Tracking Humanity: The Quantified Self Movement

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Tracking Humanity: The Quantified Self Movement
Tracking Humanity
The Quantified Self Movement
by Maggie Appleton
April 2013
Whitman College
Thesis in Anthropology
Maggie Appleton
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Auto-Ethnography
Introduction
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
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
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Auto-Ethnography
AE
Maggie Appleton
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Introduction
Introduction
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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 millennium's 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.
On 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 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 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 hundred of years (Kelly
2012b). The practice seems to have been an especially prevalent theme in the history of Western
culture a core influence on the current Quantified Self movement that I take as central to my
understanding of it and will explore extensively later on. 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.
What is now becoming important is that a practice all of us can relate to, and engage with in
small ways, is not only growing rapidly but shifting forms. Advancements in technology have
now infinitely expanded the realms of self-tracking, making the act exponentially easier than the
old methods of logging using pen and paper. From body monitors to smartphone applications, we
are now enabling a new age of the measured self.
History and Founding
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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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 was taking shape. Perhaps more accurate would be 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 to communicate and organise. These
leaders were Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly who set up Quantifiedself.com the website acting as
the digital hub of the movement. The two were journalists already invested in exploring social
and personal meanings behind technology when they met as co-workers at the forward-thinking
magazine Wired. One an editor and one a writer, in 2007 they began to collaborate over their
shared interest in a trend they had both noticed among their social circles in the bay area of
California; people subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and selftracking 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 in their pockets; advances in the quality, affordability and
miniaturisation of electronic body sensors and tracking tools; social medias normalisation of
perpetual intimate sharing of information; and the rise of the cloud the massive increased
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
the need to establish a supportive limited liability company: Quantified Self Labs (Quantified
Self 2013). Acting as an organisational support, the company is incredibly minimalist with no
full time employees and a stated goal of not making organising QS feel like work (Butterfield
2012:16). This approach to downplaying officiality and hierarchy within the movement promotes
an egalitarian power structure within the community.
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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 wikis, discussion forums, organising meet-ups, twitter conversations, blog
posts, and informative resource pages. 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 March 2013, there are currently 112
registered meet-up groups consisting of 17,804 members across 31 nations in 88 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).
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
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 the community groups of the Quantified Self
movement 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. 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
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will cite many tracking tales told through blog posts, personal websites, filmed presentations, and
second hand accounts in articles. The emphasis on storytelling using meaningful data is a key
component of the Quantified Self movement. Those presenting at events are given the guidelines
of basing 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 limiting talks to five minutes, encouraging simple and
clear communication (Christensen 2013). Conferences follow a 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, 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 branch off
from Quantifiedself.com. It is truly the central hub of this internet-hosted society. 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 (Wilson and Peterson 2002:455). Though spread over nations and internet cables,
the face-to-face aspect of Quantified Selfers regularly organising physical meet-ups strengthens
their resemblance to traditional, localised communities. Quantified Self in particular has been
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described as a grass-roots movement brought together by the internet (Harrell 2011),

emphasising its nature as democratic and community-driven.

Quantifiedself.com features many aspects typical of websites that facilitate open and
interactive online societies; social forums, active commenting on blog postings, prompts for open
discussions, frequent guest writers, and interviews with notable community members. 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, showcasing 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. 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
Leadership, Power Structures & Cohesion

Although Kelly and Wolf are often referred to as the leaders of the movement, the
community tries to cultivate an open and democratic power structure where no one person or set
of people speak for everyone. While there are many members who are more outspoken and
active in publishing ideological writings on the Quantified Self, sometimes referred to as
thought leaders, they should not be assumed to speak on behalf of the entire community
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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(Erwin 2012). Quantified Selfers may not exactly align their beliefs and habits around tracking
with its popularised leaders (who themselves hold a diverse range of beliefs around selftracking). In general, those who are frequently featured in interviews, articles, and publications
about the movement seem to be considered highly-prominent and well-respected figures within
the community, but not themselves absolute representations. In his ethnographic work,
Butterfield found it is certainly not a 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 movement itself has evolved in its short five year history, with different philosophies and
ideologies 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. Above all other qualities of the Quantified Self movement, this might be of the most
seminal importance to understanding its nature.
The Self-Tracker Identity

Identifying as a Quantified Selfer(the predominant self-referentially used term) requires
two things; first, a lifestyle based around tracking oneself using data, and second, a conscious
willingness to identity as such.3 Being an identified Quantified Selfer is voluntary and selfassigned, an ownership of their tracking activity as a significant aspect of who they believe
themselves to be. It is a public social expression of a set of values and ideals that privately can
Throughout this thesis I will use the terms Quantified Selfer, self-tracker, and tracker
interchangeably. This is based on the way I found those three terms to be used within the ethnographic
material of the Quantified Self movement. 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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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 invite 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 as to what counts as
being a member of the tracking movement requires some clarification as to exactly who we are
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.
Demographics

