body and its processes are
deconstructed down into individual aspects of functioning, each addressed and optimised
individually rather than being treated as a holistic whole. As the person is believed to be made up
of many separate parts, being able to cohesively streamline them into a perfect working order is
admirable, and will bring social prestige upon their owner (Martin 1992: 582). The division of
the self into categories is ubiquitous among self-trackers, who select specifically defined parts of
themselves to quantify and experiment upon. They pick their fluid intake, or their blood glucose
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levels, or their body weight, or the frequency with which they experience headaches. The
possibilities are endless, and yet they are all very specific and often narrowly bounded parts of
themselves individual aspects that are divided from the whole. Inheriting this technique from
the methods of scientific rationalism, they attempt to make improvements to each category in
isolation treating each as its own bounded entity. Much as the technician might read the
feedback data of a factory machine to evaluate its performance, these individuals become
technicians of their own body tweaking and adjusting variables and inputs as deemed
necessary.
Biohacking
Turning the body into a machine is in many ways the ultimate act of man attempting to
exert dominance over nature as an inferior system for his needs. The idea the biological bodies
we are born with could do with some upgrading is the product of very specifically historical
notions of anthropocentric dominance over the natural world. We can again see how these
notions trail back to the origin stories of the bible when Adam was handed dominion over all
things natural on this earth. A more radical modern manifestation of this idea might be the
philosophy of biohacking. Within the diversity of the Quantified Self movement, we find a
specific population who attempt to hack their biology in the name of self-improvement. While
self-trackers believe in using the information they amass to makes positive changes in their lives,
biohackers might be understood to take the more aggressive form of this practice they run on
the extreme end of self-experimentation (Dembosky 2011). Keep in mind the root definition of
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hack as aggressively cutting through something. The hacking being spoken of here more
specifically refers to an interruption of an otherwise natural process by premeditated,
intentional and forceful means. It carries the connotation of an aggressive outside force invading
onto an already set functioning system and overturning its processes, usually in some way that
implies cheating or shortcuts finding ways to bend the rules. This conception fits into the
greater Quantified Self narrative that their self-improvement techniques are a radical overturning
of the normal way of approaching problems. The body is suddenly problematised in a way it
previously hasnt been before its natural systems are now inferior collections of organic
functions coming to emerge without intelligent design behind them. The individual feels they
must then step up to be that intelligent designer guiding the bodys functioning.
One of the more popular websites for biohacking resources is run by Dave Asprey, also
known as the Bulletproof Executive. Offering guidance from his executive-ninja-themed
personal website, Asprey explains how he began hacking by using complex system engineering
techniques to upgrade [his] own biology (Asprey 2013). The language used to describe his life
improvements simultaneously reflect tinkering with a complicated piece of machinery and
managing a corporation. You can read about how to maintain your bodys hardware,
bulletproof your diet, turbocharge your immune system, upgrade your energy supply,
optimise your supplements, hack your nervous system, and consciously manage
stress (Asprey 2013). We see the subtle theme of warfare running through these possibilities,
bringing up the idea we are engaged in some kind of war where our bodies are under attack. If
we are in need of bulletproofing, who is shooting the bullets? In studying the language used
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around the immune system and invading microbes, Emily Martin found a pervasive conception
of the nonself world as foreign and hostile, as composed of masses of cells bent on our
destruction (Martin 1992: 126). In the context of the Quantified Self worldview, this
dangerously invasive external other includes the usual fears around illness-causing microbes,
but also includes forces originating in the structures of society itself. Much of the defensive
language paints society as the external threat, imposing demanding jobs, stressful commutes, and
monotonous lifestyles on individuals. Some of the perceived dangers are medical in nature:
Asprey expresses anxiety around the common ailments of the affluent Western world cancer,
diabetes, and heart disease (Asprey 2013). It is significant to note these are commonly believed
to be caused by the Western lifestyle, linked to cultural factors such as food choices and
sedentary living, which directly places the blame on the norms of society. All these discomforts
emerge from the social structures of life, a kind where the expectations for being successful
require functioning at a fast-paced, modern, and aggressively competitive level. The underlying
theme is the body under fire from society, requiring the individual to defend themselves against a
collective system trying to undermine their strength and wellbeing at every turn.
Sleep Hacking
Measuring the self and adjusting its functionality is especially popular in relation to sleep.
Alongside diet, exercise, and time, sleep is perhaps one of the most common life aspects
measured and manipulated by Quantified Selfers; in fact monitoring the effects of daily habits on
quality of sleep could be considered the gateway drug of self-tracking. This is due in no small
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part to the popularity of devices like the Zeo Sleep Manager a nighttime headband that picks
up electric signals from the brain and compiles a record of being awake, or in light, REM, and
deep sleep phases to report back to the wearer in the morning; information previously only
available through sleep-research clinics. This act of measuring the brain is proposed to help you
take control of your sleep, using the personalised advice of your manager (Zeo 2013). The
business-like language used suggests a transaction between you, your body, and your technology,
all as separate agents in the exchange. The device is going to assist you in achieving your sleep
goals, that your natural body appears to have failed to live up to. There are specific sections on
the website to research how to hack your sleep, including such options as conditioning your
body to function on a kind of polyphasic sleep composed of six 20 minute naps in a twentyfour hour period, totally only four hours of sleeping time compared to the traditional eight
(Zeo 2013). A tempting experiment in overturning natural patterns for the self-proclaimed time
starved citizens of the developed world.
Measuring Brains, Controlling Minds

Scientific control over the natural body has been especially concerned with controlling
the supposed physical container of the immaterial and valuable mind the brain. Western
biomedicine and technoscience reduces the complex idea of an individual mind to this physical
organ. Medical anthropologist Emily Martin labels this neuroreductionism and is extremely
critical of how it assumes all human experiences and social activities fundamentally stem from
the neural firings of our brains. Science believes that if we study the physical brain closely
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enough, we will eventually be able to universally understand and predict all human behaviour
(Martin 2000: 573-754). Given that these are the dominant assumptions in much of neuroscience,
an area that has significant influence on and carry over into Quantified Self science, we can see
why there is significant enthusiasm for measuring brains in the movement. One quantified selfer
explicitly spoke of learning from neuroscience that the self emerges from the integrated
workings of three distinct brain systems, and therefore the brain creates the self (Keener
2012). Therefore, controlling the brain would offer potential control over the future of ones
actions, idealised to eventually lead to absolute conscious control over all actions of the self.
They believe that better [organisation of] our own brains will lead to a fuller and more
meaningful concept of self (Keener 2012).
Self-tracker and Danish university professor Jakob Eg Larsen promises individuals the
ability to map their brains all day, every day using his Smartphone Brain Scanner, a headset
that allows you to hold your brain in the palm of your hand (Larsen 2012). This promise of, in
some sense, holding ones brain is salient and appealing for those aspiring to improve culturally
valuable personal characteristics that we locate within the mind, like self-control and effective
self-management. Larson sees understanding the connections between brains and behaviours as
key to future improvements in well-being and productivity (Larsen 2012). The brain is
presented as both powerful and elusive, a hidden pattern of logic that holds great promises.
Members of the Quantified Self movement like Larsen are excited about the continuing
advancements were making in being able to do brain scanning outside of a laboratory setting.
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Methods like fMRI and PET scans require expensive and bulky equipment, but we are seeing a
rise in the development of EEG scanning a method of measuring electronic activity along the
scalp with extremely affordable and portable hardware. By walking around with scanning
nodes attached to your scalp all day long, the device collects real-time neuro feedback of your
brain activity and reports what areas are in use. What remains unclear is why this information is
meaningful to the wearer. Larson claims analysis of the data could lead to improved behaviour,
reaction times, emotional responses, and even musical performances (Larsen 2012; Wolf 2010a).
Just how we get from the ability to see a very specifically constructed image of our brain to
making vast improvements in our ability to play a violin is a sketchily drawn path that many
assume follows a logical progression.
Passive Machines
Understanding the body within this mechanical metaphor carries implications for how we
interact with our physical form given that it portrays the body as a passive object. Machines are
tools used to achieve certain ends, and in reducing our value of the body to how it allows us to
interact with the world, we fail to wholly embody it as an integrated and intrinsically valuable
part of the self. Individuals in our society experience distressing conflict with their bodies
because the metaphor of the body as machine does not perfectly align with the reality of bodily
forms and functions. Unlike machines, bodies are imperfect, variable, and in a state of constant
degeneration (Hogle 2005: 696). This variability and inherent internal change constantly
happening is undermined by the understanding of the body as passive material which requires
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any changes or motion to come from external forces (Merchant 1979: 111). Federici argues that
this leads to us seeing the biological body as brute matter, wholly divorced from any rational
qualities: it does not know, does not want, does not feel (Federici 2004: 139). If the body itself
cannot know, it becomes a very limited source of knowledge only the minds experience of the
body is now a valid source of information, still inherently flawed by being one degree removed.
The numbers that are assigned to the body such as temperature, blood pressure, and all kinds of
other measurements, are always the absolute rule over the reported sense of embodiment. The
subjective experience is given only marginal validity in modern biomedicine and technoscience.
Some Quantified Selfers have clearly inherited this attitude towards the body, as tracker Larry
Smarr argued the idea that you can feel what is going on with you is so epistemologically
incorrect, as a frustrated response to doctors continually asking him how he felt. He would
rather them ask What are your numbers? (Boesel 2012).
Quantifying the Qualitative

At a surface level, the idea of the Quantified Self is solely concerned with numbers. For
many it will draw to mind the dehumanised, dry, and abstracted approach to life we associate
with those deep in the mathematical or objectively scientific world. While some Quantified
Selfers clearly hold deeply traditional beliefs about the unfeeling and mechanical body, there are
many other members of the movement who are pushing and questioning of our usual conceptions
of science. Community members describe a latent tension forming between the hard-line
information trackers and the mindfully-inclined explorative trackers (Boesel 2012). Alongside
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valuing numerical data, many aspects of the Quantified Self culture emphasise giving voice to
the individual, the specific, the humanised person telling a story about themselves and their
experiences. Their experiments are, after all, subjective and individualised scientific methods
performed upon the self. It may in fact be better understood as a radical attempt to place
importance upon a subjective collection of so-called objective data. We should consider how
they might be speaking for their data, rather than assuming it is the other way around.
The dominance of data and quantitative information over the qualitative story of a
human bodily experience is a major site of tension within the Quantified Self movement. How
external measurement and internal intuition should be balanced is a common topic among the
bloggers and commentators of the community. This leads us back to the cultural oppositions of
what is objective or subjective, real or unreal, seen or unseen, quantifiable hard data or
qualitative soft assessment. There seems to be an ambivalent or reluctance around the reliance
on numbers within the community. Wolf describes the need to tolerate the pathologies of
quantification in order to reap the powerful benefits (Wolf 2010a). He cites that numbers enable
the testing, comparisons and analysis that make up the bedrock of the Quantified Self method of
self-experimentation. The figures make problems less resonant emotionally (Wolf 2010a).
This especially comes in to play with Quantified Selfers attempting to measure and
evaluate changes to their emotions and moods. One of the great misconceptions of the Quantified
Self movement is the idea its members are reducing their humanity and sense of personal self by
way of numbers. Many self-trackers actually place a hefty emphasis on self-awareness,
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mindfulness, and intuitive knowledge beyond what the computerised graphs can tell them
(Boesel 2012; Erwin 2012). In fact, despite their relatively short six-year existence, the
movement has significantly shifted its focus from being primarily made up of the more
traditional strictly-numerical trackers to now include a growing population of holisticallyinclined members. They keep tabs on qualities of their life we would usually label as
qualitative emotions, feelings, perceptions of experiences, social interactions, moods,
outlook on life, and sense of satisfaction, to name a few. In fact, staying conscious of these
traditionally non-numerical facets is far more important to the evolving Quantified Self
community than many might think. The Quantified Self website recently did a five part special
on the variety of mood tracking tools currently available and reflections on what some refer to
softer concepts of progress such as happiness and contentment, or spiritual enlightenment,
proving the topic to currently be popular and prominent in the minds of Quantified Selfers (Kelly
2007a).
There is an interesting contradiction, however, in some trackers gauging these qualitative

experiences by assigning them numerical values in order to make them quantitative. There is a
strange dichotomy of trying to signify the value of more holistic and intangible aspects of
life, while exploring them through the narrow methods of numerical logic. There is a trend of
trackers practicing QS math, such as the math of happiness formula developed by Konstanin
Augemberg (Kelly 2012b). He is on a personal quest to uncover a methodical and generalised
pathway to happiness. His equation for the optimisation of life is yi = f(x1, .., xj), where yi
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are the major components of health, happiness, relationships, success, and financial solvency.
While xj are the major internal and external factors of psychological, physical and cognitive
states, habits, and the weather (Augemberg 2013b). This belief that happiness is firstly the
ultimate objective in life, and secondly, will come from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain
returns to the argument suggested by Sahlins that these ideas emerge from a specific cultural
viewpoint (Sahlin 1996).
Augemberg came to these conclusion after carrying out a scientifically-minded personal
values experiment where he sought to quantify his life priorities and draw them up in a
mathematical two-dimensional structure. Believing there are ten core super-values that are
universal and stable across the gender, age and socio-economic groups, cultures and
generations. The categories include learning, spiritual balance, family, career, and hedonism
(Augemberg 2012). There are many arguments to be made against this assertion, but these kind
of assumptions about human universals are common and pervasive throughout the belief system
of the Quantified Self culture. They have to be assumed in order to quantify the traditionally
qualitative. He would then assign numerical values to the felt importance of each three times a
day, aggregate the data and apply calculation to find relative means. This system led to
conclusions such as hedonism being more important in the mornings, learning and creativity
spiked during working hours, and his strive for independence trailed off towards the end of the
day (Augemberg 2012). Even when there is a desire to understand the squishy areas of
emotion and value, the way to insight is always through data. Equating data with truth, they see it
as the most important thing you can trust" because it takes emotions and politics out of the
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equation (Inkinen 2012; Pescovitz 2009). We should acknowledge an inherent irony in valuing
the emotion-less qualities of data-gathering being used to understand the emotional self.
While the tracking behaviour of Augemberg might be one of the more contradictory
examples, there are also trackers who take their dedication to relinquishing the rigidity of
quantification one step further. Nancy Dougherty is one self-tracker seeking to use technology
for the purpose of mindfulness, by constructing a necklace of LED lights and sensors that
illuminate themselves when she smiles, ideally subtly alerting her to be mindful of the way she
receives others (Erwin 2012). Quantified Selfers like Dougherty clearly take a looser and more
holistic approach to the idea of tracking, considering it valuable whether anything is being
numerically recorded or not. Yet even in practices like these, trackers are depending on the idea
that we require tools outside of the internal experiencing self to reach higher realms of
understanding about the self.
The field of psychology has long considered the inner world of the mind to be run by
mysterious and hidden forces. A number of pop psychology books in recent years have
especially promoted this notion that we lack significant knowledge, insight, and understanding of
ourselves. Widely read non-fiction publications that have consistently topped the New York
Times bestseller lists include Daniel Khanemans Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, Daniel H. Pinks
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and Dan Arielys Predictably Irrational
and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty How We Lie to Everyone Especially Ourselves
(Ariely 2008, 2012; Khaneman 2011; Pink 2009). The titles in many ways speak for themselves,
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as these thinkers in behavioural economics point out that thinking about the human being in
terms of economic logic often fails to make sense. They attribute this to faults in the
functioning of the human biological brain, which is said to trick, fool, and blind us to our true
experiences. It suggests a division between the actual embodied experiences people have and
some abstracted real experience happening in the physical neurones of the brain here we
have the legacy of Cartesian Dualism in full swing. It is perhaps no wonder we feel increasingly
compelled to strive after self-knowledge and awareness given these proposed ideologies of living
in mental darkness.
One of the most popular mood tracking iPhone applications, Expereal, was actually
developed as a direct response to Daniel Khanemans theory that we have a cognitive bias
where we remember experiences differently when looking at them as part of the past (Expereal
2013; Khaneman 2011). To combat this, the application intermittently prompts you to capture
your mood on an earthy and colourful wheel of numbers ranging from one to ten. You can then
add tags describing your situation, confirm your GPS location, and pick any companions you
might be with from your Facebook friend list metadata that will later show you correlations
between your ratings and your environment (Expereal 2013). The developers state that they
wanted the application to serve peoples need for self-knowledge, self-understanding, leading to
self-improvement (Expereal 2013). You would look back on your numbers and know how you
were truly feeling at those moments, rather than relying on false memories. One user
reported quitting a job she thought she loved on the basis of the evidence of low mood
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scores while at work which led her to realise she was not as happy as she had thought (Nafus
and Sherman 2013a).
The implication is that we do not truly know ourselves as well as we think, that our
experiences are invalid as a form of truth are a clear lasting legacy of objective scientific
thinking. Especially in the realm of the soft knowledge of emotion and feeling, our subjective
reality is so untrustworthy that we need to rely on a system of numbers to find out anything at all.
These beliefs all at once value emotional experience as an important source of insight and yet
undermine it as a way of knowing. Even though mindfulness is becoming a new buzzword and
trend in the movement, and numerical data is by no means unquestionably accepted, hard data
from the outside still ends up having the final say in how self-trackers make sense of the
world.
In ways we might read these occasionally contradictory attempts at mindful tracking as

a reactive one: the scientifically reductive origins of quantification is a critique that has been
publicly levelled against the Quantified Self movement numerous times over the past few years.
Perhaps this reformed attitude is a kind of defensiveness, as they respond to critics by
emphasising and encouraging the more qualitative factions of their community. At the most
recent 2012 Global Quantified Self conference, Nafus and Sherman observed the arena to be
full of these sorts of discourses of mindfulness and awareness, being used to describe how selftracking differs from other practices that deeply integrate technology into human lives (Nafus
and Sherman 2013a). Nafus and Sherman assert that in many emerging aspects of their
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community, Quantified Selfers do not cede authority to the supposed objectivity of devices, or
the quantitative nature of sensor data, but rather traverse between two worlds one inside
and another outside the body (Nafus and Sherman 2013a). This is an assumption in itself, as
Emily Martin pointed out that we have long been taught the boundary between the body (self)
and the external world (nonself) is rigid and absolute, a message propagated everywhere from
biology class to the popular media (Martin 1992: 126).
Embodiment
This question of having a sense of an inside and an outside to the body brings us to
the notion of embodiment as the fundamental way of experiencing the world. Prioritising the
sensuous experience of being-in-the-world as a body, over understanding the body as an
objectified component of the Cartesian mind/body duality, has become known as embodiment
theory (Strathern and Stewart 2011: 388). It is a question of whether we look at ourselves from
the outside in, or the inside out. Embodiment theory takes the position that at a base level, we
can only ever see from the inside out. While the body sometimes functions as a social object,
embodiment theory believes the objectified body is still experienced from a fundamentally
subjective cultural viewpoint. Its holistic approach collapses the distinction between mind, body,
and experience. Much of my understanding is drawn from Thomas Csordas who views the body
as an experiencing agent, a subject rather than an object (Csordas 1994: 3). If subjectivity lies
squarely at the centre of bodily experience and there is no other kind, the concern Self
Quantifiers have for understanding their body in the outside, external, real world is in fact
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an unattainable goal. The division between an inside and an outside of the body is an
abstract notion in terms of actual experience we can have no understanding that does not take
place through embodiment (not withstanding debates over out-of-body experiences, embodiment
theory would still understand these as occurring from within the subjective body).
Standardised Machines
The externally-existing and mechanical body also assumes a standardisation of all human
bodies. Being material objects, machines invoke the idea that they can be replicated, each one
simply a minor deviation of the next. Biomedicine has especially taken on this belief in their
standardised prescriptions and generalised health recommendations for the public social body.
The FDA, the AMA, the USDA, and so forth, provide pre-approved, cookie cutter biological
optimums and healthy goals to the civic population. Recommended hours of sleep, caloric
intake and outtake, body mass index, normal heart rate and pulse, are among the categories.
Anthropologist Emily Martin has argued that the culture of medicine exacts conformity as the
price of participation (Martin 1992: 13). In order to engage with modern biomedicine and its
many potential benefits, individuals must surrender themselves to being compared to the medial
templates of normalcy and standardisation. These recommendations are often the starting points
for many self-trackers, however, many find the purpose of their tracking is to discover how they
deviate from the pre-determined norm. To find their own healthy optimums and standards.
The ideal body that is being pursued by self-trackers may at first seem to be a
standardised product of the medical and scientific community. However, many individuals within
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the Quantified Self community have reacted vehemently to this notion of standardising
themselves, arguing the practice of collecting personal data allows us to legitimise the specific
needs of each individual body. Wolf has firmly expressed his belief that people are not assembly
lines. We cannot be fine tuned to a known standard, because a universal standard for human
experience does not exist (Wolf 2010a). He notes that it is typical for pioneering self-trackers
to defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge (Wolf 2010a).
One of the great hopes that gets many people excited about the Quantified Self movement
is the promise of personalised medicine, where medical treatment dreams of being infinitely
more effective by designing drugs according to the needs of each particular person in each
particular case of illness (Kelly 2012b; Smarr 2012). The idea is that given an infinite amount of
specific data on each human body, we will no longer have to rely on understand at level of the
aggregate median. The movement has taken on the cause of actively challenging the established
medical and scientific standards we now live with, believing in many ways they represent the
new frontiers of these institutions.
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Chapter Three - New Science, New Medicine, New World
Chapter Three
New Science, New Medicine, New World
The Quantified Self movement is undeniably based in the philosophies and methods of
science as a cultural artefact of the Western world. The importance of quantifiable data in the
Quantified Self ideology mirrors its centrality in science and the production of empirical and
verifiable knowledge. The gathering of data about, and subsequently experimenting on, the
body in many ways turn it into a personal scientific laboratory. Despite these historical roots, the
Quantified Self movement is becoming a force that challenges, questions, and seeks to overhaul
the methods and type of knowledge that count as science. Given the capacities of current
technology to cheaply and easily produce personalised data about individual bodies, they believe
we should be actively evolving the institutions of science and biomedicine, moving away from
the generalising and standardising practices that these institutions have traditionally worked
within. The classic QS attitude is described as distrusting artefacts of these institutions such as
diet books, doctors, and even how you feel, as you cant know for certain that youre healthy
unless you actually measure (Boesel 2012). By measure, they mean measuring using their
own personal quantification methods instead of those taken by medical professionals. This
distrust develops into attempts to undermine or work around the current power structures. They
approach this in a variety of ways, from developing their own strain of science, to promoting
the rise of personalised medicine, all trying to fight back against the idea that individual
differences are noise that is to be ignored or suppressed (Augemberg 2013a).
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Quantified Selfers aspire to follow the scientific method, emphasising standardised

methods and data collection, hypothesis testing, and controlled variables (Butterfield 2012: 61).
While idealising the scientific method, many Quantified Selfers also feel their standards are more
straightforward and flexible, describing the QS cycle as having an idea, gathering data,
testing the data, and making a change based on the findings (Branwen 2012). In a blog post
series called QS 101, written to provide guidance to those brand new to the movement and
practice, Ernesto Ramirez offers four lessons that define their scientifically-inclined practice:
Lesson #1: Something is better than nothing. Engaging yourself in some experiment, no
matter how flawed it may be, is better than never starting. The best way to learn is to do.
So go out and do something!
Lesson #2: When you decide to start something try and do the simplest thing that you
think might give you some insight. Its great to have ambitious ideas, but keeping it
simple ensures your experiment is manageable.
Lesson #3: Mistakes are worthwhile. Some of our best knowledge comes from learning
from our failures so dont be afraid of failing. By keeping it simple you also keep the
mistakes small and manageable.
Lesson #4: Seek help from others. We have a great network of individuals around the
world who are ready and willing to help you on your tracking journey. Find a meet-up in
your area and dont be afraid to solicit help! [Ramirez 2012a]
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Emphasising inclusive engagement, simplicity, forgiveness of mistakes, and social communality