The demographics of the Quantified Self movement are hard to come by, as there is no
centralised registration page. We can tell the vast majority of those who at least participate in
conferences and meet-ups live in densely populated, highly-developed, economically-wealthy
and usually technologically-inclined urban centres. We might 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
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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 locations of San Francisco and the Bay
Area of California (Meetup 2013). 4 The notoriety of this area as being a hub for professionals
working in 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
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 QS movement focus on the
young professionals working in high tech companies, usually with occupations like internet
entrepreneur, or web programmer (Long 2013; Dembosky 2011). Butterfield referred to the
identity as geek elite (Butterfield 2012:1). 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. With this label comes the adjoining culture associated with the Silicon Valley and Bay 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
consumptive and technological privilege (Maqubela 2012).
Gender in the Movement
New York is the next most populous community at 1,580 (Meetup 2013).
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The predominance of men who are actively involved and visible in the Quantified Self
movement compared to the number of women has been an acknowledged issue by some
members the community. The lack of 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 suggested as evidence of the movements gender
gap (Christensen 2013; Cornell 2010; Eaves 2012). In examining the gender of commenters and
presentation videos, one blogger found the male-to-female ratio to be 80/20 (Cornell 2010).
Indeed, in every article and publication writing about the movement, the individuals highlighted
and their tracking habits described were overwhelmingly 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 cite gender stereotypes already
present in Western culture and familiar to them; 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). There are also
speculations that the social realms the movement tends to draw members from are already maledominated 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 subculture have been explained to a wide audience by journalistic
investigations into its inner workings. Usually framed as a human interest piece, it has been
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written about in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New Scientist, The
Atlantic, and The Economist, among many others. 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 has 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 in both size and scope, and (Snyder
2013; Christensen 2013). Considering the movement a fringe phenomenon is a fading
perspective. The 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 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.

The double-edged sword of the range of publicity that the Quantified Self movement has
received, is that they have undoubtedly been presented in a reductive and inaccurate light 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
presentation of a self-absorbed technical elite who used 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, flashy digital gadgets without social context of who
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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
wonder 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 datatrackers to their bodies without also engaging in philosophical conversations about why they do
so.
Shifting Norms

Back in 2010 the relative early years of the movement Wolf wrote of extreme
quantifiers considering their behaviour to be abnormal, and considered themselves

outliers (Wolf 2010a). However, as the movement grows in numbers, 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 their tracking habits to those outside the movement, fearing they
may be stigmatised and labeled obsessive compulsive, self-absorbed, or a
hypochondriac (Butterfield 2012: 60). 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;
the industry will spur a new side of 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
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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). Quantified Selfers certainly perceive a certain type of person to be drawn
to the movement. They describe people who join as curious and goal-oriented or problemsolving 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).
There is a strong sense of being rebellious, radical, and defiant of the status quo in being part of
the Quantified Self movement. Many believe their practices go against the grain of normal
society, and revel in their ability to question existing powerful social institutions like
biomedicine and technoscience (Kelly 2011; Wolf 2010a). How they will maintain this core
aspect of their collective identity if indeed their prediction that soon everybody is going to be
doing this, and you wont even notice is fulfilled remains to be seen (Wolf 2010a).
On Self-Producing Pioneers

Fittingly, one intriguing quality of Quantified Selfers is the high numbers of trackers who
are also the creators, inventors, and developers of self-tracking tools. In line with the philosophy
of self-customising personalisation, it makes sense that the trackers 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 also 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 Quantified Self-related company or have created a Quantified Self
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tool (Paulus 2013). As both the creators and consumers of cutting edge technologies and
technological advancements, there is a fair amount of truth to their pioneer image. They closely
follow not only the new commodified gadgets and software applications to emerge on the
market, but also the advances in computational power systems one step removed from the public
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 kinds 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 shape what kind of technology we will use, and what we will use it for.
The Rising Ubiquity of Tracking

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, a milder practices of
tracking the self using technology is undeniably 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-Tracking hosted by the Quantified Self website (Quantified Self 2013). Falling
into a range of categories, they encompass smartphone applications, wearable sensor devices,
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and online websites, with many of them comprehensive systems made up of a combination of
these. 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 there are many people who
engage in self-tracking practices but are not aware of the Quantified Self movement and social
community, and therefore do not identify with it and would then 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 counted Quantified Selfers. 30 million
wearable sensors were shipped their new owners just in 2012, a statistic that only begins to
speaks to the accessibility and increasingly commonality of this practice in our global society
(Comstock 2012). On the latest call in 2012, Nike reported there were over 11 million people
were part of their online fitness tracking community (Laird 2013). The phenomenon shows no
sign of slowing down, with one market research firm 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).
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Another broad indicator we can use is a Pew Research Centre report released in January
of 2013 titled Tracking for Health. According to the study, 69% of American adults report
tracking a health indicator such as weight, diet, exercise, routine, or symptom 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 smartphone ownership up 20% just over the course of last year.
Of the 69% tracking population, 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 more generalised than the social identity being discussed throughout this paper.
Secondly, they limited the variables by failing to consider the wide variety of trackable life
aspects that fall outside the general category of health. 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.
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
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(ICTs), and undoubtably many, many more buried in the literature (Clark 2003; Hogle 2005;
Katz 2003; Quantified Self 2013; Schull 2011; Turkle 2009). In seeking a unified term for all of
the above categories, I will routinely refer to cyborg technologies throughout this thesis. By
definition, these are tools, devices, and technologies that expand and enhancing our cyborg-like
qualities. 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. 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). Gary Wolf
claims the smartphone become the centre of [the] personal laboratory for self-trackers (Wolf
2010a). 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 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
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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 2012; Wolf 2010a). Members of the Quantified
Self community are eager to dispel the belief they are simply a group of device-junkies
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 temporarily try out wearing an activity logger or sleep monitor only to
abandon the practice after their assignments support the insistence of the Quantified Self
community that their culture is truly about self-knowledge, rather than inexplicably addictive
tools that can sometimes be used to that end (Smolan and Erwitt 2012; Wortham 2012). 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 become distracted by the barrage of novel devices and systems and applications,
forgetting to pay attention to the meaningful way we integrate them into our lives and how it
defines them. 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).
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Chapter Two
Born of Western Cosomology
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 in 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 given 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. In actual fact, 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 uses the approach of treating the belief systems of the West
as we would any other, as 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, 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.
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
2012b). Indeed it sometimes seems our experiences of embodiment and conceptions of self are
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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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 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 wage-labour, 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.
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. The idea is 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 entered
the age of replacing religious doctrines with natural science, we changed very little about our
beliefs of the self, but re-labelled it 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
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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 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).
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 foundation premise that all human
action is driven by human needs, by either an avoidance of pain or a seeking of pleasure, and
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
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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.
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
of being adopted by the institution of biomedicine which built its knowledge-base 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,
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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.
It is significant 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. At that moment, 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
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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 mind could make over the 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.
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
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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
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).
Body and Metaphor

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, one that cultures use 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
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off one another. The power of the cultural metaphor is especially evident in the ethnographic
content of this thesis, as people equate their bodies to functional machines and sites of scientific
experimentation. These conceptions are constructed and defined in realms outside of the human
body and appropriated to them after the fact.
Dominating the Natural Body with Science

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 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 the smallest possible units 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
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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 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).
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
based in numbers, empirically verified evidence 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
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as our machines have evolved, so too have these metaphors, as we now increasingly describe
ourselves in terms of computer functions. The use of metaphors in the written 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).
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 systemswe 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. The person is now a flexible collection
of assets whose perfect working order will bring social prestige to the proprietor seeing
themselves as a portfolio (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 levels, or their body
weight, or the frequency with which they experience headaches. The possibilities are endless,
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and yet are all defined by being 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.
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 in the world. We can again see how these notions trail
back to the origin stories of the bible where Adam was told he had dominion over all things
natural on this earth. A more radical modern manifestation of this 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 hack as
aggressively cutting through something. The hacking being spoken of here of course 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
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implies cheating or shortcuts, finding ways of bending the rules. This conception fits into the
overall narrative of Quantified Self improvements as a radical overturning of the normal way of
approaching problems. The body is suddenly problematised in a way it previously hasnt been
before that 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, 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 a complicated piece of machinery and the management of 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
also 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? Much of the defensive language suggests that
society is being seen as an external threat to the self. Some of the perceived dangers are medical:
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
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sedentary living, which directly places the blame on the norms of society. Other threats cited
include demanding jobs, stressful commutes, and monotonous lifestyles; all discomforts
emerging from the social structures of life. The expectations for being successful at functioning
in our fast-paced, modern, aggressively competitive society put the body under fire. The
underlying theme is the need for the individual to defend themselves against a society trying to
undermine their strength and wellbeing at every turn.
Hacking Your Sleep Polyphasically

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
part to the popularity of 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 (Zeo 2013). This act of measuring the brain is proposed to help
you take control of your sleep, using the personalised advice of your manager. The language
business-like 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. A
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tempting experiment in overturning natural patterns for the self-proclaimed time starved citizens
of the developed world (Zeo 2013).
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 for 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
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.
Measuring Brains to Control the Mind
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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
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. It offers potential
control over the future of ones actions, idealised to eventually lead to absolute conscious control
over all actions of the self.
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.
Quantitative vs 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. On the contrary, much of the
Quantified Self culture is a pushing and questioning of our usual conceptions of science and
giving voice to the individual, the specific, the humanised person telling a story about themselves
and their experiences. They are subjective and individualised scientific experiments 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
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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,
mindfulness, and intuitive knowledge beyond what the computerised graphs can tell them (Erwin
2012). 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 nonnumerical facets is far more important to the 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 (Kelly 2007a). 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
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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.
There is an interesting contradiction, however, in 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). Believing happiness to be the ultimate objective in life, he is on a
personal quest to uncover a methodical and generalised pathway to it. His equation for the
optimisation of life is yi = f(x1, .., xj), where yi 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). Augemberg came to this conclusion after carrying out a scientificallyminded 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
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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 equation
(Inkinen 2012; Pescovitz 2009). We easily can appreciate the inherent irony in valuing the
emotion-less qualities of data-gathering being used to understand the emotional self.
Ideas from the field of psychology that have recently become popularised and widely
accepted, focus on our relative lack of knowledge, insight, and understanding into the self.
Popular non-fiction books 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. The titles in
many ways speak for themselves, 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.
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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). 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 selfimprovement (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 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
still ends up having the final say in how self-trackers make sense of the world.
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The 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 predetermined 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
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).
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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
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. In a variety of ways, from developing their own strain of science, to promoting the rise
of personalised medicine, they undermine these power structures and their current tendency to
treat individual differences as noise that is to be ignored or suppressed (Augemberg 2013a).
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
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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].
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
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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 d'etre 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
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 2012).
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
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legitimate part of the current domain of modern science, but an increasingly essential part of its
future (Ramirez 2012). 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.
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
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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).
Ernesto Ramirez, an active leader in the movement, holds similar beliefs to Roberts. He
argues that Quantified Self practices should be considered a legitimate as self-experimentation

and scientific institution have long been intertwined, the method having been an accepted form
of real science for centuries (Ramirez 2012; 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).