all make for an appealing portrait of self-experimentation. One that diverges from the established
associations we have with the formal, institutional culture of Science.
As many scholars in the growing field of Science and Technology Studies have noted, the
Western scientific establishment carries with it a very specific culture yet simultaneously denies
the existence of such (Franklin 1995). As Emily Martin puts it, they claim to construct reality
but not to be themselves constructed (Martin 1998: 26). Sarah Franklin historically frames
science as coming from a particular point of view that establishes cultural traditions, one that
places particular emphasis on hierarchically distinguishing pure hard facts from relative soft
knowledge. Scientists are adamant about the existence of an external, law-like reality, and
devote themselves to scientific progress using techniques that are cultural and historical
artefacts of instrumental reason (Franklin 1995). Theirs is a very specific and culturally-bound
method of producing scientific truth through detached objectivity. The focus on quantification
and objectivity that runs throughout Quantified Self is inherently tied to the power that comes
with knowledge creation in professional science (Butterfield 2012: 57).
Producing knowledge in the form of facts has been the raison detre of science since its
origins. Ronald Day summarises the power dynamics of scientific facts in his historical work,
The Modern Invention of Information. Day lays out how scientific institutions draw social power
from taking on the role of master signifier, controlling both the logic of information
production, and the value of information produced (Day 2001: 27). We see this play out in
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relationship to the Quantified Self movement, as despite grounding their experimental practices
in the scientific method, scientists have dismissed and delegitimised the results produced by
Quantified Self experiments (Ramirez 2012a).
Butterfield believes that the question of whether self-quantification can be considered a

science is the single most contentious issue within the community, observing split crowds and
harsh words whenever the subject arises at meetings (Butterfield 2012: 60). Those within the
movement concerned with strict quantification are often the same ones concerned with having
self-quantification be taken seriously in the scientific world. A number of Quantified Selfers are
beginning to argue that their community and its practices should be considered not only a
legitimate part of the current domain of modern science, but an increasingly essential part of its
future (Ramirez 2012a). They see research methods expanding and emerging beyond the walled
fortress of science, as described by Emily Martin in her anthropological examination of
scientific institutions. Up until now, she claims scientific institutions have considered themselves
above and apart from the rest of society and history, separated both for control and
defence (Martin 1998: 26). Historically, very little access or insight has been given to the public
as to what goes on behind the walls of these organisations. As out society becomes ever more
technologically connected and publicly accessible, the nature of this relationship is breaking
down.
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Buttermind
One of the most widely noted and admired Quantified Self experiments is known as the
Arithmetic and Butter test or the buttermind experiment. Carried out by Seth Roberts, a
psychology professor and one of the prominent gurus of the Quantified Self movement, thanks
to his extensive and well-publicised record of self-experimentation (Harrell 2011). Roberts tested
his ability to quickly solve simple arithmetic problems over the course of a year before and after
beginning to eat half a stick of butter (60g) each day. When eating the butter, he found his
solution times improved by an average of 30 milliseconds. In writing about the findings of his
experiment, Roberts recounts his conversations with a cardiologist concerning his experiment
and his frustration with the generalised scientific claim that butter is unhealthy. Roberts argued
that his data was much easier to understand and much less complicated than the large variety of
co-factors and variables that went into forming the official attitude of scientists and medical
professionals about the evils of butter (Roberts 2010). In doing this experiment, Roberts was
clearly trying to poke the sleeping dragon of established scientific knowledge. Roberts is an
example of a faction of the community members who idealise the trends taking place within the
Quantified Self movement blending seamlessly into the established institutions of science as a
method of reforming their shortcomings. He is known for coining the term personal science, the
idea self-experimentation is a valid and increasingly necessary method of driving innovation in
scientific institutions (Butterfield 2012: 63). This is partially legitimised by the fact Roberts
himself counts as a member of scientific institutions, being a professor who regularly publishes
in scientific journals (Roberts 2013).
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Ernesto Ramirez, an active leader in the movement, argues that Quantified Self practices
should be considered legitimate, as self-experimentation and scientific institution have long been
intertwined. Historically, the method used to be a valid practice in the absence of available test
subjects for experimentation, although now it is supposably frowned upon (Ramirez 2012a;
Augemberg 2013b). Despite this, there is a tenuous relationship between the Quantified Self
movement and the established institutions of science in current society. The scientific
powerhouses of academic institutions, grant agencies, and journals that have codified the
scientific method have come to view self-experimentation with suspicion (Harrell 2011). Those
who challenge the scientific validity of self-experimentation cite that its lack of generalizability,
repeatability, and double-blind research design disqualify it from being considered part of the
scientific institution (Butterfield 2012: 61).
While in some senses the Quantified Self movement is fighting to be considered a subsection of established scientific legitimacy, its members are also keen to distinguish themselves
from it in highlighting how the two currently differ. They model themselves on what they
perceive to be the current shortcomings of scientific methods, and advocate for an evolution of
its forms. Kelly argues the scientific method is not a static concept, having changed continuously
throughout its history. He believes the practices of the Quantified Self community are actually
at the frontier of changing the scientific method, through techniques such as testing multiple
variables at once, and shrinking the sample size to a single case (Kelly 2012a). Quantified Self
science focuses on being simple, accessible, useful, and meaningful to people. They see this as a
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stark contrast to the way current science and biomedical practices can sometimes be
unnecessarily complex, inaccessible to the public, generalising of individuals and alienating to
interact with.
The specificity of self-quantifiers producing knowledge about their individual bodies is

argued to weaken the practical application of it to greater society, a purpose that some associate
as being the ultimate goal of establishment science. Funnily enough, this focus on the individual
as the sole site of knowledge is actually celebrated by many as the strong point of the Quantified
Self practice. The Quantified Selfers praise their methods ability to be personalised on the
smallest possible scale, by keeping the sample size to a single individual. They see the n=1
attitude of personal science as challenging the generalising attempts of science to establish
absolute truths and laws that apply to all people, in all places, over all time. The search for
common patterns that cancel our individual cases is the antithesis of the Quantified Self
philosophy (Augemberg 2013a). Augemberg marks this as a fundamental difference from
regular science, in self-trackings personalised rather than generalised nature: you use your
own data in order to learn about yourself (Augemberg 2013c). Given the idea that everyone
would have access to the tools necessary to practice personal science, we would all generate our
own personal truths about our bodies. In many ways this aspect of their philosophy challenges
the idea of the human body as a standardised machine. While they still write and speak in the
metaphor of being a compiled mass of organic nuts and bolts, they see each mechanical pile as
unique and in need of specialised attention to their particular ways of functioning best.
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This philosophy of rejecting generalisation and the search for universal truths leads us to
ask whether Quantified Self science can really count under the label of science. Rather than
challenging the validity of their methods, I am addressing an issue of semiotics. By definition,
science is the attempt to uncover general laws and knowledge about the world. Unless members
of the Quantified Self movement are willing to argue we should shrink the world and the
information that matters about it to the size of the self, they may need to find a new label. The
practices of self-experimentation happening within the Quantified Self may be based on the ideas
of science, but by definition it does not describe the knowledge they produce.
Serious Science
Established scientific institutions and organisations hold a hefty amount of social power
and generally take themselves quite seriously there is a sense of self-importance that must be
affirmed by a refusal to joke around, a notable absence of having fun within laboratories.
Scientists understand their task of delivering facts to the public to be such an important one
that to make the process playful would be an unnecessary risk. Members of the Quantified Self
movement use the scientific method as a foundation for their experiments, yet add in a quality of
playfulness and approach it with a fun attitude. When presenting results at meet-ups is referred
to as show-and-tell, it invokes ideas about sharing in the classrooms of elementary school
when simplicity and fun were qualities of everyday life qualities becoming increasingly absent
from the overly complex and busy lives of professionals living in hyper-urban and
technologically advances cities. The movement encourages individuals to take back the power of
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the scientific method back to the public. Anyone can test anything, anyone can create new data.
Data that is true for them. Their attitude takes a degree of power back from elitist institutions
of science, co-opting the method and encouraging its use in everyday life by everyday people.
The common mans scientific experiment. There is an almost subversive quality to the way
members of the Quantified Self movement take the scientific method and engage it in a fun and
quirky way, adding in oddity and humour wherever possible. gwern branwen [sic] sees this
quality as quite central to the self-identity, defining the Quantified Self attitude as playful,
thoughtful and related to the simple quality of wonder a challenge to the dominant belief
that only scientists are allowed to think (Branwen 2010). By this he means the traditional
pattern of only established institutional science having the power to create and disseminate
knowledge. Demonstrating this attitude comes in the testing of correlations that are seemingly
random; such as whether standing on one leg for one minute a day improves quality of sleep
(Branwen 2010).
The degree of accuracy and precision that self-trackers concern themselves with vary
among its members, with some considering it central to the practice and others expressing
contentment with being able to see general trends without the need for pedantic perfection.
gwern branwen [sic] argues that scientific certainty is not necessary when the point is to
improve your life, not publishable scientific rigour (Branwen 2012). The numbers produced by
tracking methods are said to show patterns in cause-and-effect relationships, and for many
simply enough accuracy to suggest correlations is sufficient. Quantified Self science lets go of
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much of the over-controlling and rigid demands that institutional science clings to in its need to
exert dominance and power.
Personalised Medicine
In addition to seeking reform of the established institutions of science, either by
acceptance or by competitive establishment of a new system, the Quantified Self movement is
also actively defined a new kind of medical approach. The growing phenomena of personalised
medicine is an approach characterised by critically rethinking the effectiveness of standardised
health care treatment. Discontent with biomedicines method of using population averages and
medians to determine medical treatment is especially rampant among the Quantified Self
community. Many members believe conventional practices to be insufficient for diagnosing
and treating patients (Butterfield 2012: 64). This belief in the ineffectiveness of established
medicine is significant considering one of the common motivators cited as driving individuals to
begin self-tracking is the presence of chronic diseases. The most prevalent are cancer, Chrons
disease, and diabetes conditions that require monitoring, and ones where small changes can
hold the promise of a drastically improved quality of life (Quantified Self 2013). The New York
meet-up group had 30% of their members cite that they live with a chronic illness motivating
them to self-track (Paulus 2013).
The use of chronic illness is perhaps a purposefully loose term. As a society we seem to
be defining swathes of new conditions and maladies each day the institutions of psychiatry and
biomedicine regularly create new problematised conditions through the construction of
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diagnostic categories daily. The fourth and most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the bread and butter guidelines for all reputable
psychiatrists in the United States, is arguably an ever-expanding laundry list of human afflictions
judged by the psychological powers-that-be to count as disorders. Interestingly, the Quantified
Self movement appears to be carrying out the same process, only through a far more selfimposed method. Trackers speak of uncovering problems they didnt know they had, but
discover through the act of self-tracking. Problems about the self are invented or constructed
from analysing the tracked data, and become real and salient once the proof of the data shows
it. One tracker discovered that [he] was waking up multiple times at night and didnt even
know, a problem made apparent only through the data reported by his device (Christensen
2013). These type of statements invoke epistemological questions such as the Kants tree falling
silently in the woods with no one around to hear it. Reading the data is a specific skill the
analysis leads trackers to suddenly hear and see truths previously non-existent to them. This all
stems from the rationally scientific perspective that numbers are considered real and true in a
way that the embodied human experience is not.
The privilege of diagnosing and curing has long lain with the scientific and medical
institutions, able to dole out illnesses and subsequent remedies of all kinds. How this shift is
challenging the classic power-laden doctor-patient relationship is a significant and highly
celebrated part of the movement. In many ways self-trackers are attempting to become their own
health advisors, taking back the power of prescribing problems upon the self. They are assigning
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labels and categories themselves rather than being handed them by various kinds of medical
professionals. Ian Hacking speaks of our historical tendency to make up people by
constructing new kinds of identities, usually through powerful social institutions like medicine or
science. As certain categories of people are invented, a population seems to suddenly emerge
who exactly fit the requirements. This phenomenon seems to be produced by a combination of
forced attributions of identities and subjects fulfilling their expected social performances. These
multiple forces work in tandem as our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in
hand, each egging the other on (Hacking 2002). This aptly applies to the Quantified Self attitude
that once you know the facts, you can live by them, meaning self-trackers take on the identities
formed by the information doles out to them by their devices and tracking systems (Wolf 2010a).
Perhaps reinforcing old beliefs about the self or providing the opportunity to step into new
identity labels and characteristics.
Many trackers are tackling what we might consider the afflictions and side-effects of the
culture of modern Capitalism. Recurrent stories of the kind of maladies that led many into selftracking involve difficulties managing the demands of a highly-structured, rapid, and stressful
lifestyle definitive of post-industrial late capitalism. There are the overstimulated coffee addicts
drinking an 8-shot venti latte every morning, the chronically sleep deprived, the overstressed and
overworked spending eighty hours a week in their offices, and the financially strained among
them. These excesses are the product of the endless consumption encouraged and required by the
ever expanding markets of the capitalist economic system. The professional working classes in
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cosmopolitan Western cities are driven to buy more, spend more, work more, produce more, and
optimise more. In the midst of this cycle, many find they end up unbalanced and physically
unwell trying to keep pace with the demands of this lifestyle. While some turn to prescription
medications as quick fixes, the Quantified Self community is increasingly made up of those
searching for longer term solutions. Richard Ryan claims his insomnia, obesity, Ambien
dependence, hypertension, and high dependence on alcohol led him to start biohacking. After
the use of the Zeo sleep manager, hypnotherapy, cutting out bread, ceasing the use of Ambien,
and switching out of his rewarding but very, very stressful job, Ryan proclaimed himself
cured of all his identified maladies (Ryan 2012). Many members find satisfaction in the
possibility of curing themselves. There is an enjoyment in collecting data, organising it
intelligently and using it to solve perceived problems is repeatedly expressed in the accounts of
self-trackers (Wolf 2010a). Some describe feeling pure scientific adrenalism at becoming their
own laboratories (Harrell 2011).
While the Quantified Self movement is clearly seeking to challenge the medical
establishment, they are also working within the current system to initiate change from the inside
out. As Nafus and Sherman describe it, the Quantified Self movement takes a big tent policy
approach, including health care and health technology companies among their supporters and
members (Nafus and Sherman 2013b). Given the fact many self-trackers work for such
companies, or themselves develop and sell medical tracking devices, there is no hard and fast
line to draw between those who produce and those who use.
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As discussed earlier, the many members of the Quantified Self movement are employed
as digital developers they are the creators, rather than the waiters and receivers of technology.
Kanyi Maqubela argues this is problematic considering the privileged socioeconomic status of
the developer population, who already enjoy a high level of physical wellbeing. He suggests in
conceiving of these tools using a design-for-me methodology, with only their personal
demographics in mind, members of the movement might be more interested in signalling health
consciousness among an already highly health conscious population, rather than creating tools
that improves health on a society-wide scale (Maqubela 2012; Nafus and Sherman 2012b). Many
of the tools enable the tracking of leisure activities such as habitual running, or meditation
practice the past-times of the wealthy in the United States over management of medical
diseases that disproportionately affect lower income communities within the United States. A
prime example would be low-income African American and Hispanics battling high rates of
heart disease, cancer and diabetes. These diseases are often chronic and require constant
management of symptoms and side effects through nuanced shifts in lifestyle, ideal conditions
for tracking technologies to make a significant difference in quality of life. Yet those who would
most benefit in terms of health and wellness from these new technological capacities may
actually have limited access (Maqubela 2012). Given the pre-requisite of owning an expensive
smartphone and accompanying data plan, or buying a prohibitively expensive tracking device, it
is unlikely they are aware of the innovative healthcare revolution purported to be going on.
These socioeconomic inequalities of access somewhat weaken the argument that personalised
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medicine is truly the next frontier of medical care that some Quantified Selfers proclaim we will
all soon be engaging with (Smarr 2012).
While there are clearly examples of ways in which Quantified Selfers understand and
relate to their bodies within the framework of the divided and mechanical self, their experience
of embodiment is not so simple. The Enlightenments historical understanding of the self had a
very different relationship to technology than the one we currently hold. We are now in a period
where how we conceive of and interact with technology is fundamentally changing the
boundaries of the self in relation to it; we are expanding ourselves physically, emotionally, and
ideologically to intertwine with our technological world. The understandings of our selves
handed down from last centurys thinkers are no longer as salient or relevant to our current lived
existence with technology. We are in the midst of forming an entirely new kind of technological
embodiment, constructing new kinds of people, a process that practicers of the Quantified Self
lifestyle appear to be smack in the middle of. They are of not only thinking of their bodies
beyond the metaphors of machines, but working within and entirely new conception of the
machine. Clearly challenging how numbers have been used as a reductive and singular-minded
tool, instead they are now exploring how they might open up more qualitative and holistic means
of understanding the self especially within the institutions of scientific knowledge production
and biomedical treatment. The extended repercussions of this are an active social push to rework
how the institutions of science and medicine understand and enforce control over our bodies,
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using the open frameworks of our connective technology to enact change and upheaval in the
status quo of knowledge formation, experimentation, diagnoses, and courses of treatment.
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Chapter Four - Technological Embodiment
Chapter Four
Technological Embodiment
This chapter will focus on how our experiences of embodiment and conceptions of the
self are shifting in tandem with the integration of technology into everyday life. The Quantified
Self movement is seen by many as the first frontier in the relationship we will soon all hold with
our technological machines. The practices of the Quantified Self community depend upon cyborg
technologies and use them to actively construct new personscapes in their daily lives and
community culture. It is this quality that is deeply shifting our embodied experience as well as
our symbolic and political relationship with our bodies. Over the last decade we have developed
a new kind of relationship with our tools and inventions, one that seems fundamentally different
from that which came before; we have begun to be deeply intimate with our technologies. We
were never intimate with our toasters or lightbulbsin either the physical or emotional sense.
Things are very different for cyborg technologies; we are literally in bed with our deviceswe
sleep next to them. When they call, we respond. We immerse ourselves in their simulated worlds.
We even envelope them into the boundaries of our beingsthey are part of our bodies and
ourselves. This intimacy is constructed in cultural practices, patterns, habits and rituals that shift
how we are embodied. Our lived experiences within our bodies can be argued to be perhaps the
most foundational and pre-objective aspect of being human. It follows that we should be paying
close attention to how that experience might be evolving, and what it means.
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The idea of technological embodiment seeks to address the greater matter of how our
patterned uses of technology are shifting our embodied experiences in a way that makes the
physical boundaries of skin and flesh increasingly arbitrary for conceptions of the self. The
disintegration of the classical distinctions drawn between human beings and their technological
tools is a fascinating and popularly emerging area of study; theorists like Nancy Schll, Sherry
Turkle, Andrew Clark, Amber Case, Emily Martin, Linda Hogle, Ian Hacking, and James Katz
have ethnographically explored everything from gambling machines to smartphones in how they
creating new experiences of both our own bodies and those of others (Case 2012, 2010; Clark
2003; Hacking 2007; Haraway 1991; Hogle 2005; Katz 2003; Martin 1992, 2000; Schll 2012;
Turkle 2011a, 2001b, 2008a, 2008b, 2007a, 2007b, 1984). I connect these thinkers, among
others, to the specific themes and phenomena of the Quantified Self movement in order to better
understand how self-tracking may be indicative of our evolving conceptions of what it means to
be an embodied human being in the world of rapid technological change and access. Saying that
our culturally-constituted sense of selves should end at the physical measure of flesh and bone
is to prioritise a physicality that no longer has relevance as we move into identities that are
entwined with the transitive nature of cyborg technologies. Living as a Quantified Selfer
represents an emerging form of technological embodiment that may be becoming the new
normal.
Rethinking Technology
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There is a lot of truth to Sherry Turkles claim that in living with objects that challenge
the boundaries between the born and the created, between humans and everything else, we will
need to tell ourselves different stories (Turkle 2008b). Our ideas about the techno-human
universe are a far reach from our lived reality of it. While we are stuck in bodily and selfconceptual metaphors of the Enlightenment era, our experiences with technology race ahead
breaking down the culturally constructed boundaries of body and mind; material and imagined;
nature and culture; and self and other. Essentially, the stories that we tell ourselves are in some
sense wrong. While it may be hard to say that any human cultural story could be wrong,
maybe we need to recognise that our stories are maladaptive, or inaccurate, or not best serving
our needs. We think about technology in a way that is not keeping pace with the way we actually
live with it.
Defining Technology
To begin with the basics, it is necessary to ask what we mean by the term technology.
After all, the stone hammer perhaps began the relationship of dependency and benefit between
the human being and the technological device. What is significantly different about a modern
technology such as the smartphone, compared to the stone tool, is that the former appears to be
crossing many of the definitive boundaries of a technological object. There has always been a
simple relationship between the inanimate, external technological object being employed by
the subjective will of the human agent. We can no longer easily assume we are the only active
subject in our technological relationships now more than ever it seems our tools shape us as
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much as we shape them. Our boundaries with technology are shifting physically, as well as
ideologically. The boundary between it and us used to be clearly demarcated as the edges of
the skin colliding with the earthy materials of wood, iron, or smooth carbon-fibre. This
monolithic understanding of technological objects no longer seems as salient with technology
increasingly becoming attached to or even literally part of our corporeality. In addition, the
increasing lack of material form that defines our tools complicates matters. Technology has in
many ways become immaterial, being all at once everywhere and nowhere. With the advent of
wirelessly uploading body sensors, we no longer necessarily have handles, levers or buttons to
push as we engage or interact. Instead, it is increasingly becoming an integrated part of our
bodily selves to a far greater extent than most of us realise.
When we ask about our relationships to tools, we inevitably end up asking questions
about the human body, it being our foremost and primary means of interacting with the material
world. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss called the body the original tool with which humans
shape their world, and the original substance out of which the human world is shaped (Csordas
1994). This line of anthropological thinking would later become of immense interest to
technological theorists such as the influential Marshall McLuhan who half a century later called
the wheel...an extension of the foot (McLuhan and Lapham 1994). Where the foot ends and the
wheel begins is really one of the central questions we will be dealing with here.
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This quandary needs answering as we become seemingly more intwined and intimate
with our objects, a reality that seemingly shocks and frightens many. Our discomfort emerges
from a history of enforcing increasingly arbitrary and meaningless boundaries between objects
and bodies. Viewing the body as object or the object as body often gets reads as inappropriate
attribution or projection between these two dualistically and opposing constructed categories. In
fact, we can follow this categorical divide back further to find what we are really asking is where
the natural body ends and the cultural object made by human hands begins. We often refer to
the untouched purity of nature being colonised by the intrusively determining forces of
technological culture, especially in relation to our bodies. We label as natural that is which is
familiar to us; things which we hold strong emotional ties to are defended using the title.
Meanwhile, we reject the novel, unfamiliar and threatening alternatives as artificial, a
derivative of culture a label that carries a twinge of negative connotation insinuating danger
and discomfort. When we label a tool natural, we mean to say it functions well. Seamlessly
perhaps. Natural processes such as the ability of our legs to walk, our bodies to talk, our cells to
carry out protein synthesis, are believed to be systems that are so tried and tested that they have
been refined to near perfection. For having developed over enormous periods of time stretching
back well beyond the first Homo erectus excursion out of Africa, we give them the benefit of the
doubtleaving their inherent goodness unquestioned. We are not so quick to warm to the
artificial communicative tools just out of Japan last month, believing its functional abilities
have yet to stand the test of time.
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We are unnerved at the suggestion of allowing technology to intrude on our bodies.