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. Augemberg marks this as a fundamental difference from regular science, in self-
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trackings personalised rather than generalised nature: you use your own data in order to learn
about yourself (Augemberg 2013c). The Quantified Self method is praised for its ability to be
personalised on the smallest possible scale, by keeping the sample size to a single individual.
The n=1 attitude of Quantified Self science challenges 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). 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.
While in some senses the movement is fighting to be considered a sub-section 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 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.
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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 results are shared at meet-ups, they are
often referred to as show and tell events, harkening back to the days 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 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 playful, thoughtful and related
to the simple quality of wonder a challenge to the dominant belief that only scientists are
allowed to think. By this he means the traditional pattern of only established institutional
science having the power to create and disseminate knowledge. Demonstrating this attitude
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comes in the testing of correlations that are seemingly random; such as whether standing on one
leg for one minute a day improved their 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
much of the over-controlling and rigid demands institutional science clings to its need to feel
absolute 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
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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. 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 seemingly create new problematised conditions through the construction of
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.
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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
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,
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the sleep deprived, the overstressed, the overworked, and the financially strained among them.
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).
Much of this enthusiasm about curing the self may in part be due to the fact that 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 (ScheperHughes and Lock 1987: 25). 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.
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
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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.

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.
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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,
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
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 Schull, Sherry
Turkle, Andrew Clark, Dawn Nafus, Amber Case, 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. 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
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 self-
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conceptual 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
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
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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.
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
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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.
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. 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 (Katz 2003:
19-23).
The Natural and the Cultural
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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 microorganisms
that enable its digestion. We imagine ourselves as an autonomously self-maintaining 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
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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.
Technology with Animated Agency

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
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
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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
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
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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
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.

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?
Literature Review 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
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
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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 wellguarded 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
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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 rapid rate
of current technological advancement challenges us to keep pace with the stories we tell
ourselves about them.
Embodiment Theory

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
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far more critically important to our understanding of our selves. 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). Embodiment theory seeks to take a holistic approach
that collapses the distinction between mind, body, and experience. Rather than challenging the
idea that the body sometimes functions as a social object, embodiment theory believes the
objectified body is experienced from a fundamentally subjective cultural viewpoint. Subjectivity
lies squarely at the centre of bodily experience there is no other kind. The mental and the
physical are not different kinds of being; they are one in the same. It is the stories we tell
ourselves about their false division that make us believe otherwise.

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
devolving into unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognisable
sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases (Geertz 1973: 49).
Much of my understanding of embodiment is primarily drawn from Thomas Csordas, one
of the formative anthropologists on the subject of embodiment. Csordas views the body is an
experiencing agent (Csordas 1994: 3), a subject rather than an object. The significance given to
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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 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
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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 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 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). Embodiment constructs not only personhood,
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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).
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. 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,
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,
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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 Schull puts it, the rise of interactional gadgetry has changed the nature
of everyday life (Schull 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 Schull (Schull 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
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 (Schull
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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.
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
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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).
In her ethnography of machine gambling addicts Addiction by Design, Natasha Schull
articulates tangible examples of personscapes. Her interviews reveal unprecedented forms of

techno-human interaction that result in new kinds of bodily experiences. While Schulls 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.
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The ethnographic material presented by Schull 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, Schull 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 (Schull 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 (Schull 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 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).

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 (Schull 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 Schulls gamblers find
themselves addicted to might not be so different to some common self-tracking devices. Most
feature a combination of LED-lit displays, subtle notification sounds, and pulsation abilities.
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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, responsetracked until a habit
has permanently shifted. A bi-directional relationship between machine and 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 (Schull 2012; 171).

Schull 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 (Schull 2012; 19) in a constructed whole entity. 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. Therefore, there is no
reductive and universalised way to say that we embody technology. 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,
however, 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 (Schull
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 (Schull 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. Schull 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 (Schull 2012; 172). The alignment removes the need for complex
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 self-erasure
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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 Schulls 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 (Schull 2012; 173). The fact that we have historically thought of a
human being as an enclosed amount of flesh might not be as significant or important in our new
digital world.
Natural Born Cyborgs
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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 tailormade, 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
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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
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)
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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.
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
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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.
Embodied Practice of Quantified Selfing

Given that our repeated practices and rituals define our experience of embodiment, we
should now consider the ethnographic accounts of being a Quantified Selfer. Quantified Self is
marked by personalised practice every self-tracker measures different aspects of themselves in
different ways and to different extents. While there are a wide variety of ways to engage in a
self-tracking lifestyle, some common themes emerge from the swathes of ethnographic online
accounts. Descriptions of the Quantified life all seem to focus upon daily routines 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 what could be considered a
typical day in the life of the generalised and amalgamated self-tracker. I write this with the
caveat one of the most definitive aspects of the self-tracking movement is its lack of
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generalizability. Nevertheless, we can gain insight into what being a Quantified Selfer is, in the
sense of what the lifestyle involving a repetitive and consistent performance of behaviours day in
and day out, from these details that describe the features of many sensor technologies already
widely available; techno-human interactions occurring out in the world right now. 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 rituals
members of this subculture partake in.

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
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
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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).
One especially ambitious variety of Quantified Selfer I wish to expand upon is most
likely to closely fit with the above description of a daily routine. This 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. It has been
referred to as radical self-surveillance (Kelly 2007b). 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). 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 2011).

Lifelogging as a practice reportedly still has a ways to go. While 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. Described as being hellishly difficult to
search, it can lead to feelings of being lost in the forest of information (Kelly 2011). The
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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). 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).
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.
6
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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Turkle believes that in modern society we are 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 (Turkle 2008a). These cyborg technologies are embedded
in our lives both physically and emotionally. Much of Turkles work references a communal state
of being with devices. 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
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.
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Turkle argues the always-on co-present state has become a marker of ones sense of
self-importance (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.
Just as the texting phone is a badge of our networks, the tracking 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.
In an ideal world, many members of the Quantified Self community have expressed
wishing to see self-tracking technologies become invisible as distinctive objects. 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 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. 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. Literal
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bodily attachment is not essential as the ubiquitous use of smart phones is pervasive in the
movement.
Emotional Intimacy With Machines

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 Schulls 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. Similarly, selftrackers ask their devices for a specific kind of insight and self-knowledge, an understanding of
who they are and what they are achieving. The machines deliver in the form of graphs and trends
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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, 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. Indeed, Turkle insightfully recognised how the power of this
intimacy compels us to speak of a new state of the self, itself (Turkle 2008a).
Fetishised Devices

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
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). 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 (Schull 2012: 65).