Anthropologist James Katz surveyed a (albiet small) group of college students, asking them
whether they would be interested in having a technological connection device similar to a mobile
phone implanted embedded in their flesh. They showed limited interest in the idea of an
unnatural mechanical implant, with nearly 50% of respondents considering an imaginary
implant a bad idea (Katz 2003: 19-23). We can see there is a serious disconnect between
peoples notions of being materially intertwined with machines and the reality of the fact we all
already are.
Nature and Culture

The boundary between nature and culture only exists in a certain kind of human
world. Sahlins asserts the division is distinctive to our own folklore in the Western world
(Sahlins 2008: 2). Donna Haraway is best known for her deconstruction of these two realms as
assumed givens. Haraway suggests that we make a grave mistake in taking provisional and
local category abstractions like nature and culture for the world (Haraway 2003: 6).
Conceiving of these two terms as universally applicable and dichotomous categories restrains our
conceptions (Haraway 2003: 8). Nature is presumed to be the world previous to and apart from
the influence and agency of humans, while culture denotes that which we have created
ourselves. The falsity of this division lies in how everything created in our cultural worlds came
about through symbiosis; a kind of mutually beneficial interspecies living (Tsing 2011: 3). We
have relied on interspecies companionship for everything from the wheat that feeds us to the
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microorganisms that enable its digestion. We imagine ourselves as an autonomously selfmaintaining species, when in fact we are deeply entangled in webs of domestication with all
facets of our universe technological creations included (Tsing 2011: 5).
To undermine the arbitrary division of nature and culture, Haraway instead suggests the
idea of natureculture, where the two categories are collapsed into a singular understanding of
the continuous and fluid interactions that occur around us all the time between these supposably
separated forces. Central to the idea of natureculture is the theme of overcoming
anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. The construction of the culture category as
independent and opposed to everything outside of ourselves allows it special precedence,
importance, and consideration (Haraway 2003). In refusing to acknowledge the false boundaries,
we extend a holistic understanding that acknowledges natural agency as equal to and
inseparable from human agency in social and biological histories. Challenging the
anthropocentric idea that humans are the primary agents on this earth is critical to understanding
technology in our current world. Many thinkers within the Quantified Self movement are equally
adamant about the need to shift away from believing we are in total control.
Animated Technology
The idea that technology is misconceived by the vast majority of society as something
distant, potentially dangerous and invasive, as well as distinctly other to human beings is one
perspective the Quantified Self movement seeks to turn on its head. In the ideological world of
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the Quantified Self, technology is often attributed animate, natural, and to an extent, selfdetermining and ethereal qualities. This conception is an interesting return to the preEnlightenment understanding of the natural world as an interconnected, interdependent and
interacting living unit where each niche exists in a dynamic relationship with the surrounding
ecosystem(Merchant 1979: 99). Individual selves, societies, and the greater cosmos were
believed to be bound together as part of a larger living being. Nature was believed to be alive,
sensitive, and responsive to human action (Merchant 1979: 111). We are now returning to a
universal conception of intertwined wholes. The connectivity made readily apparent by the
technological world is leading many to appreciate humanitys interdependence with other kinds
of forces.
The loudest proponent of self-determining technology is Quantified Self co-founder

Kevin Kelly. His 2011 book What Technology Wants gives away his philosophy of considering
technology an animated power in just the title. Kelly proposes that human beings are no longer
the only agent in this world, suggesting we extend agency to the the greater, global, massively
interconnected system of technology vibrating around us, that he calls the Technium (Kelly
2011: 11). Believing that everything around us has a sliver of intelligence in it, he grants a
form of self-determination to collective machines and devices, and asks us to consider listening
to the technology (Kelly 2011). In his view, we are building new kinds of environments in
collusion with the wants of technology. Clearly the wants of technology are not like human
desires, but instead suggest technology is a self-organised system that obeys a certain set of
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greater laws shaping how it develops (Kelly 2011: 15). Kelly goes as far as to suggest the
technium can really only be understood as a type of evolutionary life (Kelly 2011: 45). In
speaking of the evolution of the technium, hes telling the implicit story of this force as just like
the force of the evolution of mankind. Except this kind of evolution is happening at an
exponential rate compared to how we as a species arrived at a collective state of selfconsciousness.
It is then all at once profoundly curious and seemingly contradictory that Kevin Kelly
begins his book with a narrative of deep skepticism toward technology and a valorisation of his
ascetic minimalist disposition toward it. He assets that he tries to keep the cornucopia of
technology at arms length so that I can more easily remember who I am (Kelly 2011: 5). In
ways he paints it as a threat to the self, as an invasion. This introduction serves as one
exemplary version of the complex and multifaceted mythology of technology; the stories we are
telling ourselves about this cultural category do not always neatly align. The bodily-spatial
reference of technology being within his physical vicinity makes it seem more real, according
to the established mind/body metaphorical categories. There are fairly explicit themes of
anthropomorphism and allusions to a mystical supernatural power being attributed to technology
in Kellys narratives. For him, technology has a face, a form of personification, one we can
read a sense of personal intimacy from in the same way he speaks of technologys ability to fill
souls (Kelly 2001: 4). Considering the Western historical trend of re-defining and reappropriating nature, this tendency to equate the natural and animate with the triumphs of
technoscience may be seen as a form of asserting categorical control over this large and daunting
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pattern of change. In order to understand the new forces in our world, we re-label them to feel
comfortable in relation to their powers. This is a recurrent theme happening in general social
discourse, but specifically within the Quantified Self movement, of appropriating the natural
onto the technological. The swathes of internet data we amass are understood as an
interconnected ecosystem. The use of the term environment is common imagining a
naturally structured space in the connections of the internet makes them more understandable
(Ramirez 2012b). We have an easier time believing in things we can see, even metaphorically.
This language might be a way of seeking comfort with the idealised familiar, it makes the
unknown realms of technology less frightening.
How widely accepted and dispersed this viewpoint is throughout the Quantified Self
movement is difficult to determine. While Kelly does not claim to speak for the whole
movement, much of his public philosophy and thought is held in high regard and shared by its
community members. The beliefs inherent in seeing technology as an animate force in the world
are affirmed by their self-tracking lives. Cyborg technologies are animately functioning even
when their human owners are pre-occupied by other matters. They upload and download
information, light up or put themselves to sleep, make noises without provocation, sense and see
what the people they ride around on do not. How could we not consider such behaviour
animate in its own right?
A History of Cyborgs
The meeting of technology and humanity leads us to the term cyborg shorthand for
the term cybernetic organism. It was originally coined by two NASA consultants Nathan
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Kline and Manfred Clynes in 1960 working on astronaut technologies (Clynes and Kline
1960). A simple and straightforward definition provided by Donna Haraway is a hybrid of
machine and organism (Haraway 1991;117). The word has manifested in so many ways and
permeated so many cultural realms that its history could encompass an entire study in itself.
Thanks to the depictions popularised by science-fiction entertainment, the common cultural
imaginings of a cyborg are of flesh-and-steel hybrids whose bodies display their artificial
origins. Purposefully constructed with exceptional abilities beyond that of natural humans,
cyborgs are commonly thought of as works of fiction. Many of the thinkers who will feature
prominently in this thesis challenge us to radically rethink the term cyborg as we currently
conceive of it. The notion is important for giving us a metaphorical concept to think with through
as we try to understand how technological culture is changing our conceptions of selves and
humanity as a whole.
Donna Haraway was perhaps the pioneer of using the term cyborg as a tool of
discourse in her 1991 essay A Cyborg Manifesto. In Haraways writing, what constitutes the
division of human and machine comes into question as an extension of her natureculture
theory. Sherry Turkle would later argue that in the cyborg world... the natural and the artificial
no longer find themselves in opposition (Turkle 2007). Haraway presents the idea of the cyborg
as a blending of two worlds, in order to suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we
have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves (Haraway 1991). It challenges a number of
pervasive ideological dichotomies in Western culture, transgressing many of the usually well-
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guarded boundaries between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public
and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilised. Haraways insight is
not only well ahead of her time, but also remarkably accurate as society now struggles to deal
with technological relationships that contradict and question those historical divisions. We are
constantly having to negotiate with the conventional ideas embedded in Western science and
politics, such as racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the
appropriation of nature as resource for the production of culture; the tradition of reproduction of
the self from the reflections of the other (Haraway 1991). All of these are inherently tied to the
issue of understanding where the line between organism and machine gets drawn. Or more
accurately, the issue of there being a line at all.
A community of anthropologists and academics has recently formed focusing solely on

this new conception of the cyborg. Calling themselves cyborg anthropologists, they study
how humans and non-human objects interact with each other, and how that changes
culture (Cyborg Anthropology 2012). The research arena of Cyborg Anthropology is vast, given
the pervasiveness of technological influence in so much of our modern world. By virtue of
studying perhaps the most rapidly evolving aspect of society, academic theory written on the
interactions of technology and human culture outdates itself in terms of technical details almost
as soon as it is published. This means almost any contribution to the field, perhaps even the small
offering of this thesis, has the potential to meaningfully explore the most recent developments
without redundancy, while benefitting from the theoretical foundations already established. The
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rapid rate of current technological advancement challenges us to keep pace with the stories we
tell ourselves about them.
Pattern and Ritual in Embodiment

Ideas about cyborgs tend to focus on the ways the body as a physical object becomes
morphed by technology. While the physical body has always been important as an external social
symbol, the way in which the body is experienced internally by individuals can be argued to be
far more critically important to our understanding of our selves. This brings us back to the theory
of embodiment introduced earlier as our fundamental subjective experience of being-in-the-world
as asserted by Thomas Csordas. The significance given to subjectivity taking place from within a
body recognises the open-ended human process of taking up and inhabiting the cultural
world (Csordas 1990: 5-10). This pre-objective approach believes the human body to be a
force shaping culture itself, rather than an object among other objects shaped by the human
cultural experience. Disciplines outside of the anthropological world often view the body as the
biological raw material on which culture operates, as if culture were simply a pretty layer of
icing on the immutable, natural, and materially predetermined cake characterised by
unchangeable inner necessities. The idea of the biologically determined body excludes it from
being an interactive participant in culture, instead being an object decorated by it. The body is
not a biological constant, but instead the physical form interacts and intertwines with the culture
embedded in it. Csordas is primarily critically responding to the classical divide in the Western
conceptualisation of the body; there is the body that you have in the external, objectified sense
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and there is the body that you are in the internal experienced sense. This understanding sees the
body as a tool a fundamental and immensely complex tool but a tool nonetheless. It becomes
a thing that is used rather than an inherent part of the subjective person. He asserts that our
bodies are not originally objects to us, and instead are the foundation of a process that
sometimes ends in objectification of the body (Csordas 1994).
The debate over what exactly constitutes embodiment has been a primary concern among
anthropologists who study the body. There are two possible meanings to embodiment at play
here; there is the experience of embodiment which refers to the subjective and sensuous feeling
of being-in-the-world, and there is the process of embodiment where people develop cultural
understandings through enacting bodily practices and portraying meaning through the body
they incorporate the social and material world into their biological beings. In a simplified sense,
one form deals with individual perception and one with social and material interaction. And yet
things are not so simplethe experience is a process and the process forms an experience.
In order to find some clarity on this conundrum, it is useful to also consider the viewpoint
of symbolic anthropologists. Symbolic anthropology sees embodiment as patterned behaviour
that forms symbolic meaning bodily rituals that graft images of society onto human flesh
(Strathern and Stewart 2011: 389). Anthropologists such as Strathern and Stewart emphasise the
importance of the process of embodiment; for them it refers to cultural patterns of behaviour that
are inscribed on or express themselves through the body. Through practice, the physical
engagement of human bodies in repeated patterns and practices determines everyday life and
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ritual. I agree with this idea in the sense that it implies engaging our bodies in a sensuous way
forms our embodied experience of the world (Strathern and Stewart 2011). This bodily
engagement then becomes a source of perception into the realms of agency, practice, feeling,
custom, the exercise of skills, performance, and in the case of rituals, performativity.
Symbolic anthropologists argue that our bodily practices end up being part of a cyclical
symbolic system that forms our social identities. Beyond being a purely sense experience, it
encompasses how people experience their bodies in relation to other peoples, and thus the
source of personhood, self, and subjectivity (Strathern and Stewart 2011: 389). Our patterned
interactions with the world end up defining our sense of selves. The construction of
personhood, that is, the social identity of the individual constructed in relation to the wider
society is the significant product of patterned embodiment. Personhood here is a process, not a
fixed pattern (Strathern and Stewart 2011: 394).
Following this, I believe there can be no pre-cultural sense of embodiment, or indeed a

body. Embodied experience has been recorded to vary enormously among cultures; differences
that are fuelled by transformations of the ideas and experiences of space, time, body, self, and
identity (Van Wolputte 2004). The way we feel and experience the world from within our bodies
is wholly dependent upon the way our culture has taught us to understand our body. Centralising
the significance of culture serves to make my argument distinctly anthropological, following
Clifford Geertzs original assertion that without culture, humans cease to be themselves, instead
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devolving into unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognisable
sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases (Geertz 1973: 49).
Csordas accuses many anthropologists of taking embodiment for granted in their work,
overlooking the foundational corporeal nature of how we interact with the world by failing to
take seriously the idea that culture is grounded in the human body (Csordas 1994). He
responds by proposing we make embodiment the logical starting point for all cultural
understanding and analysis, considering that it is how we fundamentally perceive and interact
with the world, and reasonably assumed to be an intuitive sense shared by all humans. The study
of embodiment can unveil insights into both culture and self, leading me to use embodiment
theory as a key concept for my study of the Quantified Self movement. Embodiment constructs
not only personhood, but also forms the basis for the overarching frameworks of understanding
into which people set human life and agency, or otherwise put, our cosmologies (Strathern and
Stewart 2011: 389). How this subculture specifically, and modern society generally, might be
experiencing being embodied cyborgs, rather than metal-and-flesh cyborgs, seems to me a far
more significant lens through which to study our changing sense of ourselves.
Everyday Technological Embodiments

Consider now the increasingly normalised presence of technological objects in the daily
motions of our lives. How our interactions with them involve the senses of sight, touch, and
sound very intensely, with smell and taste less common but sometimes employed. We have
become very familiar with the feel of our fingers sleekly dancing keystrokes across their pads,
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the rapid quiver of a vibrating phone tucked into a pocket, the soft glow of an LED screen in the
darkness, and the communicative chimes and twangs emanating from headsets as our laptops call
for certain kinds of attention. These sensed stimulations compose our experience of embodiment,
and are all deeply familiar and integrated into the expanding majority of human lives. We engage
in practices that repeatedly evoke them so frequently that our reactions no longer seem worthy of
drawing attention to. They are so common as to have become invisible. Except that in each
moment of sense-driven experience we are defining the terms of our being-in-the-world, a world
where our human bodies intimately and continuously interface with technology. As digital
anthropologist Natasha Schll puts it, the rise of interactional gadgetry has changed the nature
of everyday life (Schll 2012: 14).
The perception that technology is becoming inevitably pervasive throughout modern
society leads us to believe that in response we are developing a tolerance for it. As people are
attuned to whats around them...its becoming the norm for them to use these sorts of devices
noted one technological industry expert interviewed by Schll (Schll 2012; 107). The
integration of cyborg technologies into the habituated patterns of daily life has happened within
less than a decade - a startlingly rapid rate for saturating society with an entirely new kind of
cultural practice. Despite the apparent rush into technological integration, it has sunk into our
habituated lives in such a gradual and cumulative way that we fail to truly see the extent of its
permeation in our constitution of ourselves. Foucault expressed particular concern for how
dangerous it is to neglect the little things; the small and seemingly insignificant routinised daily
actions that people adopt and internalise built into a potentially enormous power (Foucault
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1977). The picture of technological integration has perhaps become too large to step back from.
This implicates the idea of tolerance in assuming that going forward more intensely integrated
and intuitive hooks will be built into our technologies to keep us attuned and responsive to
their systems. Almost relatable to a form of maturation, human tolerance is a continual process
of cognitive and affective adaptation to upticks in the intensity of machine
reinforcement (Schll 2012; 133). The reliable progression of technological innovation
guarantees that our tolerances will continuously be destabilised by upgrades that shift our
thresholds for sensory stimulation and embodied experiences. We might be said to have a new
form of consciousness emerging from the shift in practices that determine our sensory experience
of the world.
This is no more blatantly apparent than the perpetual mass downwards gaze into
smartphones, music players, and gaming devices seemingly performed by whole cities on
public transport the public signal of being elsewhere. Behaving in new ways with our
devices in public settings marks us as connected to other places, other people, other more
compelling things than the immediate present moment in our physical bodies. Now take this
image of generalised society fundamentally evolving their embodied experience through
technological habits and imagine its ultimate manifestation. The normalisation and pervasive
extent of technology embedding into our lives en mass has given the Quantified Self movement
fertile soil to grow themselves within. Their relationship to technological objects may be
marginally outside the norm, but the norm seems to be shifting in their direction.
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Building Personscapes
The Quantified Self members are constructing a very specific and perhaps oddly fringe
relationship with their devices; a relationship of interdependence, they are making them an
integral part of their daily functioning on a level not achieved by most people and their
attachments to their laptops. They are constructing personscapes, a melding of the person and
their landscape. Strathern and Stewart proposed this concept seeking to describe a process of
co-evolution which cumulates in a sense personhood and the self (Strathern and Stewart 2011:
393). Personscapes are an ideal theory to use in understanding the new kinds of lived
environments emerging from the collaboration of humans and technological machines. Taking
seriously technological agency, as the perpetual interdependence and interaction occurring
between elements in digital culture and expanding the limits of the human self, I mean to
emphasise that we are becoming part of our landscapes more so now than ever before. These
personscapes are individual experiences occurring within prosthetic culture, a term established
by cyborg anthropologists, which refers to the idea that human culture is compromised of
human and object interaction (Case 2012). We must increasingly shift our ideas about the world
to realise we are not alone in the drivers seat, that our capacities and abilities are fundamentally
dependent on other actors and agents. If we are willing to think of ourselves as aspects of a far
more broad and holistic landscape, we will be able to more clearly see and understand ourselves
in relation to technology. Recall again Turkles insight that our shifting relationship to
technological objects is going to require that we tell ourselves different stories (Turkle 2008b).
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In her ethnography of machine gambling addicts Addiction by Design, Natasha Schll

articulates tangible examples of personscapes. Her interviews reveal unprecedented forms of
techno-human interaction that result in new kinds of bodily experiences. While Schlls research
deals with an ethnographic community that differs greatly from the demographics and cultural
identities of Quantified Selfers, her analysis illuminates how the experiences of these gamblers
are not so distant from the experiences of self-tracking, and perhaps even the experiences of you
and I with our common technological objects. She presents an interface between human beings
and machines that is at once both shockingly extreme and unnervingly familiar to the common
reader.
The ethnographic material presented by Schll calls for a reconsideration of how we
conceptualise the limits of bounded human self, shifting from a matter of physical flesh to a
functional understanding that legitimises the harmoniously integrated experience of machine and
player. For this specific community, Schll finds gamblers express their experiential
relationships with machines in terms of becoming a single bounded entity, or one with the
devices. In their experience, the synchronisation and harmony felt with the machines challenges
the limits of the human body (Schll 2012; 180). The relationship between technology and the
bodies becomes as a collusion between the structures and functions of the machine and the
cognitive, affective, and bodily capacities of the gambler (Schll 2012; 73). It is not only
gamblers who seem to be experiencing the vibrations of machines as integrated sensations of the
body. The New York Times published an article on the phenomena of phantom ring syndrome,
where people mistakenly believe they either hear or feel a phone call coming in. Researchers are
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quoted as attributing the false sensation to the nature of phones becoming fifth limbs and the
constant state of phone vigilance we now live in (Goodman 2004). It could also be considered
evidence that we have so integrated our external technological devices into our lived bodily
experiences, that we believe we can feel them even when they are not giving off physical
sensations.
True embodiment involves all the senses, a fact the designers of gambling machines and
cyborg technologies alike pay close attention to (Strathern and Stewart 2011: 393). The sensory
engagement of soft lighting, affective sounds, and a reflex-rate snap, pulse, vibration [and] push
back built into the gambling machines creates a naturally comfortable and intuitive experience
of being-in-the-world (Schll 2012: 63). The collective effective of this visual, audial, and
tactile stimulation adds up to an immersive embodied experience, one that creates a closed
feedback loop between human body and machine. The machines Schlls gamblers find
themselves addicted to might not be so different to some common self-tracking devices. Most
tracking devices feature a combination of LED-lit displays, subtle notification sounds, and
pulsation abilities. Take for example the LUMOback sensor; strapped around your lower back, it
softly vibrates each time it senses you slouching, reminding you to sit up straight! A fine
replacement for nagging grandmothers everywhere, it also logs your slumped-over tendencies
wirelessly into an accompanying smartphone application that can graph your posture and its
improvements over time (Lumoback 2013). This device encompasses the feedback loops native
to most technologies favoured by the Quantified Self movement. Cue, response, cue, response
tracked until a habit has permanently shifted. A bi-directional relationship between machine and
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person builds a new way of being in the world. This shares the quality of an immediate
mechanical response joining with in the sensory world of a human body, to form a hermetically
closed circuit of action such that the locus of control - and thus, of agency - becomes
indiscernible (Schll 2012; 171).
Schll shares many of the philosophical sentiments expressed by Kevin Kelly and his
theory about the Technium. She dedicates a fair amount of attention to the phenomenology of
human-technology by building off the philosopher Don Ihde. Ihde repudiates the traditional
portrayal of technology as being one of two opposing binaries of either an autonomous,
determining force or a passive, neutral tool, and instead asks us to look at the ways objects
and subjects act together in a constructed whole entity (Schll 2012; 19). When Kevin Kelly
asks what technology wants, he means to draw attention to the fact that the nature and experience
of the technology will be determined by both the ends he chooses to pursue with it and the
organic development of his interests in relation with the forces of the technology. The mutual
construction of the personscape is what shapes the embodied experience. It should also be
recognised there is no reductive and universalised way that we embody technology. Experiences
and extents will depend upon what kinds of devices people choose to integrating into their lives,
and how those devices develop into a personscape of embodied experience. It depends on what
technology, for whom, by whom, with whom, for what collective purposes.
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Intense sensory experience is usually a feature of rituals designed to invoke lasting

memory of an event, so that it can [stay] with and transform a person over time (Strathern and
Stewart 2011: 393). The saliently satisfying experiences reported by machine gamblers create a
memorable combination of stimuli regularly and continuously, rather than as an occasional
marking of seasonal or lifetime events. It becomes a memory of a perpetual state to be achieved
rather than a point in time. The gamblers call this state the zone and suffer immensely in their
personal lives to remain in it. The zone is a new intensity of engaged experience facilitated by
the nature of the technology. A form of embodied reality where time, space, and social identity
are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process (Schll 2012). The extreme
nature of the zone certainly should not be considered applicable to all forms of techno-human
interactions or constructed personscapes between machines and man, yet as a isolated example it
speaks to the expanding limits of the possibilities that our new technological culture can imprint
on the embodied experience.
Many scholars have written about the merged state of computer and person as resulting in
a loss of the self (Schll 2012; 171). We should question this belief that to commune with a
machine to the point of entering a new and unfamiliar form of consciousness, we are
experiencing a loss and that our self must have gone elsewhere because it is now being
experienced differently. Schll describes the state as an absorptive automaticity where the
space between human action and external response collapse in space and time into a singular
flow of perfect contingency (Schll 2012; 172). The alignment removes the need for complex
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cognition in order to facilitate the interaction with the machine, making the external technology a
natural extension of the functional self. Combating the idea of the zone as a form of selferasure or loss of the self, we must take seriously the notion of the machine as collaborative
agent in the construction of a new way of being. Rather than assuming the gambler is trying to
become the machine by reducing their own agency and prioritising the perceived wants of the
game, we should grant legitimacy to both collaborative actors in the construction of a new
personscape. This aligns with Ihdes concept of embodied relation as feeling a technological
object is naturally extending ones cognitive and motor capacities with no sense of individual
distinctiveness. The firm resonation with this phenomena by Schlls ethnographic subjects asks
us to reconceptualise the limits of the self in terms of immaterial functionality and
phenomenological experience instead of the physical boundaries of flesh and metal.
The experiential accounts of the gamblers draw attention to the idea of the boundaries of
the human being expanding and taking new forms as our intimacy with machines develops. The
arbitrariness of our sense of self ending at the skin preferences physical determinants rather than
our lived functional ones. That the fact we are an enclosed amount of flesh might not be as
significant or important as we believe it to be is still a young and radical concept for many. The
idea that the boundary of a human being ends at the skin in fact seems fairly arbitrary in reading
the ethnographic interviews where players feel a level of engagement where you are the
machine, the machine is you (Schll 2012; 173). The fact that we have historically thought of a
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human being as an enclosed amount of flesh might not be as significant or important in our new
digital world.
Natural Born Cyborgs