There is particular focus on the aesthetic, bodily-integrated and fitted forms that tracking
devices take, implying a transference of beauty as the two become a singular unit. Take for
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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.
Non-Material Light Modernity

Referring to technology as some coherently bounded single machine is a dated imagining
of the technological in our current world. Since the advent of the digital cloud and amorphous
quality of devices, we can no longer locate whole technological systems within single, bounded
objects. Technology has lost its materiality. We are well past the days of relying on large, clunky
computers stored in the corners of rooms requiring one to chunk numbers into a terminal in order
to interact with technology. 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
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we want into it, and it doesn't 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
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
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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.
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
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middle state characterised by ambiguity or disorientation. Turkle references how communal

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).
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
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, but also is
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leading to 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 our 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.
Turkle claims the new disembodiment 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.
Upon reading this observation, I 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
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something else (Hacking 2007). This is the body politic of Scheper-Hughes and Lockthe kind
of idealised body that society places upon a pedestal and continually reproduces in cultural
imagery, the kind of body the society is said to need (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 25).
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Chapter Five
Watch Your Data Before it Watches You

Now that we have considered the ways we are experiencing new forms of embodiment
through our cyborg technologies, we should consider ways we are forming a digital sense of self
in online re-embodiments. The new re-embodiment takes place in troves of online data, data that
is representative of identities across time and space. 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.

The malleability and physical disconnection inherent in the data-self complicates how it
can function as a controlling form of surveillance. We are all implicated in the rise of data-selves
by nature of being digitally connected. In a surprising twist of logic, we find the members of the
Quantified Self movement are perhaps enacting a kind of soft resistance to the potentially
oppressive controls of the data-self, choosing to generate and control their own information
rather than wait for greater social and political forces to do it for them (Nafus and Sherman
2013). If we are already in the data panopticon, the all-knowing prison of perpetual surveillance
theorised by Foucault, self-trackers are the ones turning the system into a source of identity,
positive meaning and empowerment, rather than languishing obliviously in its darkness.
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.
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. 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
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continuous addition of more information. 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 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.
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
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bodily processes. Quantified Selfers are tethered to this immaterial cloud of technological
information about their lives. 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).
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, bar graphs,
and scatter graphs, among other visualisations in order to more effectively and clearly
communicate it significance to an audience.
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
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society and a symbolic stage (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 25). The same kind of
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.
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
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.
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The fact these visualisations are being publicly posted to the Internet significantly expand
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 this culture. The body under scrutiny, supervision,
experimented upon, and quantified, in constant process of becoming a more optimised, efficient,
and streamlined tool for them to inhabit. 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.

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).
Big Data

The explosion of information and data in the age of the internet goes beyond simply
numbers produced about bodies. An incomprehensible amount of infinitely complex and
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intelligently organised numerical information on just about everything is continually and rapidly
expanding. Some have quipped we should think of this as the industrial revolution of data (The
Economist 2010). 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). Referred to as big data, this is essentially the accumulation and analysis of
information (Smolan and Erwitt 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). The Quantified Self movement sees itself as a small fraction of this
much larger societal phenomena where near everything in our environment is now leaving a data
trail in its wake. They emerge from within the greater pattern of individuals producing data that
is taking place across the whole planet (Kelly 2012b).
Big data has been referred to as a technological planetary nervous system or data-
sphere (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 interconnected
and ethereal force that has a greater collective functionality. The way most every theorist in the
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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). 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.
Rejecting the Big Data Connection

There are those within the Quantified Self movement who bristle at the connections
drawn between big data and their communal identity. 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. 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
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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).
While community members might resist considering themselves part of a social average,
that doesnt prevent large corporations and organisations from treating them as such. Many
companies are finding the collections of individual data points that make up big data meaningful
as potential sources of control and profit. 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. The trail of information we leave behind us is now being referred to as
"digital exhaust," meaning the unstructured compilation of data produced by our technological
activities (Erwin 2012; Owen 2012). The infinite stream of phone records, texts, browser
histories, GPS data is conceiving of it as a by-product that is extraneous and pollutive and that
will live on forever (Smolan and Erwitt 2012). While some have called this information a
waste product, it is not waste at all for others, who see it as a resource from which value can
be extracted in the new internet economy (The Economist 2010). One firm example of the
potential repercussions of data control that currently goes on is the use of publicly accessible
data from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to evaluate whether individuals are
credit-worthy, a tactic being taken on by some financial companies (Ingram 2013).

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
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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.
Privacy of Data and Information
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.

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
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Orwells 1948, the fear lies in how the potential authority might attempt to create optimal
statistical outcomes for the behaviour of people (Ingram 2013).
Soft Resistance

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. I spoke earlier of the
Quantified Self movements quality of speaking for their data, rather than letting the data
override their construction of a sense of self. 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. [This theory is a challenge to the popular critique of
the Quantified Self movement that they are imprisoning themselves in their own panopticons.]
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The community is equally aware of these Foucaudian conclusions many have alluded to in their
analysis of its practices. 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 weretrained to see technologies of enumeration as tools of domination and
control (Wolf 2013a). 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). Additionally, portraying the community within the
frames of narcissistic focus on individual improvement and consumerist gadget love was
equally unappreciated (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 the eerily similar descriptions of controlling ones body in Discipline and Punish and
Technologies of the Self, and the habits of the Quantified Self community. Many quantified
selfers reference the parallels between Foucaults theory and their own culture, calling selftracking sort of like radical self-surveillance (Kelly 2007b). Foucaults ideas speaks to a
plethora of phenomena remarkably visible in the practices of the movement.
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,
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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). Bensons case exemplifies the kind of example many have pointed to as evidence selftrackers are enclosing themselves in Foucaudian panoptical prisons. The important point here,
however, is that Benson retains the ability to remove his data from public view he is in control
of who sees it and in what context.
The Self-Regulating Republic

The relationship to the body being described can be understood through the concept of
the body politic theorised by Scheper-Hughes and Lock. They observe how regulation,
surveillance, and control of bodies plays out in relation to power structures. Anxiety over threats
to societies as a whole are often played out upon the canvas of the body, as symbols of selfcontrol become intensified in our grasps at social control (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 24).
Scheper-Hughes and Lock 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
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docile bodies (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 26). 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.
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 self-punishment, 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 selftorture (Carmichael 2008; 2010). Wolf has similarly reflected on the problematic nature of
mechanised quantification systems to act as a powerful mirrors of own values and judgements,
that dont understand the value of forgiving a lapse (Wolf 2010a). He describes being 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
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machine. She also describes feeling increasing forgetfulness and guilt with prolonged
ownership of the band (Wortham 2012).

The Quantified Self movement is not deprived of thoughtful and insightful active
members who know the critiques of reductive quantification all too well, and experience the
emotional complications of hyper-surveillance in some aspects of their tracking habits.

Foucault introduced the idea of disciplinary methods in society which enforce
domination by encouraging the mastery of each individual over his own body. These 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
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. The practices of
the Quantified Self movement follow this same pattern of asserting that true forms of
knowledge about the self can be found through the use quantifying techniques (Foucault 1988).
These disciplinary methods are what produce our docile bodies (Foucault 1977; ScheperHughes and Lock 1987: 26).

Foucaults theory takes a radical stance in arguing that the practices and techniques of
bodily self-control increase our economic utility to society while decreasing our political power
within it. Within this framework, the time and attention given to the practices of the QS
movement would serve to politically disempower its community members.
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One issue with Foucault is the dissipation of agency behind the manipulative tactics. He
does not make clear who or what is behind these cunning, coercive, and manipulative
techniques, which are described in active terms in his work. The ill-intentioned forces of power
are seemingly abstracted from any visible or named entity. This speaks to a core part of his
theory that what makes this system so effective is the power of sousvelliance, the idea of
inverse surveillance, or surveillance of the self. We are our own enforcers. The panopticon prison
involves the recording of all events and supervision of all movements, 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).
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Chapter Six
Becoming Gods of Capitalism

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 self-improvement and optimisation that Quantified Selfers seek
always seems to be pointed in the direction of enhancing their functional alignment with the
capitalist society.
The Value of Self-Improvement
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 of thinkers such as Sir Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton that
it was essential we meticulously observe, understand, and thus exert absolute control over nature,
were seen as ways of triumphing over mans natural state of inadequacy (Sahlins 1996). 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
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with mans ever expanding requirements (Sahlins 1996; 397). 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. Indeed, the basis of the entire capitalist economic system requires an unwavering
conviction in mans neediness. 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).
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. This inherent belief in the value of selfimprovement through a process of self-knowledge has required a specific historical narrative to
be internalised. Self-knowledge is now thought to be best found in the rational and logical
scientific method of collecting facts and data. The resulting information is then a gateway into a
morally purified realm of being the best possible self one can be the optimised self.
Self-tracking is often argued to be a tool of discovery rather than optimisation. However,
in 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
enlightened forefathers proclaimed it so, progress has been promoted as the ultimate collective
purpose of humankind. The self-knowledge that trackers seek is the modern method of
experiencing a degree of transcendence. Self-knowledge is the new higher goodness for us to
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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.
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 are told the two are finite
resources. Given the growing perversity of numbers in organised social institutions, many might
perceive the movement as a infiltration or imposition 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. They report being repeatedly
asked to explain what drives their tracking habits, and most cite a variety of practical benefits
they experience. They name its ability to draw attention to and manage the struggles of life, and
overall 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; decreasing anxiety and stress; increasing productivity; and general
smoother operation of the self (Wolcott 2013). There are some who make grandiose claims
about increasing their IQ by 40 points or extending their lifespan by decades, and others yet who
believe everyday life can be optimised (Augemberg 2013a; Dembosky 2011). Overall, self-
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improvement comes up again and again as the singular, salient goal for those who are drawn to
self-tracking.
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.
if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better (Wolf
2010b).
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 selfcare 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 the technologies that permit individuals
to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their
own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform I 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. This hypothesis could not be more aptly affirmed by the Quantified Self
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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. 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 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 have 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. Wolf speaks of people who believe their
numbers hold secrets that they cant afford to ignore, and perhaps answers to questions they
have not yet thought to ask (Wolf 2010a). The asking of questions and drive to understand
through empirical data is the mark of the scientist. 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.
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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 os 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.
Where once 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 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. It is not
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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. For Western society, our
higher wisdom is implied in earthly things (Sahlins 1996: 408). 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).
Is is not that God was society deified but that society was God socialised (Sahlins 1996: 411).
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).
the retreat of religion and the growth of naturalism since the seventeenth century (Sahlins
2010: 383).
In the wake of abandoning God and instead idealising the natural and real as ultimate
goods, Sahlins argues this was the enchantment of society by the world by the symbolism of
body and matter instead of spirit (Sahlins 2008; 87). 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.
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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).
the dream of a quantified self resembles therapeutic ideas of self-actualisation (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 optimism itself to best
perform in the capitalist labour system.
Capitalism From Need
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Self-interest has since been considered natural and socially positive, the veritable fuel driving the
machine of Capitalism; self-love was being given respect (Sahlins 2008; 85).
The individual then becomes the ultimate end of his own project (Sahlins 1996; 399).
Self-pleasing man turned out to be a good thing and in the end the best thing, since the
greatest total good would come of each persons total self-concern (Sahlins 1996; 398).
The Capitalist Body