Many of these ideas about rethinking our boundaries of the self are shared by philosopher
Andrew Clark, who questions how exactly we understand the outer limits of the physical human
body in relation to machines. In his book Natural Born Cyborgs, Clark proposes the idea that in
many ways human beings have always been cyborgs. This claim comes with the caveat that his
definition of a cyborg is perhaps a little looser than most; he believes it to be a type of technohuman interface that provides an organic solution to human limitations. This simple idea
imagines the Palaeolithic human slicing away at a antelope carcass with an Acheulean blade
instead of his fingernails a form of cyborg. Rather than seeking to make meaningless this
otherwise hyper-technical term, he is simply pointing out that by its simple definition, it is less
radical and alarmist than we make it out to be.
Clark reads our mental ability to enter into deep and complex relationships with
nonbiological constructs, props, and aids as a fundamental trait of human nature that facilitates
our exceptional intelligence (Clark 2003: 5). This is where we get our notion of technology
from - as tangible things we interact with that enhance our abilities and capacities to achieve
objectives in the world. Clarks argument turns this conception on its head as he asserts that our
tools will soon be moulding themselves to us, remaining tools only in a very superficial or thin
and paradoxical sense, and making it harder to tell where that person stops and this tailor-
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made, co-evolving smart world begins (Clark 2003: 30). Although conceptions of the body have
allegedly entered a period of upheaval and flux, we are undoubtably still clinging to the comforts
of historical ideas. Clark derides this prejudice that whatever matters about my mind must
depend solely on what goes on inside my own biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of
skin and skull (Clark 2003: 5). Conceiving of all mental action and activity as occurring inside a
bounded mind gears us to approach problem solving as a collaboration with something
external to ourselves.
Extended Mind Theory

Self-tracker Mark Carranza is a perfect example of Andrew Clarks theory of the
extended mind the idea that external environments should be considered legitimate parts of our
minds due to their active role...in driving cognitive processes (Clark and Chalmers 1998). The
theory opposes the ideology of neuroreductionism to a certain degree. It grants the idea of the
mind greater boundaries than simply the encasing of the brain. Carranza has been meticulously
digitally logging, tagging, categorising, and organising his ideas for almost thirty years. Those
who have watched him navigate this overflowing trove of information describe a smooth
interaction with somebody in the present moment and his digital record, bringing in association
to conversations that took place years earlier... What for other people in an inchoate flow of
mental life is broken into elements and cross-referenced (Wolf 2010a). Through his digital log,
he now interacts in conversations in ways never before possible, referencing obscure and detailed
information from the past. In ways he has transcended traditional boundaries of time the past
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takes on a different quality when it ceases to be a distant and imperfect memory and instead is
brought sharply into the present. This use of computational power to extend ones capacities and
abilities aligns with Kevin Kellys stated belief that we now all live in an age where computers
are extensions of our brains. His assertive ideology speaks, at least a degree, of the Quantified
Self community holding similar convictions about how we are extending ourselves
outwards (Kelly 2011; 2012b)
While considering techno-human interfacing age-old, Clark acknowledges its new

implications with the radical turn digital culture has taken in a sudden, massive leap in the space
of mind design (Clark 2003; 8). Clark calls the post-human future imagined to be on our
horizons a dangerous and mistaken image precisely because the qualities many are reading as a
futuristic melding with biotechnology in fact reflect nothing so much as their thoroughly human
source (Clark 2003; 6). One glaring critique we can easily make of Clark is that his theory
simply attempts to argue that we should move our cultural technology into the world of
natural human functioning, a transference that still depends upon two arbitrarily confining
categories. However, while we can appreciate Haraways proposal of a natureculture lens
through which to view the world, Clarks argument works within the already established realms
of understanding making it more accessible and salient. The basic premise underlying our
worldly interactions remains the same; we believe humans manipulate their material world to
enhance their capacities in it.
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The New Cyborgs

In order to take seriously Sherry Turkles now infamous claim that we are all cyborgs
now, (Turkle 2009; 152) it is essential we are not still conjuring images of the Terminator in our
minds. She best described the real-life version of this phenomena in her observations of MIT
students in the 1990s carrying around computers, keyboards, and screens as permanent bodily
accessories. The rise of devices that are worn on (or perpetually reside in close proximity to) our
physical body makes us prosthetically consummated with machines; we move beyond
objects...or prosthetics to become one with them, as Turkle puts it (Turkle 2007a). This is the
self becoming comprised of the human-object interaction, possibly making the distinction
between the two arbitrary. The MIT cyborgs were likely considered quirky and eccentric over
twenty years ago, their quality of living simultaneously in the physical and the virtual at that
time seemed exotic (Turkle 2008a). Today, that description could fit anyone with a smartphone.
Yet, many are shifting the label of cyborg away from themselves by projecting it onto
communities such as the Quantified Self members. We are always looking for those just different
enough to be counted as falling outside the boundaries of normal. Just as the image of the
Terminator is an inaccurate depiction of the cyborg, so too is the self-experimenter...portrayed
as mad scientist attempting to turn themselves into superhuman villains (Harrell 2011). The
reality of living as a self-tracker for the majority of its community members is far more benign
than many of the popular articles that have covered the movement wish it to be. Aspects of it are
also exceedingly familiar to many of us in our own technologically-entwined existences.
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Cyborg Technologies
The tools and platforms through which Quantified Selfers record their information can
take a variety of forms, but most fall under the header of cyborg technologies. These devices and
deeply integrated into their lives, required in order to manage large amounts of data collection
and synthesis. Most self-tracking requires having technological objects on, near, or even in you
at all times. It should be clarified that being a Quantified Selfer does not explicitly require the
use of technological devices to track your data, but there are seldom few who take on major
tracking projects without the use of these computational and sensor technologies. 6 Much like
Turkles MIT cyborgs of the 1980s, at the moment most of these devices are distinctly visible
and physical; appearing as wristbands, bracelets, armbands, waistbands, headbands, and belt or
pocket clips adorning the body externally. Or simply functioning from within a smartphone
carried around in pockets and bags.
In an ideal world, many members of the Quantified Self community have expressed
wishing to see self-tracking technologies become invisible as distinctive objects (Inkinen 2012;
Wolfram 2012). As the movement has progressed, greater emphasis has been put on making
these tracking tools blend seamlessly into the environment of their bodies, with the perpetual
goal of making them even more integrated and non-material. By minimising the barriers between
you and your tracking platform, you become immersed in the experience of quantification.
Physically integrating with tracking devices is seen as an effective way to minimise costs and
One Quantified Self community member at a Seattle meet-up presented her tracking technology of
putting gold stars on a piece of paper, although we can imagine much of the impetus behind this method
was to ironically prove a point about the fundamental simplicity of tracking. (http://quantifiedself.com/
2012/12/amelia-greenhall-on-gold-star-experiments/)
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maximise outputs (Inkinen 2012). There has been a rise in tracking tools that function only as
software applications, accessible through already established terminals of connections like
internet browsers on laptops and smartphones. Literal bodily attachment is not essential as the
ubiquitous use of smart phones is pervasive in the movement. The vast majority of tracking uses
at least some form of smart phone applications as their informational input device. Functionally
this extends trackers beyond their plastic casings as they continuously wirelessly upload
information to internet servers. The movement of technologies into a non-material realm is
actually a relatively new understanding of our tools, and one we are still grappling with.
Non-Material Light Modernity

Referring to technology as some coherently bounded single machine is a dated imagining
of the technological in our current world. As our devices take on more amorphous qualities, and
carry the ability to upload and download over wi-fi internet connections and over bluetooth, we
can no longer locate whole technological systems within single, bounded objects. We are also in
an age of cloud computing, referring to the increasing trend of hosting private computer files,
data, and resources online so that we can access them from anywhere (Wolf 2010a). The contents
of our laptops are no longer solely hosted on hard drives, but now float in the digital clouds.
Essentially, technology has lost its materiality. We are well past the days of relying on large,
clunky computers stored in the corners of rooms requiring us to chunk numbers into a terminal in
order to interact with technology.
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The new non-materiality to the machine, the technology, the computer leads
cyborg anthropologist Amber Case to claim we are moving from a state of technology having
heavy modernity to a light modernity. Heavy modernity refers to having physicality and
mass, immovable and bulky, like the equipment of factories that drove the Fordist industrial
revolution. In contrast, our new world is defined by transcendence a lightness and flexibility in
time and space (Case 2012). In being able to carry around internet connections in our pockets,
Case calls our devices Mary Poppins technology because we can put anything we want into it,
and it doesnt get heavier and then we can take anything out, having moved beyond the
limitations of all things having mass and weight (Case 2010). As Haraway puts it, our best
machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals,
electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable,
mobile... people are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque (Haraway 1991).
This observation links to the larger pattern of ubiquitous invisibility that we recognise as a
common aspect of modern technology, a lack of materiality that leads us to think of cyborgs as
floating signifiers (Haraway 1991).
The Online and Offline Worlds

Because we conceive of technology as immaterial in contract to material reality, the
language we continue to use around technology assumes the existence of separate worlds;
plugged and unplugged (Turkle 2008a). This misunderstanding is best exemplified by social
researchers who, in conducting surveys and interviews, attempt to discover how many times a
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day people use a technology such as the internet (Pew Research Center 2009). What could one
possibly mean by a time? Even if one were to estimate some measurement of events, it would
be in the hundreds, completely beyond an accurate figure, especially considering its unconscious
and automatic nature. There is no bounded beginning and end to our connectivity anymore. As
Turkle says, we are always on (Turkle 2008a). The question is poorly conceived in relation to
modern digital life its like asking how many times a day you glanced to your right hand side.
We sometimes bound these times as checks - as in, how many times a day do you check your
email or Facebook? The impulsive glance towards a phone or tracking device is a barely
perceptible event. Increasingly, tracking ceases to be a discernible event that people do at
points in the day, it happens without their conscious attention going to it. If Im engaging in a
form of self-tracking I may still be uploading and downloading data even when theres no object
of technology in sight. There is not a moment of connection then disconnection, it is continual
and seamless and not something they are ever without. There is no time-off in the practice of
continual self-tracking.
Lifelogging
One especially ambitious variety of Quantified Selfer I wish to expand upon is the
lifestyle of the lifelogger. Individuals who lifelog aspire to intentionally record and archive all
the information in their life (or at least large portions of it). The collection may include all
written documents and emails, media activity, audio recordings of everything you hear, video
recordings of everything you see, GPS location tracking, all on top of any sensor body data
(Kelly 2007b). He suggests the efforts that this lifestyle would require do come with some
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potential benefits such as the monitoring of body vitals becoming a medical warning system...
to diagnosis illness and to prescribe medicines, gaining a searchable, retrievable, and
shareable... digital memory, the opportunity for deep comparative analysis using this archive
of all your work and play activities to improve your productivity, creativity, and consumptivity,
and giving you a method of organising, shaping, and reading your own life (Kelly 2011).
Lifelogging is presented as a practical system, and yet also one that helps to construct an identity,
especially in the notion that it would give you a way to read your own life. The stream would
constantly reflect back to you all you have done, perhaps providing a kind of continuous story
about who you are where you are going. Lifelogging is premised on the idea that we are all
producing a lifestream of information in our digital activities, whether we intend to or not. The
public mild version of this phenomenon is the Facebook timeline that displays a chronological
collection of a persons activity on the website. Lifestreams apply not only to objects that leave
trails of data in their wake, but humans as well (Kelly 2011).
A Day in the Life

Given that our repeated practices and rituals define our experience of embodiment, we
should now consider what the ethnographic accounts of being a lifelogger, or even just a rather
intensive Quantified Selfer, would entail on a day-to-day level. This consideration comes with
the hefty caveat that self-tracking is marked by personalised practice one of the most definitive
aspects of the movement is its lack of generalizability. Every tracker measures different aspects
of themselves in different ways and to different extents. While there are a wide variety of ways to
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engage in a self-tracking lifestyle, some common themes emerge from the swathes of
ethnographic online accounts their daily routines feature a repeated frequency of performing
self-tracking activities. Using a wide array of reported practices that self-trackers have published
on blogs, I have compiled a narrative of a day in the life of the generalised and amalgamated
self-tracker. I do not mean to suggest all of the components in the below story have ever
simultaneously occurred in a day in the life of a self-tracker, but that the imagined tale provides
insight into the kind of daily patterns members of this subculture partake in. We can gain insight
from these details that describe the features of many sensor technologies already widely
available and being used; techno-human interactions occurring out in the world right now.
Lightly woken, perhaps by a softly vibrating wristband, the self-tracker comes into
consciousness up the end of a REM sleep cycle. A system has spent the night monitoring their
brain-waves through a thin headband, and can provide a bar-graph-laden report about the amount
and quality of their sleep compared to a number of potentially correlating factors perhaps
caffeine intake, bedtime, stress levels, or the air quality of the bedroom, which has been
measured for carbon dioxide content and temperature throughout the night. Feeling refreshed and
alert, they proceed to step onto a wi-fi scale that instantaneously sends the weight, body mass,
and fat percentage to their tracking online system. Breakfast can be enjoyed after being
nutritionally analysed, calorie counted, and photographed by a smartphone application. Riding
their bike to work, a wristband GPS tracks the route, monitors heart rate, and logs their activity
level detracting the number of breakfast calories burnt up from the daily balance. Each step
taken around the office is tallied and may earn them a badge for reaching a daily goal. Every few
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hours, their smartphone periodically alerts them to numerically evaluate a series of emotions they
might be feeling; another application reminds them to rate the importance of their listed personal
values in that moment. If during an especially bureaucratic meeting their stress levels begin to
rise, the heart-rate-measuring earlobe attachment of their biofeedback mediation assistant will
cue the suggested tactic of slow, methodical breathing. As the day winds down, they take time to
review their day in far more detail than those of us who mumble events to family members over
the dinner table, developing ideas for a better tomorrow. (Aumemberg 2012; Carmichael 2008;
Dembosky 2011; Inkinen 2012; Wolcott 2013).
While the suggested narrative might emphasise the integrated flow of self-tracking that
some of the devices make possible, lifelogging as a practice reportedly still has a ways to go.
Much of the popular technology is designed to minimally interrupt the flows of daily life
(indeed, has become a selling point for most), check-ins are still inevitable. Its devotees also
report struggling immensely with the management of all that data (Wolfram 2012). Described as
being hellishly difficult to search, it can lead to feelings of being lost in the forest of
information (Kelly 2011). The available devices have limits to the extent they can automatically
log and organise everything about a human life. Many people report doing a fair amount of
manual input into Google spreadsheets through their smart phones up to thirty minutes at the
beginning and end of each day (Carmichael 2008; Inkinen 2012; Wolfram 2012). Despite these
hiccups, Kelly believes that lifelogging will be the new normal as part of the shift to a whole
new lifestyle, where every aspect of our lives is predicted to become more quantifiable (Kelly
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2011). The practice at the moment still requires conscious, consistent and regular engagement in
the activity, a characteristic that may in fact make it more meaningful to its practitioners and
their identity as lifeloggers. This is especially significant when we consider the theoretical
relationship between embodied experience and the construction of personhood. As Strathern
and Stewart argue, it is our repeated patterns of behaviour that make up the process of
constructing personhood (Strathern and Stewart 2011). Engaging in the process of recording
actually gives lifeloggers their sense of personhood and identity, more than the story they are
able to reflect back on and read in an attempt to understand their self.
Interestingly, one of the more recent developments in Quantified Self culture has been the
realisation by some members of the role repeated engagement in practices has for consciously
forming their identity as self-trackers. They acknowledge that manual data entry is crucial to
being really aware of what the data is saying, and reducing their use of systems and tools
that automatically collect data without them directly interacting with it. These members tends to
be the more mindful variety discussed earlier, the new frontier in Quantified Self philosophy.
Nafus and Sherman suggest this mindful quality to data logging being pursued might [give] a
fuller experience of what data changes might feel like, as one learns how to feel ones body
through the data (Nafus and Sherman 2013a). This idea of experiencing and feeling data
speaks to the new forms of embodied experiences these technological relationships are forming.
Tethering
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Sherry Turkle similarly believes that our experiences with technology in modern society
are primarily characterised by conscious and continual engagement with our devices. She argues
we are now becoming tethered to our technology. There is constant potential for initiating or
receiving electronic communication by having portable devices such as phones, tablets, and
laptops literally on us. They are always turned on and they are always somewhere on our
person, as she says we are in a perpetual embodied state of being always on (Turkle 2008a).
Much of Turkles work references a communal state of being with devices. These cyborg
technologies are embedded in our lives both physically and emotionally. We can assume the
quality of these relationship extend into members of the Quantified Self community, and
recognise that of all populations, they are likely to most acutely experience the novel and
complex ways we are having to navigate our relationships with machines.
Turkle claims that tethering retrains the body. She illuminates the point by describing
behaviours around smartphone use; pressing them to our ears, tapping into their screenswe are
taking on new bodily habits. We integrate these devices into the everyday gestures of the
body (Turkle 2008a). In self-trackers, one form of this habitual retraining would be the checkin. Trackers check their devices and data routinely throughout the day just as we all perpetually
glance down at our cellphones, expectant of new information and contact from the world. The
trackers initiate the interaction rather than when they are cued or alerted by their devices, as they
glance at their sensor wristbands or open their smartphone applications looking for positive
affirmations and feedback throughout the day. Many of the devices are purposefully designed to
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enable quick check-ins, with external LED lights that indicate the status of your activity level so
far that day, so that progress is always immediately visible.
Liminal Co-Presence
Technological thinkers like Turkle and Case have hijacked Irving Goffmans notion of
co-presence, originally referring to the study of face to face interaction in natural settings
and the behaviours of people in them, such as glances, gestures, positioning, and verbal
statements that people continuously feed into the situation, to explore and explain our new
experiences with technology (Goffman 1967). Electronic co-presence is about believing you
are being able to be in two places at once through the use of cyborg technologies. Being in a state
divided between the digital and physical worlds is characterised by a rapid cycling that
stabilises into a sense of continual co-presence (Turkle 2008a). In wearing a visible tracking
device the person marks themselves as perpetually inhabiting this state of co-presence. Perhaps
to a lesser degree than being immersively engaged in an iPhone screen, but nonetheless a form of
projecting oneself into two places at once. If they are ambiently transferring data while holding a
conversation, making a meal, or even sleeping, they are performing the embodied self in multiple
ways at a single moment in time. Rather than suggesting electronic co-presence mimics actual
co-presence, Turkle theorises the co-present state of having cyborg technologies on you is a form
of liminality. Liminality is another borrowed concept from anthropological history, made
notable by Victor Turner in his descriptions of coming-of-age rituals. It refers to a transitory
middle state characterised by ambiguity or disorientation. Turkle references how communal
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spaces now walk the borderline of public and private, as we collectively congregate while
expecting we will not be interrupted as we privately interface with our smartphones. Another
example that speaks to this disorientation is the claim that with digital technology, we now
experience time asynchronously. James Hanson describes this as non-linear, void of continuity,
and encourages us to think in fragments, with little connection to a sense of process (Hanson
2007: 10). Thinkers like Turkle and Hanson are referring to generalised societys experiences
with technology,
Disembodiment
This sensation that in our interactions with technology we sometimes feel a lack of
continuity of the self leads many to the assumption that we are undergoing a kind of
disembodiment. Disembodiment is considered the state where ones sense of self is separated
from their sense of physical presence in the world. The association is born from tales of hyperengaged gamers foregoing the basic physical needs of sleep, sustenance, or even bladder relief in
order to remain enmeshed in the immaterial realm of avatar bodies fulfilling heroic campaigns.
Full-bodied denial of the comparatively benign senses and signals being sent from their CNS has
earned computer gamers a reputation for an impressive detachment from reality. I should
concede that technology has evolved and developed so rapidly that while this claim is simply no
longer relevant, it may have once been so. With the explosion of such phenomena as video chat
services and increasingly visual forms of social media, human bodies are able to be very real and
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present over the internet. Unfortunately, we are still attempting to shed this idea of a
disembodied technological world well over a decade later.
Turkle argues that our transformation into certain kinds of cyborgs is both a
disembodiment as bodies [disappear] into still-nascent computational spaces, and also the
construction of a kind of re-embodiment (Turkle 2008a). I am especially drawn to this idea of
a re-embodiment that has been overlooked by the writings on cyborg technology that
dominated during its early emergence in the 1990s. Many of the pioneering theorists studying
the body and technology concluded that the immateriality of cyberspace entirely removed the
physical bodies of people from the equation. The Quantified Self movement poses a challenge to
the idea of a disembodied virtual community by placing their bodies at the centre of their
communication. Though not always able to be physically with one another, the bodies of
Quantified Selfers are made highly visible. Through their online publication of bodily functions,
they are able to see one another bodies in the numbers being given off in real-time by them.
Kevin Kelly also rebuts the idea of self-quantifying practices being a form of
disembodied digital life, pointing out that instead of disappearing from physical life into the
virtual world, they are instead taking the digital and [embedding it] in the physical
world (Kelly 2011). By attaching peripheral tracking sensors to their possessions and bodies,
they are bringing the engaging benefits of virtual escapism into lived reality rather than
surrendering reality altogether. It is a form of having their virtual cake and eating it too. We
should validate the reported experiences of self-trackers in their claim that their relationships to
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technological devices do not invoke a sense of losing themselves, and consider their situation as
a the building of new kinds of embodiment, as re-embodiments.
Intimacy and Trust