There are certain types of bodies that align themselves with the ideals of Capitalism
better than others. Emily 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 (Martin 1992: 134). Emily 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. If true the average body may be viewed as deficient (Hogle 2005; 697).
Writing about bodily technological enhancements, Anthropologist Linda 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).
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Martins understanding of the late capitalist body fits the ideologies of the Quantified Self
movement more than the other kind of body she sees us developing out of; the body of the 20thcentury Fordist mass-production systems. The Fordist body seeks efficient production above all
else and is subject to centralised controls (Martin 1992: 122). It is easy to assume their
preoccupation with numbers is a manifestation of this body with its obsession with efficiency
of tracking as a rapid progress toward a known goal, as Wolf also originally thought (Wolf
2010a). The most striking challenge to this assumption is that for many trackers, there is no
specifically identified goal. Meetup 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 bodies
can be seen in the Quantified Self movement, their ideologies direct 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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However, for Quantified Selfers many aspects of the Fordist industrial body clearly do
remain. The industrial capitalist society interpreted the body as a machine that simply required
optimisation in order for labourers to achieve maximum productivity and efficiency.
The scientifically-based method of data collection and analysis allows individuals to
construct their body and find rewards in the social prestige accompanying that construction. 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
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.
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
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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
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 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 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. There is the sense that being a citizen in the highly-globalised and
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fast-paced capitalist world of today requires abilities and capacities that are beyond our
normal, natural, plainly human bodies. Martin believes that we experience ever accelerated
demands for change and progress on the individual level, a development of the person at all
times (Martin 2000: 579). The highly desired and coveted qualities in our age of late Capitalism
are people who are always adapting, scanning the environment, continuously changing in
creative and innovative ways, 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 (Martin 2000: 578).
This mode of hyperactivity can only be aspired to using the assistance of technologies designed
to export the details of day-to-day management of overcommitment.
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 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 self-hacker identity claim to have rewired
their brains through their efforts (Dembosky 2011).
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Planning and Management of the Self for Capitalism The Responsible Citizen
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, 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 society.
The business language of managing the self is a common theme throughout self-
tracking culture and the products that seek to serve it. The Nike Fuelband asks you to set goals,
watch your progress, and share your results, in order to stay motivated in achieving them (Nike
Plus 2013). Much of this language sounds as if it could belong in a company management
meeting, only the system being managed is now the individual person.
Time
Management of the self in the service of capitalism can be seen no more clearly than in
the modern structuring of time. The ideal citizen of our socio-economic system is maximally
efficient and productive in all they do, whether matters of labour or leisure, especially as the
boundary between the two increasingly disintegrates. The expectations of the working realm
have expanded and have now overflown into all realms of life (the distinction between realms of
life being a creation of the Capitalist mode of production itself). The ideal Capitalist worker must
see all time as commodified. There is the constant opportunity to use time to be producing
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something, anything. That something has 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 pre-industrial. (Federici 2004;
135) 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.

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.
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 you are saving time as in, your
experiment leads you to open up more unscheduled minutes and hours of the day that is almost
always deemed a success. Having more time is a good in itself for trackers. Careful monitoring
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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 (Chronos 2013). 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. 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 tried to tell you where the time went. There are
clear associations between physicality and time in this understanding. Time becomes a material
object for trackers.
The materialistic approach to time taken by Quantified Selfers reflects an attitude that
first emerged during industrialisation and the rise of a Capitalist economy. 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). Metaphorically, we see labour and time as a resources
that can be saved, stored up, used, spent, wasted. Every minute of the day is an opportunity for
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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 citizen-subject. 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).
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
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 lead back to the demands of a Capitalist ideology. 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.

We now struggle with the lack of division between working and personal time, [use
theories of Hansons 24/7 in here].
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Time for the quantified community is not only material, but also incredibly visual - it is
represented in graphs and pie charts and timetables, designed to show you where it went.
Chronos advertises that you can now see your time like never before with 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 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 selfimprovement) and have earned a place as one of them. It gives you cultural capital and
legitimacy in their social world.
On her website Quantified Awesome, Sacha Chua is tracking everything about her life,
but mostly she is how she manages her time Chua is certainly not alone. She logs her minutes
into one of twenty-nine different categories and sub-categories including discretionary - reading
- non-fiction, unpaid work - subway, business - consulting, and sleep. Her 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 using those hours to [live] by her priorities. She defines her priorities, turns them into
actions, then schedules them (Quantified Self 2013). The rhetoric of time management for the
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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. Selfquantification 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.
The self-directed, self-aware, self-sufficient, self-supervising, ambitious, extroverted, maximally
productive, optimised individual serves a very specific kind of society.
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 97) that we be conditioned in selfdiscipline and restriction and yet indulge in consumption in order to keep the economic wheels
of the marketplace turning. By consuming technological products that assist us in managing and
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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.
progress was Reason in the service of needs (Sahlins 1996: 400)
Anxiety and Control, Dissatisfaction, Limitation