Sherry Turkles tethering applies to both devices that have physical embodiment and
those that we perceive as existing in the ethereal liminality of the connected internet. Whether
they are physically attached or not is less important than we might think. The difference between
having a device attached in a physical sense of being strapped, pinned, or clipped on, and having
it be attached in a habitual and emotional sense may in fact be of insignificance. We do not need
to string a cord between our iPhones and our bodies because we have an emotional cord that
functions just as well. Keeping our devices close to our physical bodies is a habit we persist in
because it is driven by an emotional motivation. The emotional motivation component is founded
upon our increasing intimacy with machines. Turkle calls technology the architect of our
intimacies (Turkle 2011b). By this she means that how we are intimate with ourselves and one
another is determined by our technology. We project the possibility of love, surprise,
amusement, and warmth into our devices, without them we feel adrift. (Turkle 2008a). To
momentarily return to Schlls gamblers, it is significant they described investing trust in their
gaming devices as it continuously delivers rewards to them. While in the example of gambling
this exchange of emotional input for literal monetary output is especially blunt, the same premise
is easily readable in our exchanges with commonly used personal devices. We ask for
stimulation, it provides. We ask for entertainment, it loads up Angry Birds. As Gary Wolf points
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out, we similarly invest trust in technology by handing it our valuables in the form of private
email, family photographs, contact information, an even bank passwords and credit card details
(Wolf 2012a). Wolf further argues the way the internet cloud amasses information about us in
search [histories], friend networks, and status updates, is sometimes out of the individuals
control, and the amassing of personal data in the methods of the Quantified Self is a way to
reclaim some of this power (Wolf 2010a).
Self-trackers argue they use the cloud of information as a way of [looking] outward...as
well as inward toward the psyche, in our quest to figure ourselves out (Wolf 2010a). They not
only ask their devices for a specific kind of insight and self-knowledge, but also other forms of
available information in the complex web of technological resources, seeking an understanding
of who they are and what they are achieving. The machines deliver in the form of graphs and
trends and timelines, affirming their sense of all-important progress in the world. To invest that
much of their sense of self and identity into these external objects and unseen internet flows of
data, there has to be implicit trust between the two. This trust allows them to engage in a
patterned embodiment with their technology that feeds an interdependent state.
Fetishisation, the extension of human or supernatural qualities to objects, of our
technological devices is no small contributing aspect in the intimacy we experience with them.
Turkle notes our tendency to draw parallels between cell phones names and candies or ice cream
flavours: chocolate, strawberry, vanilla there is a sweetness to them (Turkle 2011; 152). We
find a similar phenomenon in the world of tracking tools, as many devices and applications are
named for themes with positive associations that instil a sense of intimacy. One major one is
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words for friendship, companionship or other kinds of terms that describe human relationships;
we have the Amiigo, the Wakemate, GoalBuddy, Adidas MiCoach. Progressions and
improvements, especially with allusions to nature, are apparent with mindbloom, fuelfrog,
and growthnotes (Quantified Self 2013). There is also particular focus on the aesthetic, bodilyintegrated and fitted forms that tracking devices take. Body parts and functions are another
popular theme, emphasising the unity of object and owner with Cardiio, Pulse, Heartmath,
and BodyMedia. Just as the designers of gambling machines seek a create a close fit between
player and device, to accommodate the natural curves of human bodies, so too do tracker
designers idealise their seamless integration (Schll 2012: 65). The way these trackers are
conceptualised, designed, and named is undoubtably based off the fact that research in the area of
human-computer interaction has shown that when machines are given human-like
characteristics and offer emotional reassurance, we actually do feel reassured (Wolf 2010a). It
makes them far more effective in engaging us in new embodied states of being. Turkle
insightfully recognises how the power of this intimacy compels us to speak of a new state of the
self, itself (Turkle 2008a). These acts of trust are significant, as one might think the intangible
nature of the digital cloud would invoke the dualistic historical associations with the unseen
being unreal and untrustworthy. Instead, this example serves to show how our old forms of
thinking are perhaps evolving, with new technological relationships routinely proving we require
new categories and conceptions for thinking about the world.
Devices of Social Status
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The fetishisation of these cyborg technologies are as much about raising our social status
through their use as they are emotional pacifiers. Take for example the language used to promote
the Misfit Shine, a quarter-sized and smooth silver pebble activity tracker. Versatile in the
ways it can be worn as a clip, watch, or necklace, it was crafted like jewellery and can
complement any fashion statement, appealing to our perceived need for constant flexibility and
adjustment in this rapidly shifting world. This image-conscious product considers itself
timeless, elegant, precious, bold, and gorgeous. It similarly emphasises high
technological advancement, being made of a solid block of aircraft-grade aluminium with laser
drilled invisible micro-holes (Misfit Shine 2013). Undoubtably the implication is that the
irresistible attractiveness and forward-thinking quality of the Misfit will project outwards from
the person, enveloping their body into its halo of positive aesthetics. Just as our devices are
becoming parts of us, we simultaneously wish to see ourselves in the qualities of our devices. We
imagine the intimacy we have with technology might cause transference of characteristics, as we
become a singular unit of being.
While tracker developers clearly put extensive thought and effort into maximising social
appeal through device aesthetics, we also read social status into the privilege of being alwayon. Turkle argues the always-on co-present state has become a marker of ones sense of selfimportance (Turkle 2008a). She speaks of the high-status body, in our technological society
as being in intensive contact with others, but spread...around the world (Turkle 2008a). We
believe it is a sign of importance that someone might be in such high demand, they are required
to be in two places at once. Just as the texting phone is a badge of our networks, the tracking
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accessory is a badge of many possible social symbols: of pursuing self-improvement, of being in

control of ones body (Turkle 2008a). It is a sign that this person is informed about themselves.
They are an active agent of change. They are a citizen of an engaged technological community
using new marvels for the betterment of life. They are taking responsibly for their lives with a
superhuman capacity for awareness and insight.
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Chapter Five - Watch Your Data Before it Watches You
Chapter Five
Watch Your Data Before it Watches You

Members of the Quantified Self movement are not only experiencing constructions of
personhood through their patterned use of technology, but also representing personhood in online
digital forms namely, in data. Data is undeniably attributed an immense amount of power
within the Quantified Self movement. This power is inherited from their scientific origins,
however it is also taking on new manifestations within the community. Data is both deeply
involved in constructing their embodied personscapes, as well as acting as a medium to express
identities of the body and self across time and space. In 2010 Gary Wolf published The DataDriven Life, a long and reflective article in The New York Times on self-tracking as both a
personal lifestyle and growing movement. Wolf began with the absolute claim that humans
make errors (Wolf 2010a). This statement is significant to Wolf, as it is to the entire Quantified
Self community affirming their belief in human imperfection as a fundamental truth. However,
he proceeds to argue that now only some humans make errors, and others use data (Wolf
2010a). The people who live and breathe data are believed to be different, to be overcoming the
historical problem of weakness by human error. Given the significance and power Quantified
Selfers attribute to data, it makes sense they would attempt to streamline data with their bodies,
hoping to internalise that power and make it a part of their selves.
The idealised interchange between data and bodies for Quantified Selfers is an
enveloping of information into the body, as the knowledge and insight provided by the data
becomes inherently internalised. Because Quantified Selfers paint the natural human state as
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being quite bad at understanding numbers, as Kevin Kelly argues we dont really have
quantified cognition, they pursue data collection as a different way to absorb this quantified
information (Kelly 2012b). He advocates for techno-human integration that makes us capable of
unconscious, infallible sensations sourced from data a building of technology into our bodies
in a way that makes them authentic and seamless extensions of the self the personscapes
discussed earlier (Kelly 2012b). They are seeking to make the quantified sensational, to feel what
the optimal actions to do and decision to make are without having to analyse numbers to get
there. In the tracking projects Quantified Selfers take on, the ultimate goal would be to no longer
need to track, as the goals and habits they set out to change come about. This is a kind of
episodic tracking that some members practice. They use tracking to learn something specific
about themselves, and then they put the self-tracking system down rather than making it a
permanent and continuous aspect of their lives (as is the case with lifeloggers) (Christensen
2013). If a new pattern sticks, tracking no longer serves a purpose as the data has been
transducted, or moved inside [them] in a way (Nafus and Sherman 2013a). Again we find
the theme of seeking to become a singular bounded unit with their technology, as the ideal being
that there is no difference between what they feel and what the machine tells them is optimal.
Data and Flesh

We have historically believed there is a clear distinction between immaterial,
transcendent information and the fleshy, unique bodies of human beings (Mitchell and Thurtle
2004; 1). Another artefact of mind/body dualism, we perceive information and bodies as two
utterly different substances in the world material and immaterial. In the introduction to Data
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Made Flesh, editors Mitchell and Thurtle argue that information works in the metaphysics of
absence and the body in the metaphysics of presence (Mitchell and Thurtle 2004; 1). We think
information exists between elements, as a way to understand them, whereas bodies are the
elements themselves (Mitchell and Thurtle 2004; 1).
Mitchell and Thurtle argue for a broader understanding of a body as anything that
cannot be divided without changing the fundamental pattern of its dynamics and cannot be
reduced to a description of the parts or their functions, essentially that the whole is greater than
the sum of its parts (Mitchell and Thurtle 2004; 3). This flexible conception would allow us to
consider mechanical systems and technological networks as kinds of bodies, and rethink what
counts as part of our embodied systems of functioning an affirmation of the theory of
personscapes, and extending our sense of selves, that we have been working within. The division
of data from flesh is a poor and inaccurate understanding for dealing with the advances in
technology that are reforming our self-knowledge and self-awareness. The insistent segregation
of the two is a fallacy as bodies and information continually graft themselves onto one another
in a number of different cultural domains (Mitchell and Thurtle 2004; 1). This is especially
apparent in the relationship between bodies and information for Quantified Selfers, who see
bodies in information and information in bodies.
Perfectly Quantified
While the Quantified Selfers dream of having their actual bodies posses the
characteristics of perfect quantification, for now they make do with projecting images of their
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bodies that seem perfectly quantified. The Quantified Self movement uses cyborg technologies to
gather together self-portraits composed of immaterial information that partially places their sense
of self outside of their own body. Using data sourced from the physical body itself, they are
externalising an image of their bodily processes. Quantified Selfers are tethered to this
immaterial cloud of technological information about their lives. This new trove of data enables
us to store, display, perform, and manipulate aspects of identity, argues Turkle, an identity that
requires more work to manage as it infinitely expands with the continuous addition of more
information. Our devices are beginning to allow us the unprecedented ability to collect
information in monstrous volumes. The perceived immaterial nature of digital information has
given us license to both generate and horde masses of it because we believe it has no material
cost. Our data becomes a limitless projection of self in digital space (Turkle 2007b).
Anthropology now takes as established that virtual spaces allow for fundamentally new
constructions of identity (Wilson and Peterson 2002: 457). Turkle discusses how people are
tethered to new ideas of themselves constructed in tandem with technology, rather than solely the
devices themselves. The devices are gateways to a sense of new beginnings and new
subjectivities, but it is in the data itself that we find a new state of self, one that is extended in
a communications artefact (Turkle 2008a). While much of Turkles research focuses in on
identity building through virtual games and worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, the
same principal can be extended to the construction of an online self through self-quantification.
Virtual online worlds and multi-player online games provide the opportunity for people to
construct fantasy versions of themselves; vicariously living out notions of perfected characters
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and expressing multiple or alternative aspects of their identity in comparison to the more kosher
social roles they might fulfil in everyday embodied society.
The Quantified Self method offers the opportunity for a melding of these two; the
imperfect, real world self meets the potential of an expanded, improved, and high-functioning
self, using the seemingly limitless tools of technology. The online projected self is the idealised
form of the immediate embodied self in the material world or at least encompasses the
aspirations of what that lived body wishes to be; better rested, more productive, nutritionally
optimised, emotionally positive, and physically fit. It is a construction of self outside of the
embodied self potentially visible by anyone with a web browser. Quantified Selfers speak of
their records digitising life into a present tense documentary, a first person narrative (Wolcott
2013). They are creating a story of their own identities, preserving themselves to be stored
eternally in a networked world. How this might be an form of positive self-affirmation and
assurance is an interesting consideration. Csordas notes that the body/self has become primarily
a performing self of appearance, display, and impression management in the time of late
capitalism (Csordas 1994).
Performing Through Data

This notion of a public, openly visible performance of the body is perfectly captured in
the online troves of body data presented by selftrackers. Sharing the information one acquires
about their body is one way of being an active member of the online Quantified Self
community. Raw data is often transformed into colourful and aesthetically pleasing pie charts,
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bar graphs, and scatter graphs, among other visualisations in order to more effectively and
clearly communicate it significance to an audience (Benson 2013; Daytum 2013; Feltron 2013).
Emily Martin spoke how we are all increasingly seeing our bodies as a flexible collection of
assets, to be kept up-to-date as a public presentation of the self a portfolio, being managed
by us as the proprietor (Martin 1992: 582). The truth of this insight on a wider scale than
simply the Quantified Self community is visible in the way we are increasingly expected to keep
a sharp eye on and meticulously groom our online portfolios on websites like Facebook,
Twitter, and LinkedIn, among others all considered essential to future career prospects and
success in the new networking economy. Going so far as to turn data about the self into a
visually appealing chart may perhaps be the new level of personal portfolio and selling of the self
in an online environment.
One of the most well-known examples of an aesthetically-beautiful personal data display

is The Feltron Report an annually published book by Nicholas Felton. Since 2005 this graphic
designer has presented to the world his own world; tracked, collected, analysed, and visualised
into graphs, maps, diagrams, and charts (Felton 2013). Many other designers have followed his
lead, coming to see infographics and data visualisation about the body as a new expressive
medium and art form (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). We might understand this display as a kind of
bodily decoration, the aesthetic means through which social self-identities are constructed and
expressed (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 25). Turner called the body a common frontier of
society and a symbolic stage (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 25). The same kind of
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performance is being put on, only the common front we show to our society now lies on the
internet, in the form of personal blogs and webpages instead of our literal skin. We now have
virtual skin.
Making this virtual skin aesthetically appealing serves as a social status marker. Turkle
claims this new status-driven form of embodiment does not ask you to deny your body its
pleasures, but on the contrary, to love your body, to put it somewhere beautiful while you
work (Turkle 2008a). We can read this idea of putting the body somewhere beautiful as a
beautified online visualisation of the body making aesthetically attractive the work of being in
ones body. I now cannot help but cite Ian Hackings critique that in our modern day
technological prowess, we are moving closer to fulfilling a simplistic version of a Cartesian
dream, whereby bodies are just machines in space...while the mind, the soul, is something
else (Hacking 2007). The online bodies-in-data being produced by self-trackers are
presentations of this idealised mechanical body, visible in all its functional parts, now inhabiting
the space of the virtual world, as well as the physical world. The idealised bodies of society have
long been beautiful in flesh, but now can also be beautiful in the immaterial space that we
associate with the mind.
Quantified Selfers fall into the category of people who have taken on data generation
about the self as a form of identity. There are now social labels emerging such as datasexual to
describe people who engage in lifelogging activities. The name is supposed to play upon the idea
of a metrosexual a male vainly overly concerned with his physical appearance combined
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with a "preoccupation with personal data" (Basulto 2012). Related to the rising popularity of
infographics and data visualisations, there is an aspect of public display and show to datasexuals.
Social power and admiration is being pursued through the creation and internet sharing of
elaborate artworks made up of personal information, or data-grooming (Basulto 2012). The
language being used to describe all of this is clearly one of fetishisation. The new bodies of the
digital trackers who are displaying them over the internet are held to the same standards as our
physical bodies in space they are being aesthetically adorned and dressed up in order to attract
others to them which is to say, they are being sexualised. Datasexuals are believed to think
that data is sexy (Basulto 2012). Far from remaining a plain and dense list of numbers, data
today has to appeal to people using graphically designed shapes and colours and effects that help
tell its story. The vast amounts of data out there has led to stiff competition for data to get noticed
by an audience with a limited amount of attention.
The fact these visualisations are being publicly posted to the Internet significantly
expands this potential audience, perhaps most importantly in the minds of the presenters
themselves. How many literal people watch these reports of selfexperimentation matters less
than simply the idea that any person may be watching at any given time. These videos are a
public performance of the ideal body for the culture of Self Quantifiers, they are recordings that
communicate to others the values of self-knowledge and successful self-improvement on behalf
of the presenter. They display the idea that their body has been put under supervision, been
experimented upon and quantified, and engaged in the process of becoming a more optimised,
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efficient, and streamlined mechanism. These recorded performances quickly become outdated in
a culture of constant evolution and improvement, where thick streams of data flow in with every
passing second. It is preferable to be able to witness the performance of the supervised body in
real-time, which is why serious selftrackers frequently set up personal websites that live report
their bodily information to the public internet as it is produced (Benson 2013).
Authentic Data Connections

Turkle suggested the problematic question of whether we are abandoning ourselves as we
are spread across technology in new manifestations of identity. She wonders about an inner sense
of satisfaction assumed to result from true human connection. Connection over technology
feels different, is different. How are we to say whether this new kind if more true or genuine
to some ideal of a natural human sociality? There is no doubt the public display of data acts as
a form of social interaction and cohesion for the Quantified Self community. Some members
cited a desire for social connection being their primary reason for joining the community, and
self-track without any defined goals for self-improvements (Christensen 2013). The generation
of content for contents sake (or in this case, data), is suited to our new social norms of perpetual
sharing. Wolf notes that quantified data can take the place of more qualitative content that
individuals feel consistently pressured to produce, as you might not always have something to
say, but you always have a number to report (Wolf 2010a). It is significant to recognise that this
communication of information does not necessarily equal connection over computerised
networks. How could it connection requires an emotional energy, an investment in being with
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other people as people instead of abstracted mounds of data. Think of the sheer mass of
communication we are offered by the streams of the internet; the play-by-play news updates, the
daily reflective blogs, the immortalised esoteric academic publications, the insightfully
humorous essays, the snippets of tweets these scraps and trails of other lived experiences are
too vast in number for us to see real people behind. It is impossible for us to feel a connection
with even a small fragment of it. There is simply too much human communication on offer vying
for our attention; too many stories, too many words of advice, too many captured ideas. We
could spend our entire lives collecting and curating the humanity of the internet (and some
people do try), and yet only ever encounter a puddles worth for the vast ocean that is out there.
Mirrors of Surveillance
Despite the inherently performative nature of posting bodily information online in a
visually pleasing format and promoting it, some members of the Quantified Self movement do
not wish their practice to be seen as an exhibitionist display. Wolf suggests that the tools and data
of tracking would be better thought of as mirrors rather than windows (Wolf 2010b). He
means to reverse the idea that public displays of tracked data are all about letting other see into
intimate parts of the self, but instead encourages members of the movement to focus on data as
being a way to turn inward, advocating that the emphasis should be on systematic
improvement of the self by self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge (Wolf 2010b). The
demand of perpetually performing acts of self-improvement can come with emotional
complications, however, as the pervasive display of perfectly quantified bodies online can foster
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social environments of pressure and obligation to achieve these new bodily standards. ScheperHughes and Lock believe our bodies operate on numerous levels in society, with one of them
being the level of the body politic. As part of this, they argue we continually reproduce in cultural
imagery the kinds of bodies that we believe our society needs, placing them upon pedestals
and enacting a subtle force whereby members of the society understand they should seek to
emulate these idealised bodies (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 25). Now transforming our
actual bodies is not the only way to resemble the ideal. We can now also produce bodies in
digital clouds of data that adhere to the ideals, a brand new kind of bodily production. Despite
this type of performative social body gaining ground, the tracking world is still complicated by
invasive political forces exerting themselves on the physical bodies of its members.
Scheper-Hughes and Lock assert that political control over individual bodies often stems
from anxiety over threats to societies as a whole. These society-wide concerns are then played
out upon the canvas of the body. Symbols of self-control become intensified in our grasps at
greater social control (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 24). Given the attention that Quantified
Selfers pay to their bodies, we should now wonder whether they are channeling greater anxieties
about modern society as a whole. Self-trackers are clearly on a mission to fix things that are
assumed to be broken, or at least could use some improvement aspects of themselves. Yet, they
also invoke larger social issues that concern them in discussions and reasoning around why selftracking is important. Self-tracker Sarah Doody, who runs the blog Personal Metrics, frets over
Americas state of being in a consumption driven lifestyle, where obesity levels have reached
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ultimate highs, in the middle of a massive climate crisis, and an economy in state of
turmoil. Given these conditions, she believes there is an eminent need to quantify our
behaviour in order to gain some transparency and understand how we ended up here (Doody
2011). That the solution to these vastly complex and socially-embedded issues might be found in
collecting data about ones own body seems unlikely. The problems of the macro social cannot
be fixed by concentrating, no matter how intently, on the level of fixing the micro individual. The
misapplication of burdening individuals with the weight of massive and systemic national
problems of politics and society may even lead to a form of excessive personal control.
Tormenting Machines
The Quantified Self movement is not deprived of thoughtful and insightful active
members who have reflected on their experiences of the emotional complications of hypersurveillance in some aspects of their tracking habits. The discontents of building a surveillance
system around oneself that seemingly reduces your body to a spreadsheet of numbers has been
expressed by a number of community members. In 2010 Alexandria Carmichael posted an
unusually reflective piece of writing on Quantifiedself.com. She describes there being selfpunishment, hatred, and fear behind her usual routine of logging 40 things about my body,
mind, and activity every day. Saying she was addicted, she felt her habits were driven by a
fear of not being in control. Believing that the numbers in her meticulous google spreadsheets
drowned out intuition and instincts, she made the decision to stop tracking, rather than continue
letting it be an instrument of self-torture (Carmichael 2008; 2010). Wolf has similarly reflected
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on feeling both aided and tormented by his systems, such as a work-tracking regimen that
turned him into a mean-spirited, small-minded boss (Wolf 2010a). The numerous journalists
who have been assigned to take on the experiment of wearing a Fitbit or Nike Fuelband in order
to gain some Quantified Self insight report being initially obsessed and enamoured, only to have
these feelings quickly give way to a frustrating sense of obligation to the machines. Jenna
Wortham coins the term fuelshamed (in reference to the Nike Fuel-band) to describe a kind of
embarrassment felt by seeing the illuminated...lonely red dot, a signal that I wasnt active
enough to appease the machine. She also describes feeling increasing forgetfulness and
guilt with prolonged ownership of the band (Wortham 2012). Wolf argues there is a
problematic emotional component that comes with the use of mechanised quantification systems,
given their ability to act as powerful mirrors of own values and judgements, that dont
understand the value of forgiving a lapse (Wolf 2010a).
Imposing Healthiness
The emotional repercussions of interaction with measuring technologies are especially
apparent in issues of body weight and size, given their intertwined nature with social judgements
of morality and personal responsibility. As Greenhalgh has argued, perceived body weight has
moved from an explicitly aesthetic to an issue of health in the United States, as the nation is
proclaimed to be in a war on obesity (Greenhalgh 2012). The body size of individuals is read
as whether they might be burdening society in the form of higher public healthcare costs paid
by national taxes. Fatness is considered an issue of personal responsibility, rather than being
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recognised as the multifaceted and complex social issue that it is. The individual becomes the
tangible target rather than the greater political forces of inadequate infrastructure and public
services, such as food deserts and poor nutrition and physical education in public school systems.
Given that obesity has become medicalised and framed as a disease or threatening health
condition, we more easily accept and are willing to justify weight regulation devices and
technologies that seek to change the physical bodies of individual citizens.
On the political level, regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies plays out in
relation to power structures (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 26). They argue that cultures can
act as a kind of disciplining force, determining the codes of conduct and rules around
domestication of the individual body in service of the social and political needs of the whole
society. These bodily corrections produce normal and docile bodies (Scheper-Hughes and
Lock 1987: 26). We can see how these tracking devices could easily be read as corrective
measures, turning the problemtised overweight and obese subjects into thin, fit, proper
Americans (Greenhalgh 2012). The modern American version of the docile body.
Scheper-Hughes and Lock are referring to the theoretical groundwork laid by Michael
Foucault who wrote extensively on the subject of the socially produced and controlled body.
Foucault first introduced the idea of disciplinary methods in society which enforce domination
by encouraging the mastery of each individual over his own body. These disciplinary methods
are what produce our docile bodies (Foucault 1977; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 26).
Coercive tactics and mechanisms revolve around the social production of knowledge and power
as structurally embedded, with institutions such as medicine, prisons, and the various sciences
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determining their nature (Foucault 1977). Foucault asserts that we have numerous ways of
developing knowledge about ourselves by investing legitimacy in fields such as economics,
biology, psychiatry, medicine, and penology, all of which are simply playing truth games to
generate understandings of people by following specific rules and techniques (Foucault 1988).
The tracking devices used by the Quantified Self movement follow this same pattern of asserting
that true forms of knowledge about the self can be found in techniques of quantification.
Within the United States, health is understood as something that is achieved rather than
ascribed. As with many things in America, it is believed to be something you work for and
earn (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 25). If health is being equated with slimness or fitness,
it assumes all individuals with non-normative bodies have failed to achieve health, or are
lacking in their efforts to do so. Foucault proposed that modern biomedicine has created a
framework where instead of pursuing religious salvation, we now pursue health as the ultimate
form of the virtuous life (Foucault 1977). The association of virtue with health means that those
who are able to achieve health through active and intentional efforts are the more virtuous, and
therefore valuable, members of society.
Victoria Schwanda Sosik, a designer of wellbeing technologies at Cornell University,

argues the way trackers like the Wii Fit system try to encourage movement and exercise can have
harmful emotional side effects. The avatars on the programme have waistlines that swell and
shrink according to the highly problematic Body Mass Index (BMI) of the people they represent,
who have to stand on a wi-fi scale to play the game. Any increase in weight is accompanied by
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an ominous sound effect as their character looks down at its midsection is disbelief (Sosik
2012). She suggests the use of visualisation that are more constructive and less degrading
would likely be far more motivating for users, given the absence of shame and discouragement
that they currently foster. Nafus and Sherman consider how these trackers might be becoming
cruel technologies of scolding and shaming and weapons to deem people unhealthy (Nafus
and Sherman 2013a). After all, we are proclaimed to be in a war on obesity, [emphasis added]
one that the dominant discourse claims is eroding the nations health, emptying its coffers, and
even depriving the country of fit military recruits (Greenhalgh 2012). All reasons enough to
believe our society might be under serious threat, and invoke a lasting sense of anxiety that
motivates individuals to begin disciplining their own bodies, attempting to do their part to save
the nation as a whole.
While Nafus and Sherman found that many Quantified Selfers do not grip to tightly to
normative understandings of what is and isnt healthy (thanks to their pioneering culture
and prominent attitudes of skepticism towards established norms), the digital technologies
forming around and being promoted by Quantified Self practices sometimes do (Nafus and
Sherman 2013a). These technologies carry the power to enforce subtle controls over the
behaviours of their users a problematic relationship when the categories of normal or
abnormal, healthy or unhealthy, and insufficient or optimal are too rigidly set.
Community members were well aware of the the risk of people [grabbing] onto the frame so
hard they break it, meaning that the ideals of self-knowledge fundamentally fail if people end
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up losing their sense of selves amidst the automated systems of compulsive data collection
(Nafus and Sherman 2013a). Keeping the focus on continuous discoveries that ultimately
improve overall wellness is said to require community solitary and social support. Gary Wolf
reiterates that it requires connection with others who share our concerns and care enough to
help to prevent people struggling against the very systems they have built (Wolf 2010a).
One issue with this suggested form of prevention is that it depends upon having strong
personal relationships with other Quantified Selfers a set of direct connections that not all
members of the Quantified Self community necessarily have. Given its quality of being an
imagined community, not all self-trackers necessarily engage with other members face-to-face.
Those residing in rural or small towns come up against the barrier of being unable to regularly
attend meet-ups and conferences, ideal gatherings to form those connections. While relationships
can form over internet interactions, there is also the possibility that those who take a more
passive approach to community engagement would lack this support claimed to be essential to
pursuing self-tracking in a sustainable and psychologically healthy way. Given the immersive
sensory experiences provided by tracking technologies where the boundaries between the human
self and the technological tools are blurred, where intimacy and trust pervade the
relationship, we should find it unsurprising people might struggle to distance themselves from
their tracking systems. Though the Quantified Self community are themselves part of the
production system that designs and develops these devices, optimising their functionality to
motivate and shape human action according to perhaps unattainable or rigid social ideals, they
seem to be keeping the regulatory safety net externally grounded in the relative non-
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technological realm of human communities. To stay mindful of their self-knowledge goals and
fully understand their relationships with their devices, they rely on the community support and
connections of meet-ups and conferences. What they may not be fully considering is how the
encouragement and promotion of self-tracking that they put out over the internet reaches people
in situations different to their own. People for whom the use of these devices might be less of an
empowering and enlightening experience, and instead manifests as a self-destructive and
oppressive system.
In ways the movement is implicated in the promotion and popularity of health-related
tracking technologies and companies that promote far more limited, harmfully judgemental, and
politically implicated notions of healthiness and bodily correctness, even if the members of
the movement themselves do not believe in those restrictive categorisations (Nafus and Sherman
2013a). By idealising the practice of self-tracking, the values that underlie it, and explicitly
asserting that the lifestyle should be expanded into the greater population, they implicitly help
create the markets that these industries will sell to. We can find some solace in the fact the
Quantified Self community is marked by continuous and lively discourse around the political
complications and complicities of their practice. Challenging institutional power is a core
characteristic of their culture, a force we can hopefully rely on to regulate the problematic
industries of technological health now threatening to impose themselves upon our bodies.
Sousvelliance
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A twelve year veteran of tracking, Buster Benson transmits an automatically updating

algorithm on his personal website that speaks in his narrative; as of 3 minutes ago, it looks like I
have 155 unread emails, and have sent out 1 email so far today. Scroll down for a set of pie
charts letting you know the probable percentages of what he is usually doing at this time on this
particular day; working 29% of the time, conference 8% of the time, or flying 4% of the
time. What hes been concerned about this week; money 19% of the time, death 16% of the
time, or religion 12% of the time. How hes been feeling this week; happy 50% of the time,
creative 13% of the time, or selfish 13% of the time (Benson 2013). Everything from the
simplistically bright colour scheme to the colloquially conversational tone of the websites copy
is lighthearted and whimsical the playful attitude fit for a true Quantified Selfer. Benson found
an aspect of his transparent sharing less playful however, when he began to experience the
repercussions of his openness. His first tracked variable was his motivation level quantified
using a self-assigned number. He speaks of first realising the ramifications of publicly giving a
small bit of insight to his emotional mood; his co-workers changed their behaviour towards him
based on the most recent reported motivation level, or how many hours he slept. The experience
led him to think about the balance between what I do and what people know about me (Benson
2012). Indeed, some might consider the extent of Bensons sharing either daring or dangerous, as
his fully searchable and archived website also automatically uploads and displays every photo he
takes and drops a GPS pin onto a map marking every location he visits (Benson 2013).
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Bensons case exemplifies a number of complex questions we should ask in relation to

the body politic theory raised by Scheper-Hughes and Lock, and Foucaults concerns with power
relationships. Benson is the kind of example many have pointed to as evidence that self-trackers
are practicing sousvelliance the idea of inverse surveillance, or surveillance of the self as
part of enclosing themselves in Foucaudian panoptical prisons. Originally conceived by Jeremy
Bentham, the panopticon prison is characterised by perpetual surveillance that involves the
recording of all events and supervision of all movements. In Foucaults interpretation, this is
specifically an enforcement of regimens by the subject himself. A power relationship in which
the individual takes on the role of both imprisoner and imprisoned, he becomes the principle of
his own subjection (Foucault 1977: 197-203). Despite the dramatic rhetoric of an oppressive
prison establishment, Foucault suggests the panopticon is polyvalent in its applications, a
structural system that extends into to everyday life, in schools and hospitals and workplaces,
coercing individuals to become useful to their societies (Foucault 1977: 205-211). He goes on to
argue that while being our own enforcers might increase our economic utility and lead to a more
docile and domesticated society, the practices and techniques of bodily self-control decrease our
political power. That to lose dominion over our own bodily selves offers us up to the given social
and political establishments as fodder for the taking.
Within this framework, the time and attention given to the practices of the Quantified Self
movement would serve to disempower its community members. Yet self-surveillance is
presented as a form of empowerment and the gateway to a better self in the ideology of the
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Quantified Self movement. The idea is that in constantly watching ones self, you can engage in
efforts to change behaviours that will ultimately benefit you. This requires the assumption that
the individual is actually the ultimate agent in control, rather than the invisible and structurallyembedded forces of coercive social power. However, we should take into consideration the fact
that Quantified Self culture actively challenges and makes efforts to reform the standard
evaluations and judgements that science and biomedicine make about individual bodies. They do
not accept the givens that would produce docile and domesticated bodies in the theories of
Foucault. They are highly conscious of the authoritative powers that science and biomedicine
hold and exert as they struggle to be considered a legitimate part of their institutions. It would be
hard to conclude that for the Quantified Self community, the structural systems that enforce
domestication are entirely invisible. In fact, Quantified Selfers may be far more conscious of
new forms of social institutions that exert subtle power over individuals that are emerging in our
technological world seeing political forces overlooked by the vast majority of digital citizens.
Big Data Rising

As a population highly intertwined with the technological communities and industries,
self-trackers are well aware that we are all now being quantifiably tracked, whether we know it
or not. Hekler and Ramirez make clear that our every interaction with an online presence is
associated with a database entry (Hekler and Ramirez 2012). The explosion of information and
data in the age of the internet goes beyond simply numbers produced about bodies, and includes
the trail of information we leave behind us is made up of a stream of phone records, texts,
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browser histories, as well as sensor signals like GPS locations from smartphones, all being
given off by our technological activities (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). The unstructured compilation
is sometimes referred to as "digital exhaust," understood as a by-product that is extraneous and
pollutive and that will live on forever (Erwin 2012; Owen 2012). While much of this
information does appear to be doing little more than laying around on databases, uncollected and
unstructured for the moment, there is a mounting interest in its synthesis and application. This
collective is beginning to be understood as a body in itself, the kind of body defined by Mitchell
and Thurtle, where the sum of it is believed to be capable of incredible things, to have emergent
properties, though the parts are simply bits of numbers (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). This body is
now being referred to as big data. It is essentially the accumulation and analysis of information
on a massive and infinitely complex scale an incomprehensible amount of intelligently
organised numerical information on just about everything, one that is continually and rapidly
expanding (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). Some have quipped we should think of this as the
industrial revolution of data (The Economist 2010).
Big data has also been referred to as a technological planetary nervous system or datasphere (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). Sandy Pentland (often cited as one of the most influential
data scientists in the world) refers to this new mass of information as a human-machine
system, one that [includes] people as a key part (Edge 2012). Indeed, it is the computers and
algorithms themselves that are credited with revealing new insights that would previously have
remained hidden (The Economist 2010). One cannot help but harken back to Kevin Kellys
notion of the Technium and his belief in technology taking on a new animated form, a vastly
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interconnected and ethereal force that has a greater collective functionality. The way most every
theorist in the field of information technology speaks about it, it is clear the Technium and the
emergent force being attributed to big data are the same idea.
Pentland takes the viewpoint that we are at a tipping point of changing how we
understand and interpret information, a reformation of scientific inquiry. Other have called this
shift from the computer age to the information age a kind of Copernican Revolution in
knowledge (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). Where the old laboratory-based question-and-answering
process relied on averages to generalise about parts of society in the form of classes and
markets, we are now finally able to see the social phenomena...made up of millions of small
transactions, or micro-patterns (Edge 2012). The real-time and global inflow of information
from GPS satellites, smartphones and cameras, trackers, and sensors of all kinds is enabling
humanity to sense, measure, understand, and affect our aspects of existence in profoundly new
ways (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). We see an interesting parallel taking place, where those who
study big data are speaking in the same terms as the Quantified Self movement in the changes
they wish to see (and believe are currently taking place) in the methods and attitudes of
institutional science. The only difference is whether they are speaking on the level of the
individual or the entire globe.
Big Data Big Brother

The issue of big data has inevitably raised concerns about who is controlling and
watching all of this supposably intelligent data, and what they are using it for. Many
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companies are finding the collections of individual data points that make up big data meaningful
as potential sources of control and profit. While some have called this information a waste
product, it is not waste at all for others. As the mass of numbers on tracked human bodies
grows, and more bodies are joining in each day, some are beginning to see the information trove
as a valuable resource from which value can be extracted in the new internet economy (The
Economist 2010). Numerous institutions that are leading the field of big data imagine the
collective being mined for scientific discoveries, enforcing political accountability, or
economically employed for marketing research in order to target customers (especially in the
production of health management tools) (The Economist 2010; Nafus and Sherman 2013a).
Public Privacy
In the general population, we sometimes find a notable lack of anxiety around the
dangers of generating massive amounts of data about oneself. Sharing everything is the new
normal, as we are encouraged to share, like, tweet, and post the many facets of our daily lives.
Self-trackers seem more aware than most people about the potential repercussions of sharing,
although this does not extend not result in less sharing but rather more conscious thought over
how and why they share. They exercise a fair amount of protective effort into ensuring they are
the only individuals able to access the intimate numbers of their daily rhythms. While it would
take quite the flamboyant imagination to concoct scenarios where their caloric intake numbers or
average blood pressure could enmesh them in a conspiratorial blackmail situation, there is little
we should assume about the power of unbridled knowledge across the pipelines of the internet.
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Countless commentators have warned that big data has the power to arm the the bad guys as
well (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). The potential for the intricate movements and details of
peoples personal lives to be tracked by barely physical and perceptible sensors and controlled by
a centralised authority has been described at the nightmare scenario of big data. Akin to
George Orwells 1948, the fear lies in how the potential authority might attempt to create
optimal statistical outcomes for the behaviour of people (Ingram 2013).
Data Ownership and Control

These concerns around data control and its potential repercussions are far from abstract
fears, as we are already seeing cases such as financial companies evaluating whether individuals
are credit-worthy based on their social network profiles (Ingram 2013). These examples of
organisational surveillance are just as blatant in the tracking world. The company behind the
activity tracking device FitBit has already set up an entirely new division aimed at corporate
wellness, where companies can purchase trackers en masse for their employees to wear while
the leaders pay to access the resulting data. The system aims to motivate employees to move
more and improve their health, ideally leading to fewer sick days, lower healthcare costs, and
increased employee productivity (FitBit 2013). Your boss is literally watching whether you climb
that extra flight of stairs or not.
There has been considerable struggle for control over data collected from self-tracking
systems. The most popular activity tracking systems such as the Nike+ Fuelband, the FitBit, and
the Jawbone UP all use their own specially developed software to manage and analyse the data
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given off by their companion tracking devices. They also prevent their users from exporting the
raw data collected through the devices. Significant conflict and controversy has arisen within the
Quantified Self community over these limitations, with many arguing that users should have
absolute control over data they themselves produce. One popular solution to this problem within
the community has been to apply the same logic used towards their bodies many hack their
devices in order to get what they need from the system, as well as installing new capabilities and
functions (Butterfield 2012: 67).
Political bodies especially are now beginning to pay more attention to the phenomenon of
mass accumulation of data. David Clare, the editor of One More Life Hack, a major UK-based
quantified self blog, advocates for the overall societal benefits that a nation could enjoy if
individuals were willing to offer up body data to governing bodies more freely. He calls the
movement currently a little selfish for using the information only for our own learnings,
improving our own health and perfecting our bodies instead of enabling leaders to dictate
policy on incredibly large scale, long-term, organic data (Clare 2013). The politicisation of how
individual empowerment through self-improvement might lead to greater power at the hands of
governing political bodies is a discomforting transfer of power in the eyes of many self-trackers.
Anxiety around who has access to, owns, and ultimately controls the data and information being
produced about peoples bodies is very apparent.
Big Self Quantification

The Quantified Self movement has many members who express seeing themselves as a
small fraction of this much larger societal phenomena where near everything in our environment
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is now leaving a data trail in its wake. They believe Self Quantification emerged from within the
greater pattern of individuals producing data that is taking place across the whole planet (Kelly
2012b). Nafus and Sherman affirm that the Quantified Self movement was sparked by, enabled
by, and is an explicit response to big data, owing its origins to the expanding capacities of data
generation and sensors that make collection cheap and easy (Nafus and Sherman 2013a).
However, there are also those who bristle at the connections drawn between big data and the
communal identity of Quantified Selfers. Konstanin Augemberg argues that the two lie on
opposite ends of the conceptual spectrum (Augemberg 2013a). This connects back to the belief
that data collected from self-tracking is not generalizable beyond single individuals, and
therefore cannot be treated as another drop in the ocean of social information. He is arguing all
those drops of data would not add up to anything meaningful that you cant crowdsource
data if everyone in the crowd tracks an entirely different aspect of their lives, in different ways,
and presents the data differently. While community members might resist considering themselves
part of a social average, that doesnt prevent large corporations and organisations from
attempting to treat them as such.
While we can appreciate the emphasis placed on considering the individual over the
generic mass, Nafus and Sherman rightly point out that QS practices are entirely inseparable
from big data, the two share the fundamental quality of looking for greater insight and
knowledge whether about a whole human or a whole world out of the emergent properties of
massive data (Nafus and Sherman 2013a). Kevin Kelly has asserted that Quantified Selfers
sharing their information is essential because of the meaningful knowledge we might gain from
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pooling data into a vast data commons. He argues only through collective information will
they achieve revolutionary breakthroughs in healthcare and self-care (Boesel 2012). To solve
the problem of idiosyncratic data sets, Gary Wolf suggested community members make active
efforts to streamline their data into common variables, exported from the various systems we
use into a simple format for exploration, as part of his ideal QS World I Would Like to Live
In (Wolf 2013b). Here we find a prime case of contradictory and conflicting viewpoints existing
side-by-side in the Quantified Self community. This affects how the movement will develop and
progress, as the horses of opinion pull the cart in multiple and sometimes opposing directions.
We can imagine the community sacrificing some cohesion in the name of making space for subcommunities and factions to form, all remaining under the greater header of Quantified Self,
but pursuing it in their own ways.
One such sub-faction are the supporters of an emerging concept within the movement
known as Quantified Us the ideal that offering up individually tracked data about the self
might eventually be used to defeat obesity, stop gunfire, or prevent suicide (Bond and Safina
2013). The tactical points in between having access to collective data and enacting social change
are vague at best, but the conviction in the power of data remains. On WeTheData.org, a website
promoting a politically-charged Quantified Us future, the flexible nature of numbers is
acknowledged as they cite its ability to topple dictators, or empower them and encouraging
social cooperation and exchange to direct our data towards the communal good (We The Data
2013). These attitudes are evidence of the ways Quantified Selfers are far more aware of the
political nature of data as a determining force in our lives.
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Soft Resistance
This brings us full circle to the debate over whether Quantified Selfers undermine their
own political power in the practices of self-tracking and self-improvement. Nafus and Sherman
argue that the Quantified Self movement is best understood as a form of soft resistance to the
growing power of public and private sector institutions attempting to monitor and control
populations through the surveillance of big data. By producing the data themselves, they control
how and why the information emerges. Their fluctuating and fragmented data sets escape the
systems of aggregate data analyses, as they switch between tracking different variables for
different self-improvement projects. The malleability and physical disconnection inherent in the
data-self complicates how it can function as a controlling form of surveillance. Nafus and
Sherman situate this self-determining data within the more politically significant landscape of the
biopolitics of the technology industry (Nafus and Sherman 2013a). They argue self-trackers
represent a profoundly different way of knowing what data is, why it is important, who gets to
interpret it, and to what ends, a challenge to the most hungrily panoptical of the data
aggregation business (Nafus and Sherman 2013a). This concept of soft resistance interprets the
data-tracking of Quantified Selfers as an empowering mechanism, a politically motivated
challenge to the way many of us are tracked in the digital world without thinking about it.
What is significant about individuals such as Buster Benson is that he retains the ability
to both publicly present his data in a certain way, and remove his data from public view he
remains in control of who sees it and in what context. This relates back to the Quantified Self
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movements quality of speaking for their data rather than letting the data override their
construction of a sense of self. The movement holds a fundamental belief in self-definition, in
identity construction through constructions of data. As part of their soft resistance theory, Nafus
and Sherman describe the whole philosophy of Quantified Selfers as soft, meaning they
display a readiness to evolve what constitutes meaning as it unfolds (Nafus and Sherman
2013a). Paired with a tendency to critically question and continually re-evaluate systems and
signifiers, this quality has no doubt played a significant role in the dynamic evolution the
movement has undergone since its emergence and founding.
The Quantified Self movement is acutely aware of the critiques of reductive

quantification that have repeatedly been levelled against them. They are equally concerned with
the Foucaudian conclusions that many have alluded to in their analysis of its practices. Many
Quantified Selfers reference the parallels between Foucaults theory and their own culture,
calling self-tracking sort of like radical self-surveillance (Christensen 2013; Kelly 2007b).
Wolf responded to Nafus and Shermans paper in a very recent blog posting, pointing out nearly
all of the anthropologists who had engaged in studying the community were trained to see
technologies of enumeration as tools of domination and control. He took offence to the idea
self-tracking was being reductively read as a cover up for conformist obedience to corporate
monitoring, and a self-imprisonment into the iconic panopticon system (Wolf 2013a). While it
is hard to deny anthropologists have a penchant for offering Foucaudian readings of nearly every
aspect of modern Western life, it is equally hard to deny that Quantified Selfers indeed put their
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bodies under surveillance and impose a self-enforced discipline even if it is done in a flexible
and critically reflective way. Considering how political and economic forces impact our cultural
existences in the specific details, rather than in large and abstract ideas of Foucaudian power,
makes this argument even more salient.
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Chapter Six - Becoming Gods of Capitalism
Chapter Six
Becoming Gods of Capitalism

The historical rise of the Quantified Self movement is about so much more than simply
numbers and mathematical methods. In the tagline self-knowledge through numbers, the more
definitive aspect the aspect that leads us back through the historical conditions that led to the
rise of this movement is the self-knowledge part. Within the movement, there is an explicitly
shared value in self-knowledge for its own sake an assumption that gathering information and
awareness about the self is an inherent good. This inherent belief in the value of selfimprovement through a process of self-knowledge has required a specific historical narrative to
be internalised. We now return to Sahlins and Western Cosmologys foundational belief in man
as an imperfect creature of lack and need (Sahlins 1996: 397). Being naturally imperfect, we
have since held onto an inherent belief in the value of self-improvement. Western history may be
read as a long series of vain attempts to fix that which is assumed to have always been broken.
The idealisation of empirical science starting in the seventeenth century was one such
effort to achieve redemption; the conviction that it was essential we meticulously observe,
understand, and establish facts of nature was an exertion of control control in the form of
medicine and technology that we would use on our inadequate state of being (Sahlins 1996).
Self-knowledge is now thought to be best found in the rational and logical scientific method
of collecting facts and data, gateways to the morally purified realm of being the best possible self
one can be the optimised self. The relationship between Quantified Selfers and science feeds
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into their relationship to capitalist ideologies. Martin draws an interesting parallel between
scientists and the accumulating, aggressive individual born of capitalism. Both approach the
world from a monadic, agonistic, competitive viewpoint in their drive for control and power
(Martin 1998: 27). Given the presentation of an ideal Quantified Selfer being a more pure form
of scientist than those wearing official lab coats, we might ask whether they also could be a more
pure manifestation of the ideal Capitalist, more so than any wall street stock trader who is not
investing his entire physical being to the cause of absolute optimisation and productivity. Selftracking is often argued to be a tool of discovery rather than optimisation. Wolf believes that if
we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better (Wolf
2010b). However, the focus on self-understanding is simply a few steps removed from seeking
an optimised self. If you can understand, you can control. And if you control, you can progress.
And ever since our enlightenment forefathers proclaimed it so, progress has been promoted as
the ultimate collective purpose of humankind.
In his 1998 essay Technologies of the Self, Michael Foucault expresses intrigue into
the traditions established by both Greco-Roman and Christian values for the relation between
self-care and self-knowledge. He asserts that the maxim know thyself has obscured take care
of yourself in contemporary society, where the former is now assumed to be a manifestation of
the latter (Foucault 1998). In ascribing to a morality of asceticism, we find it difficult to base
rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give ourselves more care
than anything else in the world. Foucault also wrote of technologies that permit individuals to
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effect by their own means...a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls,
thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain
state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault 1998). Essentially,
Foucault sought to understand how people use technology to construct notions of the self.
Technology can be understood loosely here to include certain kinds of information and
knowledge, as well as tools such as self-tracking devices. This hypothesis could not be more
aptly affirmed by the Quantified Self philosophy of seeking self-improvement through the
massive gathering of data - a very specific form of knowledge.
Built into many of these ideas is the assumption that human beings are an unsolvable
mystery when considered through the lens of rational logic. Scientific attempts to explain human
behaviour as the rationally thinking creature it has been portrayed as in Western Cosmology
rarely pans out. We saw this in the earlier discussion of psychologists proclaiming humans to be
strangely illogical beings, thus concluding we actively lie and deceive ourselves as part of our
natural functioning (Ariely 2012). This quandary ends up frustrating many as self-exploration
and self-knowledge are seen as elusive but essential to living a good life. Quantified Selfers
believe they have come across a form of self-exploration which might be considered the least of
all possible evils in this inherent problem. While many acknowledge the limitations of
understanding purely through numerical values and statistical data, the recent advances in
technology that enable a whole new level of tracking intensity and its integration with the self
lead them to believe they are being granted access to a new and special kind of self-knowledge.
They cite its ability to see the unseen, and Wolf speaks of people who believe their numbers
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hold secrets that they cant afford to ignore, and perhaps answers to questions they have not
yet thought to ask (Nafus and Sherman 2013a; Wolf 2010a). These allusions to secrets and
seeing unseen things imbues unknowable and mysterious qualities into technological ways of
knowing that perhaps in places where the decidedly un-mysterious and theoretically allknowing world of rational science has fallen short of providing us with understanding, the
emergent forces of digital technology will come through.
The Social Solution of Capitalism