James Hanson and many others have suggested connective technologies have become a
place to channel anxieties over a felt need for control (Hanson 2007). 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. He argues, much like Turkle, that we can now never be off.
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. 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 come
along with our greater functionality, is however, a rising price.
We should return briefly to Natasha Schull and her compulsive gamblers, who perceived
their technological engagement of being in the zone as a way to escape from the capricious,
discontinuous, and insecure (Schull 2012) nature of the human world. 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 post-fordist capitalist society.
She additionally argues that are now [using] technologies to manufacture certainties and
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enact a mode of self-equilibrium, through engaging with their predictable patterns and
systematic modes of interfacing. Strathern and Stewart spoke of embodied rituals providing the
relief of anxiety and the creation of confidence of outcomes (Strathern and Stewart 2011: 390).
Rituals are thought to be effective when they correspond to the sense pathways of the cosmos.
Her research is indicative of larger social trends for our changing relationships with machines, 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 (Schull 2012).
Our relationships to technology both quell and generate different manifestations of
anxiety. 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. 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.

Some 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.

Perhaps ironically, stress-reduction and management is a common goal for self-
quantifiers, 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.
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Particularly notable and applicable to the phenomena of the Quantified Self are Schulls
readings into how the immersive experience of machine gambling serves to alleviate many of the
modern anxieties and uncertainty that have emerged in our post-fordist capitalist society.
Examining the way phenomenological bodily experiences interact with cultural patterns of
modern political-economic structures should lead us to a rich and nuanced understanding of
technological embodiment.
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 selfimprovement 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.
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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
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
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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 Schulls ethnography may have been able to engage in a
very limited understanding of happiness, that is, a state of pleasure, while in the 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,
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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
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 potential for unprecedented behaviour change as a result of this new design
approach of a loop involving social proof and feedback is saliently exciting for many
(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
charts that will help the person see their tangible achievements (Fitbit 2013). Jacobs reported
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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 Communal Good of Self-Interest and Self-Improvement

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 fundamental Capitalist belief that people
fulfilling their own self-interests will lead to good for the greater public and social interests is a
framework that the Quantified Self ideology appropriates/extends onto their beliefs about care of
the individual body. Especially in the context of the trends in big data and personalised medicine
discussed earlier,
Kelly states that he believes the self is being serviced by this new Quantification, meaning that
(Kelly 2012b)
Self vs. The Community
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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, as they argue paying such close
attention to the self is instead about higher goals of trying to be be happier, healthier, more
efficient, productive and successful (Augemberg 2012).
The movement sees themselves as trying to cultivate a culture of sharing (Christensen 2013)
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).
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 function effectively
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Maggie Appleton
serves to create an imagined community. Political scientist Benedict 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 further by actually providing the individual with information
about their abstracted co-community members, giving them even more reason to believe in their
steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity of emotive logging on their iPhone (Anderson 1991:
26).
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 selftracking 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.
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Maggie Appleton
Our new social state involves a fear of intimacy that gets mediated through 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.
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.
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).
This theory that what is good for the individual must be good for the greater society is strikingly
familiar.
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Maggie Appleton
Connectivity
Connectivity culture is about possibilities and fulfilment, but it is also about the problems and
dislocations of the tethered self. Technology helps us manage life stresses but generates anxieties
of its own. (Turkle 2011a: 243)
We remake ourselves and our relationships with each other through our intimacy with
machines (Turkle 2011a: 3)

Turkle points out that being in the constant presence of community is one new luxury
enabled by cyborg technologies. While self-tracking 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.

For some trackers the lack of a specific goal or problem in mind is less important than
sharing and engaging in a community. Trackers explain these kinds of members as just being
curious in an open-ended way, a common self-attributed quality within the culture.
(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).
In asking if we are abandoning ourselves as we are spread across technology in new
manifestations of identity, Turkle 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? The ultimate point here is that communication does not necessarily equal connection
over computerised networks. How could it; connection requires an emotional energy, an
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Maggie Appleton
investment in being with other people as people instead of abstractions. 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.
The Quantified Self movement unites these two they take big data and turn them into
individualised human stories that join the enormous archives of ourselves we are amassing. This
is the personified version of big data. Big human stories.

The way data is conceived of in this new hyper-technical community goes 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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Maggie Appleton
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.

The ideology of the Quantified Self movement expressed by its organically developed
leadership 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 QS movement could
be said to be attempting to become the most human they possibly can to develop and enhance
the qualities that they believe most make them human. This conception of the human self is, of
course, highly bound up in historical and social contexts.
One of the dominant narratives of the Quantified Self movement is their conviction that selftracking is the next frontier of the greater, natural evolutionary process. 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 re-creation 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 self-knowledge. Kelly
paints the natural human state as being quite bad at understanding numbers, we dont really
have quantified cognition. We need a different way to absorb this quantified information. He
advocates for unconscious, infallible sensations, 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.
Confronted with this perfected being of collusive technology and humanity, finally rid of the
definitive weakness of mankind, we might ask whether it merits a redefinition of how we
understand ourselves.
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Maggie Appleton
With a firm belief in the potential for greatly enhanced degrees of life, comes the question
of whether the lowly category of human will soon cease to be the standard. One additional
faction of the Quantified Self falls under the header of transhumanism, focusing on the
speeding up of evolution in pursuit of the development of humans into an improved form of
being - the posthuman (Humanity Plus 2012). Transhumanists believe our incredible intellectual
powers of reason will eventually morph us into beings that transcend the limitations of the
human condition (Hughes 2004: 156), making us something other than human.

We seem to be asking a lot of ourselves.
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Maggie Appleton
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