Where rational science and medicine were seen as the perfect solutions to go about
fixing individual flawed bodies, capitalism became the logical extension for dealing with mans
insatiable nature on a societal level (Sahlins 1996). There is an intimate and inherent bond
between the Quantified Self movement and the economic system of capitalism, or more
specifically, capitalist ideological thought. The two feed into one another quite well. The selfimprovement and optimisation that Quantified Selfers seek always seems to be pointed in the
direction of enhancing their functional alignment with the capitalist society.
Starting from a place of physical suffering and misery, we invested the positive science
of how we make the best of our eternal insufficiencies; capitalism. Seeing material opportunity
in hardships, it was conceived that man would always be a scarcity-driven creature of need,
therefore eternally requiring an economic system that would unsuccessfully attempt to satisfy it,
forever growing with mans ever expanding requirements (Sahlins 1996; 397). Indeed, the basis
of the entire capitalist economic system requires an unwavering conviction in mans neediness.
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Assuming we all had needs to fulfil, instituting a system that revolved around their material
creation and exchange made sense, as human need came to be the reason for society
itself (Sahlins 1996; 398). Recall this human need is predicated on the conviction that mans
ultimate purpose is the search for satisfaction, the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain,
in material and spiritual manifestations. We present as natural the fulfilling of sensory
appetites as the means to serve the self as its finality, the ultimate justification of the capitalist
system as a good and natural adaptation to the Western construction of mankind (Sahlins 1996:
402).
When Kevin Kelly makes explicit that self is being serviced by this new
Quantification, we might consider how the practice of Self Quantification is understood as a
fulfilment of needs the need to know oneself, the need to pursue improvement, the need to feel
in control (Kelly 2012b). Serving these needs inevitably drives the system of capitalism forward
through its production and consumption of tracking goods and services. It is significant the
solution to satisfying our needs comes in the form of material goods, goods that we imagine help
us to reach higher states of being as we use them to fix our imperfections. Our perceived
natural physicality and material products have become the new canvas through which we
pursue ideals of spiritual transcendence and godliness.
Nature Becomes God Becomes Society

In a time back beyond the ancient rise of religion, the ideal of nature was replaced by the
ideal of God. We have now returned to a worldview where we have replaced God with nature
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only nature portrayed as the natural system of capitalism. In the Christian doctrine nature was
without redeeming spiritual value, because God created it out of nothing, making Him the sole
source of spiritual power (Sahlins 2008: 89). The demise of God in the minds of many required
power be placed elsewhere. In the wake of abandoning the word God, we instead idealised the
natural and real as ultimate goods, as the higher wisdom of Western society became implied
in earthly things (Sahlins 1996: 408). It is not that we do not worship a higher power in our
secular society, but that the kind of power we worship goes by very different names and forms
than simply God. What we have ended up with is the enchantment of society by the world
by the symbolism of body and matter as spirit (Sahlins 2008: 87).
The construction of the godless natural world ruled by rationality that we now live in
came about through the rise of empirical science and the capitalist free-market; the twin
demiurges of the Western rational cosmos (Sahlins 1992). Both science and capitalism are
specific kinds of logic systems we have accepted as givens. Many minds have spend some long
and hard hours convincing us that capitalism is a natural and logical system for complex
economic societies. Sahlins argues we are still in an enchanted world in the same way we were
when religious thought dominated the public realm. Rather than God being the enchanting force,
we now have imagined cultural values of the material that is to say, commodities the
products of capitalism (Sahlins 2010: 383). But it is not only in commodified materials that we
seek ideals of higher powers, but also in our material selves. Sahlins further argued that rather
than making God society deified, now society [is] God socialised (Sahlins 1996: 411).
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Holding up the powers of rational science and quantification as products of society, in living
through these, the members of society themselves are able to become their own ideas of God.
Capitalism as Religion
Sahlins repeatedly seeks to make clear there are many parallels and similarities between
the capitalist economic system and the qualities anthropologists have long observed in the
structures of religion, from Christianity to those so-called traditional or native societies. In
calling the ideas of the West a cosmology, Sahlins tries to get at the heart of what these beliefs
all add up tohe tries to address the vastly interconnected and interwoven ideas that are so central
to us that we are often incapable of seeing them. Western cosmology as a transcendent,
functional, and objective order that requires absolute faith in it for the system to function
(Sahlins 1996: 407). The clearest example is Adam Smiths so-called invisible hand that runs
the capitalist free market it is an unknown and unseen, beneficent, and encompassing system
that adds up to greater force than mankind himself (Sahlins 1996: 407). In many ways, this does
not seem so far off the invisible hand of a God shaping the world in invisible and unknowable
ways. Instead of Sunday mornings in the pews to give attention and devotion to a religious
ideology, men show up at factory lines each morning as an expression of dedication to the idea of
the capitalist industry. Having faith in a controlling power greater than the singular human being
is a functional necessity of any belief system religious or economic.
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Self-knowledge about the body and self that trackers seek is the modern method of
experiencing a degree of transcendence. It becomes the new higher goodness for us to seek in
our godless, scientific, and rationally-rules world of progress at all costs. The numerical
measurements are the constant assurance that progress is being made. Here we find ourselves at
the crux of a cosmology that would eventually gave birth to the Quantified Self movement; these
historical footsteps give them more logical legitimacy than many would have originally
considered. The motivations and beliefs of the Quantified Self movement make perfect sense
within this understanding of Western Cosmology. Placing their bodies at the centre of the path
towards a higher good, they are fulfilling a historical framework laid out for them starting with
Adams original sin and ending with Adam Smith.
The Quantified Self movement undeniably displays many patterns, activities, and rituals
that are equally comparable to supernatural belief systems. This is because beneath the fact we
give them different social labels, all of these collections of social phenomena as simply sets of
belief systems and enact those beliefs in strikingly similar ways. The repetitive bodily practices
that self-trackers perform daily could be read as a kind of worshipping of the capitalist system, a
dedication to embodying its most optimised form. We have seen how the drive to rid the body of
imperfections is based in the Judeo-Chirstian religious origin myth, and how much of the moral
judgement around bodily needs was fuelled by religious writings. The spiritually redeemed body
was free of sickness and suffering, invulnerable and immoral, and ... needs neither air, food or
drink; it is a divine body without needs (Sahlins 1996; 397).
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Wolf has himself noted the similarities between the movement and higher notions of
transcendence, stating that the dream of a quantified self resembles therapeutic ideas of selfactualisation (Wolf 2010a). The Quantified Self movement does attempt to transcend the needs
of the body but to manage them in a way that best streamlines them into the functioning of daily
life. The kind of daily life that members of the Quantified Self happen to be working towards is
one that functions within the Capitalist economic system. Just like the long and extensive
cultural history of body rituals of purification - the attempt to physically embody the belief in a
transcendent sense - the ideal capitalist body is the self-reliant and self-made body systematically
optimising itself to best perform in the capitalist labour system.
Progress Required
The activity of transforming ones self into this idealised Capitalist worker fulfils the
socio-economic demand that all people and systems continually be engaged in forward
progression through history. Given the material requirements of the technology that enables this
embodiment, the attainment of the ideal Capitalist body will inevitably divide along lines of
economic disparity and class. Only individuals in possession of money and time will be able to
then posses the ideal physical form and mental cultivation of hyperactivity. The implications for
an array of social identities in our society would be an interesting further exploration branching
off this topic. It would also interesting to expand on how the embodiment process itself serves
the dual imperatives of commodity capitalism, (Carolan 2005: 97) that we be conditioned in
self-discipline and restriction and yet indulge in consumption in order to keep the economic
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wheels of the marketplace turning. By consuming technological products that assist us in

managing and affirming control over our animalistic and unruly bodies, we believe we can
transcend them to be rational creatures fulfilling the demands of the Capitalist notions of
progress.
Capitalist Bodies
There are certain types of bodies that align themselves with the ideals of capitalism better
than others. If indeed are in an age where our bodies fail to fulfil the demands of our economic
system, Anthropologist Linda Hogle argues the average body may be viewed as
deficient (Hogle 2005; 697). Writing about bodily technological enhancements, Hogle points
out that to talk about what is viewed as needing fixing...one must first consider the cultural
assumptions that constitute normal (Hogle 2005; 697). Martin suggested that the drive
towards productivity and flexibility in the United States has called for a new type of body,
possibly specific to American culture: one that is vigilant, responsive, needs little sleep, and can
work harder. (Hogle 2005; 697). There is no doubt the bodies of the Quantified Self movement
strive to improve themselves in ways that sound remarkably like they would fulfil the demands
that Martin has found our modern capitalist society makes of us.
The modern employment of technology for bodily transcendence is increasingly directing
and enabling the individual to pursue progress and productivity by attempting to transform
themselves into the ideal capitalist worker. Building a powerful extension onto the theories to
Foucault, Silvia Federici argues that reform of the body is at the core of the bourgeois ethic
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because capitalism makes acquisition the ultimate purpose of life (Federici 2004; 135). She
argues that the mind/body split and degradation of the body serves a very functional purpose in
the economic system of capitalism. The mechanical understanding of the body seeks to
maximise its social utility, and to transform all bodily powers into work powers (Federici
2004; 139-140). Maximising efficiency and ones physical capacities for the purpose of being
able to work for longer hours, with more focus and dedication, and to produce more
commodified products is a frequently expressed desire of Quantified Selfers.
Two Capitalist Bodies

Emily Martin finds us at a crossroads where our understanding of the body is shifting
with our modes of production. From the body of the 20th-century Fordist mass-production
systems that seeks efficient production above all else and is subject to centralised controls
(Martin 1992: 122), Martin argues the social bodies we now live within are defined by the
qualities of late capitalism, which functions around technological innovation, specificity, and
rapid, flexible change in a world where time and space are compressed in the ceaseless global
flows of goods and ideas. It asks for problem solving, highly specialised instantaneous responses,
and an adaptability of skills to specific needs the tools for serving small-scale market
niches (Martin 1992: 122-123). Quantified Selfers seek an idealised body that aligns with both
varieties of the capitalist economy, one that carries over aspects from the Fordist legacy but now
also fulfils the needs of late capitalism. Martin argues these two bodies are coexisting in the
late 20th century (Martin 1992: 129). While we are moving beyond understanding the body as a
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mechanical system simply requiring maximisation of productivity and efficiency, it is being

replaced by more complex demands upon the individual in order to achieve optimisation.
Flexible Bodies
In addition to the demands of self-optimisation embedded in our histories, we are now
also required to embody a state of constant flexibility, able to rapidly change and adapt while
constantly upgrading ourselves in order to keep pace with the economy and the culture it
fosters. Martin speaks of an increasing demand for restless change and continuous development
of the person at all times (Martin 2000: 579). Martin found that in the corporate environment of
the United States, people who displayed dynamism, spontaneity, and the ability to continuously
[change] in creative and innovative ways were desired and considered valuable (Martin 2000:
578). She portrays our current environment as marked by the stretching, condensing, speeding,
warping, and looping of time and space, due to the manic state of tumultuous and continuous
transformations happening in our social sphere (Martin 2000: 578). These descriptions are
strikingly similar to the nature of always-on liminal co-presence that Turkle argued we are part
of in our use of cyborg technologies. The alignment of the flexible state of being that late
capitalism demands of us and the fulfilment of that state using these technological devices make
them salient solutions to these economic pressures. The flexibility that characterises the body
demanded of late capitalism is a fear-driven response to our loss of employment, status,
housing, and health in current society (Martin 1992: 129). The pressures to embody flexibility
are underwritten by concerns over failing to succeed in certain socially-constrained senses.
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Fordist Bodies
The Fordist reading of the Quantified Self body is perhaps the default version as a
preoccupation with numbers in an obsessive search for efficiency. Early on in the movement,
even Wolf originally interpreted tracking as a rapid progress toward a known goal (Wolf
2010a). However there are many ways Quantified Selfers challenge this assumption, the most
striking being that for many trackers, there is no specifically identified goal. Meet-up leaders
describe many attendees for whom there isnt necessarily a specific goal in mind and arent
solving a problem with their tracking habits (Christensen 2013). The open-ended approach to
tracking taken by some members fits into the flexibility described of the late capitalist body.
Without explicit goals to achieve, these individuals could be interpreted as wisely surveying the
field before making determined decisions of understanding the situation before acting upon it.
While qualities of both the Fordist body and the last capitalist can be seen in the Quantified Self
movement, their ideologies are increasingly directing them towards the individually specialised
and malleable nature defining the new age of capitalism, and away from mass-produced
generalisations that ruled during the last century. There is a degree of truth to Wolfs original
assumption, but how this movement emerged, developed, and continues to gain ground in the
public sphere today is also a vastly more complex matter. The true efficiency aficionados of our
society are a limited population, one far smaller than the current scope of the Quantified Self
movement. There is much more at play here than simply numbers.
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Conspicuous Bodies
The patterns and habits of the Quantified Self individual can be read as an active
production of their own bodies. Within the context of a capitalist society, they are creating a
conspicuous body. Michael Carolan lays out this idea of the conspicuous body as an extension
of the idea of conspicuous consumption social power being displayed through physical form
rather than the amassing and display of commodities. He argues that we have recently entered a
new epoch of conspicuous consumption where we increasingly strive to become the nice
thing itself - to literally embody conspicuous consumption (Carolan 2005: 84). In the industrial
capitalist economic system, the body became a mechanical tool used to produce commodities. In
late capitalism, the body produces itself in the same way. We engage in the process of turning
ourselves into commodities, using productive energies to build upon our natural form, to try and
redesign the human body according to particular needs and desires (Hogle 2005: 696). Instead
of goods being sold on the market, we now sell ourselves. Historically, conspicuous consumption
functioned in displaying to others that we are in control of the material world around us, where
the conspicuous body will now show we are in control of our physical form. The physically in
shape, fit and well-regulated body represents power, control, strength, and restraint (Carolan
2005: 96). We assign moral value to the body that appears to have achieved dominance of the
body by the mind, as an external signifier of ones inner worth (Carolan 2005: 89). The docile
politically correct body of today, the lean, strong, androgynous, and fit form manages to
align itself with the needs of a capitalist system in that it represents restriction, determination and
hard work while also requiring the indulgence in consumption. Achieving this body might
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involve the purchase of everything from gym memberships and equipment, to healthy food, to
workout clothes, and now, to tracking devices and sensors. Its perpetuation feeds the market,
more so now than ever before.
The Quantified Self movement in many ways itself resembles a product. The official blog
is sleekly designed with an official logo and look to it. The presentation videos posted online
are introduced with a professionally animated five-second sequence to match, complete with a
theme tune. Whether this could be understood as an attempt to sell the movement to the wider
population is debatable, especially complicated by the matter of most members being both
participants and producers. Nafus and Sherman point out that these mixed motives need active
management and acknowledgement within the community, also noting that this intertwining of
commercial labour and personal creative work is a standard quality of the technology industry,
and equally common the wider trends of late Capitalism (Nafus and Sherman 2013a).
Performing Capitalism
The ideal body for the Capitalist mode of production is not only of a certain physical
appearance, but also must perform in a certain way. It must be optimised for the performance of
productivity in all settings. A certain state of mind is required to be the ideal citizen. There is
something specifically about the modern condition of living perceived to be more demanding for
our mental faculties. In his research on how technology is changing and expanding our minds,
Marc Prensky claims that in this century we need better minds (Prensky 2012: 1). As capitalist
markets of the West shift from requiring physical hardships in factories and fields to mind-driven
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intelligence and creativity, we see the focus rest upon optimising the brain. There is some degree
of experimentation with drugs and supplements that affect mental functioning amongst
Quantified Selfers. The casual term for mind-altering drugs within the community is
nootropics or smart drugs. From tryptophan to modafinal to adderall, some invest
considerable time into finding the correlations between reported mental states and intake of
substances claiming to enhance the mind (Branwen 2012). Those more in tune with the selfhacker identity claim to have rewired their brains through their efforts (Dembosky 2011).
There is the sense that being a citizen in the highly-globalised and fast-paced capitalist world of
today requires abilities and capacities that are beyond our normal, natural, plainly human
bodies.
Responsible Self-Management
One of the most powerful ideologies driving the production of conscious and
performative bodies in capitalism is the idea that each individual is responsible for the active
management and production of themselves. John Stuart Mill proclaimed that over himself, over
his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign (Hughes 2004: 11). During the
Enlightenment men became agent of themselves, prescribing laws for themselves citizens
more than subjects. We entered a new social world of social obligation to the collective state, of
each individual as responsible for himself (Sahlins 2008: 81). Martin argues our understanding of
our selves within bodies has been shaped by this production of the civic self, that by creating
and protecting individual rights, [we] produced citizens who, one per body, voted, fought, paid
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taxes, and sowed their seed (Martin 1992: 121). We created sets of personal responsibilities for
each to pay attention to, believing that civic virtue would come by itself out of private
vice (Sahlins 2008: 81). This is the groundwork that our current state of being resides upon; the
belief that greater social good will emerge from individual self-interest. This apparent
contradiction became the basis for capitalist society.
The business language of managing the self is a common theme throughout selftracking culture and the products that seek to serve it. Much of this rhetoric sounds as if it could
belong in a company management meeting, only the system being managed is now the individual
person. For example, the Nike+ Fuelband asks you to set goals, watch your progress, and share
your results, in order to stay motivated in achieving them. While each individual person using
the system has their own personal account logging their progress, the online site also features
live updating collective counters of the steps taken, calories burned, achievements earned, daily
goals hit, and miles run of the entire Nike+ community (Nike Plus 2013). The system attempts to
make transparent the connection between the gains of the individual and the gains of the social
collective, exemplifying the philosophy that if each user holds themselves accountable to daily
goals and achievements, the communal pot of achievement is added to.
On her website Quantified Awesome, Sacha Chua is tracking everything about her life,
but mostly she is tracking how she manages her time. She logs her minutes into one of twentynine different categories and sub-categories including discretionary - reading - non-fiction,
unpaid work - subway, business - consulting, and sleep. Chua is certainly not alone her
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software is an open-source tool that anyone can sign up for and begin logging themselves
through (Chua 2013). Similarly, for three years Catherine Hooper has tracked how she spends
each hour to make sure she is using those hours to [live] by her priorities. She defines her
priorities, turns them into actions, then schedules them (Quantified Self 2013). Chua and
Hooper are both using structures of time to fulfil the self-management demands of the capitalist
system, or perhaps the demand to live an awesome life as Chua puts it (Chua 2013). This is the
self-directed, self-aware, self-sufficient, self-supervising, ambitious, extroverted, maximally
productive, optimised individual serving a very specific kind of society.
Managing Time, Managing the Self

Management of the self in the service of capitalism can be seen no more clearly than in
the modern structuring of time. The rhetoric of time management for the purpose of setting
goals, defining priorities, and achieving these explicit and well-defined aspirations runs deep
through the ideology of self-tracking. The idea you should know what you want in life, make that
desire explicit and tangible, write yourself a methodical plan of how to get there, and believe it is
a matter of sheer force and willpower to end up there. Self-quantification is about drawing a road
map to follow through life, a form of trying to determine the future, to control ones destiny. It
may seem to many that this is the obvious tactic for success write a comprehensive plan
and follow it. We should remain aware that this attitude of expressing excessive control and
direction over ones life is highly culturally-bound. The kind of success being chased is
narrowly defined within the bounds of a capitalist economic system. In late capitalism, Martin
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describes how we believe we must be flying from one thing to another, pushing the limits of
everything, doing it all with an intense level of energy focused totally on the future in order to
find success (Martin 2000: 578).
Material Time
The metaphors we use around labour and time portray them as material resources that can
be saved, stored up, used, spent, or wasted. This understanding emerges from a capitalist
ideology of maximising efficiency and productivity in a wage labour system. The old adage
time is money changed peoples understanding of time by commodifying continuous
experience. It turned time into a finite substance. E.P. Thompson wrote about the relationship
between time, discipline, and economic systems and points out that capitalism requires all time
[to be] consumed, marketed, put to use as it would otherwise be offensive for the labour fore
merely to pass the time (Thompson 1967: 91). The ideal citizen of our socio-economic system
must see all time as commodified in order to be efficient and productive in all they do. Every
minute of the day is an opportunity for an individual to be a good or bad Capitalist in their
decisions to spend time wisely or waste it. We should briefly return to Foucault on this
subject who cited time-tabling as an essential method of controlling the activity of the citizensubject. It imposed the idea that time should be without purities or defects; a time of good
quality, by assigning the body to perform certain activities within blocks of minutes (Foucault
1977: 151). This applies to both matters of labour and leisure, especially as the boundary
between the two increasingly disintegrates. The expectations of the working realm have
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expanded and now overflow into all realms of life (the distinction between realms of life being a
creation of the capitalist mode of production itself). We have the constant opportunity to use time
to be producing something, anything, and that something has increasingly begun to be bodies
themselves. The obsession over tracking ones physical state and mental optimisation of
productivity is a way to spend time fulfilling the demand of becoming the idealised worker of the
capitalist society.
Technological advancements have then taken this to an entirely new level. Many workers
today rely on the digital calendars and clocks of accurate-to-the-millisecond smartphones to
regulate their days. In Federicis view, this late capitalist pace of life attempts to overcome our
natural state, by breaking the barriers of nature and by lengthening the working day beyond the
limits set by the sun, the seasonal cycles, and the body itself, as constituted in the preindustrial. (Federici 2004; 135) However, her claim assumes there is a pre-cultural way of being
in the body. She implies an existing relationship between the cycles of the sun, seasons, and
human body outside of the influences of cultural structuressuch as a capitalist economic society.
The idea that our bodies are being violated by the forceful structures of capitalism is a popular
yet sometimes unsubstantiated claim.
This materialistic approach to time that emerged during industrialisation and the rise of a
Capitalist economy has been taken on by Quantified Selfers. Time is perhaps the most commonly
used variable in all variety of quantified self experiments. It becomes a tool of measurement; a
constant that gives Quantified Selfers an assumed good to evaluate their experiments with. If
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you are saving time as in, your experiment leads you to open up more unscheduled minutes
and hours of the day (which can then be filled up with more scheduled activity) that is almost
always deemed a success. Having more time is a good in itself for trackers. Careful monitoring
of time is necessary because people have such very poor sense of time, as one Quantified
Selfer put it. Seeking good time calibration is therefore a worthy goal within the movement
(Wolf 2010a). Quantification applications often speak of time as if it were a material and
animated object that escapes if you do not invest effort in its control and management. Time is
portrayed as elusive and yet highly valued; it is a substance you need to save and maximise.
One of the more popular and well-developed time-tracking iPhone applications is Chronos,
whose tagline your time is your life, how are you spending it? implies that how a person
spends their time is an essential part of identity and the concept of self (Chronos 2013). It is
therefore thought to be exceptionally important that we monitor where our time goes. Chronos
does this by GPS tracking the location of your phone and determining activities based on it - eg.
sleeping in your bed, parked in your desk chair, picking up a carton of milk. Amassing location
data on how long you spend in specific places, the application tries to tell you where the time
went. There are clear associations between physicality and time in Quantified Self culture, as
the capitalist understanding of time as material is made apparent.
Time management in a time-starved working cycle where enough is never enough lead
one Quantified Selfer to invent the 28 hour day. Joe Betts-LaCroix constructed for himself a new
standard of time that walked the line between self-hacking and self-tracking. His schedule
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contained the same number of hour-long blocks of sleep, work, childcare, and even relationship
time as a normal week but fits into a seven day week six times the same way a 24 hour day does
seven times (Betts-LaCroix 2011). This solution emerged in response to his unmanageable drive
to continue working late into the night, and then have to deal with the repercussions of fatigue
the next morning. Betts-LaCroix describes his tendency to get obsessed with things and want to
keep going, and just forget about time, leading to finishing programming problems at 5:00am
and trying to wake two hours later at 7:00am with the rest of society (Betts-LaCroix 2011). Both
the problem and the response leads back to the demands of a society structured by capitalism
the compulsion to maximise working time and productive output, and the structuring of
communal social schedules. In ways we might understand Betts-LaCroixs experiment as a
breaking down of the pre-prescribed time construction expected within society, as some kind of
resistance to the norms. Yet, his end goal still serves the imposed demands of productivity at all
costs, only now granted the flexibility accepted as part of late capitalist labour.
Visual Time
Time for the quantified community is not only material, but also incredibly visual. These
visualisations are represented in graphs and pie charts and timetables, designed to help the
individual manage their time by showing them where it went. Chronos advertises that you can
now see your time like never before with the idea this will lead to achieving your personal
goals around time management (Chronos 2013). If we are able to see something, we believe
we have more control over it greater understanding leads to greater power. On Quantified Self
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blogs, collected data is most significantly organised and publicly presented in the time frame of a
year (Feltron 2013). In having annual reports be the popular form of reporting numbers back to
the community, the culture creates a system that requires a long-term investment in order to
participate in. They are weeding out those who might only dabble in self-tracking for a day
weeks or months. Publishing an annual report shows you have invested significant amounts of
your time and effort (highly valued materials in the realm of self-improvement) and have earned
a place as one of them. It gives you cultural capital and legitimacy in their social world.
Natural Alignment
There is now also an awareness that capitalist society inflicts pressures upon us that we
have to manage. We have opened up a new dialogue and discourse about respecting our
natural needs apart from and outside the socially-constituted schedules of work and labour.
New forms of medical and therapeutic treatments that are slapped with the slogan natural are
becoming popular. As we increasingly witness the destructive capacities of productivity in the
form of industrial developments upon both the natural planet and human bodies over the past
century, it seems our trust in man-made products is slightly wavering. As rhetoric over the
dangers of genetic modifications and genome testing, chemical pollutants and pesticides,
additives and artificial substances, carcinogens and clones rises in volume, perhaps it should
come as no surprise we give are now putting more stock in the natural things presumed to be
untouched by the latex-gloved hands of human scientists and technicians. Driven by different
forces of fear, many are now desperately trying to uncover what the natural diets, sleep
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patterns, schedules, and systems of human beings might have been before the age of cities and
civilisation. Ironically, we automatically turn to research carried out by scientific institutions to
provide this insight into our evolutionary foundations. The way to find ones natural bodily
rhythms in the method of Quantified Self tracking is through the use of scientifically-based
methods of data collection and analysis that allows individuals to construct their body and find
rewards in the social prestige accompanying that construction. The naturalisation of the capitalist
socio-economic system is especially visible here as self-quantifiers believe they seek alignment
with their natural rhythms and needs. What is truly being sought is the alignment of the
functions and abilities of the body with the needs of a capitalist system. It becomes natural to
be in perfect synchrony with the mode of production.
Managing Anxiety
We can likely all relate to the feelings of pressure and anxiety that can emerge from these
capitalist pressures. We are told to construct our bodies as optimally functioning and
aesthetically virtuous, to manage our finite, material, and critically valuable time, and to
responsibly do so while respecting our natural ways of being. Just as we are expected to
manage all these aspects of ourselves, we are expected to actively manage and contain any
stressful and discomforting feelings that may arise because of them. Our relationships with
technology increasingly play a key role in both quelling and generate different manifestations of
this anxiety. Sherry Turkle notes that technology helps us manage life stresses but generates
anxieties of its own (Turkle 2011a: 243). We should return briefly to Natasha Schll and her
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compulsive gamblers, who perceived their technological engagement of being in the zone as a
way to escape from the capricious, discontinuous, and insecure (Schll 2012) nature of the
human world. Her research is indicative of larger social trends, as our increased intimacy with
technology serves as a means of affective management and creates a personal buffer zone
against the uncertainties and worries of [the] world (Schll 2012). The substituted new form of
experience is built around the human-machine interface that she argues alleviate many of the
modern anxieties around uncertainty that have emerged in our late capitalist society.
James Hanson is among those who have suggested connective technologies have become
a place to channel anxieties over the felt need for control that characterises late capitalism.
Hanson argues that our connective abilities now induce a sense of thinking about our lives in
full operation twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This sense is supposably an
invisible potential for immediacy (Hanson 2007: 4). Hanson is picking up on here important
aspect of potential in our new cyborg lives. He argues, much like Turkle, that we can now never
be off the tethered self creates both possibilities and fulfilment as well as problems and
dislocations (Turkle 2011a: 243). The concept of the cyborg implies a more-than-human being,
an organism with more capacities and abilities than your regular homo sapien. As we add on to
ourselves with technological enhancements, more is expected of us; we have more potential for
what we can be. The baggage of anxiety that comes along with our greater functionality, is
however, a rising price that needs paying in some form or another.
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Within the practice of self quantification, we have already seen how its devotees find it
causes both comfort and stressful pressure. Despite the idea behind amassing and analysing
bodily information being an elevated quality of life, the continuous technological check-ins and
inputs that the process of quantifying requires can act as an anxiety touchstone. Schlls
gamblers similarly [used] technologies to manufacture certainties and enact a mode of selfequilibrium, through engaging with their predictable patterns and systematic modes of
interfacing. This assurance of safety and comfort align with the anthropologists Strathern and
Stewart whose research showed that effective embodied rituals can provide the relief of anxiety
and the creation of confidence of outcomes (Strathern and Stewart 2011: 390). As the act of
quantifying becomes habitually ritualistic, self-quantifiers may find themselves experiencing a
sense of calm in their perceived control over the physical functioning of the body.
Perhaps ironically, stress-reduction and management is a common goal for selfquantifiers, one they perhaps fulfil inadvertently through the act of quantification rather than the
conscious adjustments made in more tangible areas such as hours of sleep or dietary intake.
Some self-trackers report being off for the rest of the day if their morning routine of systematic
tracking is performed incorrectly or incompletely (Nafus and Sherman 2013a). While we can all
relate to the relative comfort of habits and schedules, these being qualities of all human lives, its
a question of whether self-tracking imposes excessive limits on its practitioners.
The Gamification of Life

Alongside imbuing the world of the self with more professional importance than ever
before, there appears to be a simultaneous attempt to lighten the weight of perpetual self-
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improvement using a tactic known as gamification. A technological buzzword only emerging

within the past few years, gamification is essentially the application of game thinking and
practices to a non-gaming context in order engage users and solve problems (Zichermann, et
al. 2011). The focus in gamification theory is to make certain tasks fun and rewarding when
people might otherwise struggle to feel motivation towards them. Organised institutions such as
corporate businesses and governments are seeking to improve their effectiveness by including
missions, competition, social interaction, status and rewarding achievement in both their
internal culture and the products and services they offer people (Fleming 2012). Immediate and
tangible rewards for achievements are quite literally the name of the game. Many believe in the
potential of this system to shape the future of work where fun is the new
responsible (Zichermann, et al. 2011). Much like keeping track of aspects of the self is not a
profoundly new concept, turning the mundane into a playful game also cannot be claimed as any
kind of novel idea. The big difference is once again that magic ingredient of technology.
Zichermann and many others have suggested we are entering an era of the gamification
of life, where the reach of technology into our lives in tandem with the application of game
theory is allowing us to fundamentally change how we are in reality. Cyborg technologies are
an essential part of this developing reality, enabling states of embodiment that look and feel
fundamentally different to those humans have experienced in the past. Turkle has repeatedly
expressed her belief that among the plethora of reasons that new connective technologies are
seductive is that they give us the sense we are doing more, achieving more, being in more
places at once, and are in greater control of our lives (Turkle 2008a). The expansion of gaming
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attitudes into all realms is seen by some as a necessary response to the pressures of life in late
capitalism.
Jane McGonigal is a game designer who justifies her advocation of gamifing real-life
situations by claiming that reality is broken, because games do a better job of making us
happy (Andersen 2011). The argument that reality, meaning lived experience, carries some
sort of obligation to make us happy is a seemingly entitled and privileged perception.
McGonigal appears to be implying that happiness emerges from qualities notably present in
games, such as immersive engagement and immediate positive feedback for completing actions
and tasks. The conclusion we need to fix reality by imbuing it with game mechanics because of
the apparent popular use of virtual gaming as an escapist outlet for avoiding real-world
troubles, seems an inappropriate solution to some of the struggles we have seen emerge between
people and their collaborative relationships with virtual worlds (Andersen 2011). We should
question the possible downsides to imbuing more of life with instant sensory stimulation and a
rapid-paced, goal-oriented drive.
The issue at hand here is truly a complication of rules and responsibilities in the modern
world of adult obligation to matters like employment and household support. Blurring the line
between game and real life, play and work, fun and serious may in fact leave
individuals disoriented and confused about what is expected of them in order to be respected and
legitimised members of a society. The gamblers of Schlls ethnography may have been able to
engage in a very limited understanding of happiness, that is, a state of pleasure, while in the
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zone with their machines. Yet in the world outside of the zone they experienced profound
sadness, anxiety, and loss of control over their lives because their achievements within the world
of the gambling machine did not transfer into what general society sees as worthwhile and
valuable. Instead it led them to fall short of the expectations laid out for responsible members of
the real world.
This misalignment of gaming attitudes and real world situations has repercussions for
the culture of self-trackers as many devices seek to foster a gamified environment for their users.
For instance, the Nike Fuelband tells you that life is a sport, referring to the virtual playing
field the company has created for its users. Engaging in physical activity while wearing the
wristband will generate NikeFuel points, a reward system which can unlock awards, trophies,
and surprises. The generation of imaginary energy results from these efforts, egging on the
player (Nike Plus 2013). Similarly, the Fitbit device gives you a running scoreboard of your
movement throughout the day, reaffirming the gaming framework built around the
responsibility of physical activity (Wolcott 2013). Journalist A.J. Jacobs experimented with
wearing a number of popular tracking devices and claims they spurred a revolution in his life,
changing the way he thought about movement instead of just motivating him to move more.
What was once a chore became a game, where he began to [get] competitive with
[himself] (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). While games can motivate, they can also limit us.
Games are bounded situations where there are clear rules and goals, limiting the
behaviour of their participants in order to have them focus on the requirements of winning. They
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make the situation simpler in order to make achieving the objective easier. For example, a
football game begins to lose its definition if players are allowed to do much more than kick the
ball in a singular direction with their feet. If they could hand carry, hide, purposefully ignore,
puncture, eat, nap on, or take the ball home, the game would be much less functional and fun.
Without limiting actions and setting boundaries, it becomes a less effective game. If we
extensively embed games in life, and life itself becomes a game where we are constantly
presented with immediate set objectives to complete, we kill the open-ended nature of everyday
life. The increasingly game-like qualities being built into self-tracking devices as motivation
techniques might push the Quantified Selfers to run an extra mile, or work an extra hour, but the
continual sense of having immediate goals could create a tunnel-like vision of the world.
Continually presented with the optimal next task, the rhythms and decisions of life become
automated in a way that appears decidedly un-human.
Many see this potential for unprecedented behaviour change as a result of this new
design approach of a loop involving social proof and feedback is saliently exciting
(Zichermann, et al. 2011). The feedback systems of tracking devices offer a sense of validation
for their users. The Fitbit Ultra activity tracker beams real-time, motivating lines to its wearer
such as step on it and you rock, delivering a constant sense of achievement. James Wolcott, a
Fitbit user, expressed enjoying the extra pat of appreciation...[on] days when I dont feel I
sufficiently rock (Wolcott 2013). On the website of the Fitbit tracker, the service offers a full
picture of progress over time, emphasising the large, simple and brightly colourful visuals and
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charts that will help the person see their tangible achievements (Fitbit 2013). Jacobs reported
loving shrinking that ugly grey slice representing your humiliating sedentary time as
reported on his pie chart (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). The presentation of this tracked data is
reminiscent of grade school gold star charts, offering aesthetic and public positive affirmations.
Turkle theorises that perhaps because our environments now deliver so much instant feedback,
we come to expect it as the norm. We may soon only recognise actions or thoughts or feelings as
real if we receive a response to them. We can see this happening in the way people put out
Facebook status updates and tweets out into the world, seemingly needing others to like or
retweet their contribution to the digital noise in order to feel proof that it is worthwhile and
valuable. Turkle argues that as a thought or feeling is being formed, it may need validation to
become established (Turkle 2008a). The reliance on devices for validation, a gift usually
bestowed on us from social interactions, raises questions about the nature of social community in
the hyper-technical and quantified world of late capitalist optimisation.
The Greater Good

The capitalist ideology proposes that self-interest is a natural and socially positive force.
Self-pleasing citizens are understood as the best solution to the problem of inherent need, since
the greatest total good would come of each persons total self-concern (Sahlins 1996; 398).
Indeed this is the veritable fuel driving the machine of Capitalism, as self-love was...given
respect (Sahlins 2008; 85). We determined that if each individual became the ultimate end of
his own project, the society as a whole would flourish (Sahlins 1996; 399). The beliefs of the
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Quantified Self movement reflect this same fundamentally capitalist ideology, as each person
fulfils their own self-interests by concentrating on improving themselves through their own
personalised system of numbers and experimentation. Especially in the context of the trends in
big data and personalised medicine discussed earlier, concern for the self before concern for
others is an embedded belief. How this value of believing self-interest to be an inherent social
good gets balanced within the functioning of a community is a problem that we inherently are
required to navigate and manage in capitalist societies.
The Self in the Community

There is an odd tension in the ideology of the Quantified Self movement between
scientific discovery of the self, by the self, for the self, and a strong rhetoric and practice of
engaging in community and ethos of sharing that many believe will lead to a collective higher
form of knowledge. Pitting self-promotion and altruism, these seemingly opposing qualities
are presented as both motivating factors for self-trackers (Harrell 2011). While Gary Wolf has
explicitly written that the goal isnt the figure out something about human beings generally but
to discover something about yourself, there is still a strong current of rhetoric that idealises the
communal, the social, and the great cosmic potential of attention to the individual (Wolf 2010a).
There is a strong aversion to being labelled narcissistic, or having the community be
characterised by a narcissistic focus on individual improvement (Wolf 2013a). I agree that the
label narcissism imposes a judgement on the community as a way of dismissal. We should
instead consider how the historical ideologies that underlie the movement convince us that
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paying such close attention to the self is a way to achieve and embody higher goals that go
beyond simple self-love. Members of the movement refer to these goals when defending
themselves against accusations of narcissism, instead arguing they are working towards being
happier, healthier, more efficient, productive and successful (Augemberg 2012). These
qualities are implied to contribute to the good of society beyond just the individual, especially in
the case of efficiency and productivity.
Understanding the self in relation to a greater community is a significant theme in the

Quantified Self movement. One journalists described the continuous data stream and hive-mind
chatter that goes on in the online community as resembling a kind of emerging neuro-cellular
confraternity (Walcott 2013). G. Coates is correct in noting that the isolating and distancing
aspects of cyber-worlds require us to find new ways to experience meaningful
togetherness (Coates 2001). We are searching for a valuable form of being together, a need
which virtual communities are beginning to fill. In and of itself, the community of Quantified
Selfers practicing self-interested self-tracking together enables a feeling of connection and
battles the rising loneliness of the digital age. In the fundamental desire for connection,
broadcasting out and conversely imagining the outside to be peering in allows people to imagine
they are not alone in places where they actually are. Places where they are not only literary alone
but emotionally alone as well. Sherry Turkles big theoretical argument that she has coined is that
we are all now alone together (Turkle 2011a). By this she means we have developed a digital
culture that allows us to enter private worlds through the use of cyborg technologies even while
in public spaces. Our new social state involves a fear of intimacy that gets mediated through
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digital connections, as we take advantage of the illusion of companionship without the demands
of friendship (Turkle 2011a: 1). We selectively choose how and when we interact with others
over connective technology, sometimes limiting our interactions out of discomfort or fear rather
than not wanting connection.
Sherry Turkle argues we are now [remaking] ourselves and our relationships with each
other through our intimacy with machines (Turkle 2011a: 3). She points out that being in the
constant presence of community is one new luxury enabled by cyborg technologies. While selftracking technology might be assumed to delve the individual into self-absorbed introspection,
its presence may alternately invoke a sense of communal activity. The community aspect of the
Quantified Self movement should not be overlooked, as the social networking aspect of the
practice is often emphasised as a significant source of meaning. In the emotion tracking
application Expereal described earlier, it is not only the mood trends of the individual displayed
on the tiny graph stretching across your iPhone screen, but also a comparison to the aggregate of
what everyone in the Expereal-using community was feeling at that moment in time. The
purpose of this is supposably to understand how peoples feelings relate to one, to discover
whether we all are in sync (Expereal 2013). This brings us back to the Quantified Selfs quality
of being an imagined community. Anderson wrote about the ability of media to give people the
impression they are part of a larger social whole by performing extraordinary mass
ceremonies (Anderson 1991: 35). His classic example is reading the morning newspaper, an
activity situated in physical time that people use to imagine they are connected to millions of
other anonymous beings. Applications like Expereal take this conviction of community one step
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further by actually providing the individual with information about their abstracted cocommunity members, giving them even more reason to believe in their steady, anonymous,
simultaneous activity of emotive logging on their iPhone (Anderson 1991: 26). Loneliness is
what drives the motivation to wish to imagine others are with you when they are not. In sharing
information, even without feedback, the information projectors are achieving a degree of that
desired connection. They get to know there is now the possibility of people being aware of their
being-in-the-world in that moment. They are trying to project their subjective embodiment into a
common understanding. We all crave attention in order to be aware of others, and have others be
aware of you.
The theme of social good emerging from individual good manifests in numerous ways
across the Quantified Self culture. Quantified Selfers often imagine future utopias where the
movement is successful, having gained massive traction amongst the wider population. They
imagine data forms converging into a single universal format, making all tracking information
easily shareable, and gathering together huge collective data pools reflecting the quantified
bodies of whole populations (Wolf 2013b). Many hold the belief that the quantified self leads to
the quantified crowd, quantified mass, or quantified collectivea society-wide database
where the information gathered from millions will form a whole ecosystem and allow
individuals [grasp] the power that they have to improve their own health (Belusa 2013;
Roberts 2012). The way data is conceived of in this new hyper-technical community goes
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beyond simply living by it. Its collection on a macro, society-wide scale is said to be the gateway
to a higher realm of existence for humanity, a new phase in our evolution. The data evolves us.
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Conclusion - Evolving Humanity
Conclusion
Evolving Humanity
Numerous aspects of this research provoke questions about the biggest human story the
one we tell ourselves about who we are as a consistent collective species across time and
space. One of the dominant narratives of the Quantified Self movement is their conviction that
self-tracking is the next frontier of the greater, natural evolutionary process. Their ideology is
surprisingly humanistic, holistic and in many ways, anthropological. Running counter to the
expectations of many, the way this community speaks about and understands itself is hardly
reductive or minimising of their humanity. In fact, followers of the Quantified Self movement
could be said to be attempting to become the most human they possibly can to develop and
enhance the qualities that they believe fundamentally make them human. (This conception of the
human self is, of course, highly bound up in historical and social contexts).
When Kevin Kelly talks about the movement in large, ideological terms in talks or his
published essays and books, he often begins with the story of mankind on the universal scale. He
asserts that what the quantified self is doing... is furthering this evolution, the constant recreation of the self (Kelly 2012b). In a seemingly strange re-framing of ideology, Kelly calls the
current state of numbers and graphs ruling over the Quantified Self movement not what we
really want, but an intermediate step on the way to becoming Qualified Self (Kelly 2012b).
The Qualified Self is a fully sensationalised version of the technologically extended self, a future
idealised form of their current process that has even greater capacities of self-insight and selfknowledge. Confronted with this perfected being of collusive technology and humanity, finally
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rid of the definitive weakness of mankind, we might ask whether it merits a redefinition of how
we understand ourselves.
In Beyond Humanity, an exploration of the ethics of biomedical enhancement, Allen

Buchanan argues that those who fear enhancing ourselves will undercut and destroy human
nature premise it on the idea that the good is determined by our nature (Buchanan 2012).
Finding ourselves at the end of a long exploration into human nature as undoubtably culturally
constructed, it makes little sense to assert there is some fundamental natural quality to our
species that we should defend at all costs. Even those who release the idea that our shifting sense
of selves is either good or bad, still concern themselves with the question of whether we are
reaching a point where we have evolved so much that soon we will transcend our own
definitions.
The idea we are evolving into something other than human, perhaps becoming
posthuman as some have called our theoretical future state, focuses on the speeding up of
evolution in pursuit of the development of humans into an improved form of being (Humanity
Plus 2012). This theory believes our incredible intellectual powers of reason will eventually
morph us into beings that transcend the limitations of the human condition (Hughes 2004:
156). James Hughes wrote the diatribe Citizen Cyborg as a call to action, that given our vast
technological biomedical advances, and global political cohesion as a species, we need to now
unite and push forward into the next stage of human self-emancipation through science and
democracy (Hughes 2004: 187). Another attempt at escape from the weighed chains of
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imperfection Adam and Eve bore us into. His demands of individually maximisation for the
evolution of mankind into the righteous democratic transhuman are a dauntingly inflated
flamboyance of our own self-image, to say the least (Hughes 2004).
There irony here should be apparent post-humanism idealises a state where we have so
fulfilled the positive qualities that define humanity, we cease to be ourselves. This brings us back
to our conviction that humans are flawed, and if we fix our flaws, we no longer have to call
ourselves humans. The posthuman state seems to be asking for a lot from us. What we have is
a whole movement suggesting that we direct our evolution purposefully. This falls under the
assumption that we could direct the evolution of our species as some kind of coherent and
collective idea. That self-editing leads to species-editing. A perverse responsibility handed to us
on the individual level. Perhaps I can only speak for myself, but this is not the anthropocentric
burden I personally wish to shoulder in my lifetime.
If indeed the Quantified Self movement is at the forefront of what it will mean to be a
human being of the future, it is valuable to understand where they are, so we can try to determine
where were going. The movement intrigues many, myself originally among them, because it
prompts intrigue around matters of the self and society that we find especially critical to
navigating our modern ways of living. We look to it as an opportunity to critically examine
salient questions about ourselves what it is we need to know about the self, how we should go
about finding this information, how to use that information to fix our inherent imperfections,
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where to draw the boundaries between the inner and outer world, and which parts of it we are
responsible for fixing.
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Page 1 !

Chapter One The Quantified Self Movement

Chapter Two Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Three New Science, New Medicine, New World

Chapter Four Technological Embodiment

Chapter Five Watch Your Data Before it Watches You

Chapter Six Becoming Gods of Capitalism

Conclusion Evolving Humanity

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

History and Founding

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

democratic and community-driven. This strengthens their resemblance to traditional, localised

Leadership, Power Structures & Cohesion

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

The Self-Tracker Identity

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

describe people who join as curious and goal-oriented or problem-solving

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Gender in the Movement

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Trackings Rising Ubiquity

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Establishing Cyborg Technologies

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Self-Knowledge for Self-Improvement

Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Born of Western Cosmology

The functioning of the Quantified Self movement relies upon on an extensive

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Constructing the Self

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Constructing Human Nature

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Dividing Bodies and Minds

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Scientific Domination of the Natural Body

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology