tracking humanity: the quantified self movement

Tracking Humanity

The Quantified Self Movement

by Maggie Appleton

April 2013

Whitman College

Thesis in Anthropology

Page 1 ! Maggie AppletonTracking Humanity: The Quantified Self Movement

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 3

Auto-Ethnography 4

Introduction 5

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


Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments


Auto-Ethnography

AE


Introduction

Introduction


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 self-

identify 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


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


1 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).

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 self-

tracking that went far beyond the ordinary (Wolf 2010b). They attribute the rise of these habits

to four factors; the growing ubiquity of personal mobile devices, allowing people to carry

powerful computing capacities 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.


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


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


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


2 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).

(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 self-

tracking). 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 self-

assigned, 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


3 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.

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


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


4 New York is the next most populous community at 1,580 (Meetup 2013).

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 male-

dominated fields such as science and technology (Cornell 2010).

Public Awareness

The rapid growth of the Quantified Self community is in no small part due to the

generous attention it has received from a variety of major news publications. The beliefs and

practices of the Quantified Self 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


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


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 data-

trackers 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


normal (Kelly 2011). As this shift continues, it creates an interesting interplay with the

dominant narratives that Quantified Selfers tell themselves about being pioneering self-

trackers (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 problem-

solving oriented (Christensen 2013). Many come from a science-minded perspective and are

interested in poking, prodding, and measuring as a way to go about the world (Cornell 2010).

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


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,


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).


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


(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


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).


! Maggie AppletonTracking Humanity: The Quantified Self Movement

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


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


5 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.

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


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


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,


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


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


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


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


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


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,


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


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


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 twenty-

four hour period, totally only four hours of sleeping time compared to the traditional eight. A


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


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.


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


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 non-

numerical 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


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 scientifically-

minded personal values experiment where he sought to quantify his life priorities and draw them

up in a mathematical two-dimensional structure. Believing there are ten core super-values

that are universal and stable across the gender, age and socio-economic groups, cultures and

generations. The categories include learning, spiritual balance, family, career, and hedonism

(Augemberg 2012). There are many arguments to be made against this assertion, but these kind

of assumptions about human universals are common and pervasive throughout the belief system

of the Quantified Self culture. They have to be assumed in order to quantify the traditionally

qualitative. He would then assign numerical values to the felt importance of each three times a


day, aggregate the data and apply calculation to find relative means. This system led to

conclusions such as hedonism being more important in the mornings, learning and creativity

spiked during working hours, and his strive for independence trailed off towards the end of the

day (Augemberg 2012). Even when there is a desire to understand the squishy areas of emotion

and value, the way to insight is always through data. Equating data with truth, they see it as the

most important thing you can trust" because it takes emotions and politics out of the 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.


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 self-

improvement (Expereal 2013). You would look back on your numbers and know how you were

truly feeling at those moments, rather than relying on false memories. One user reported

quitting a job she thought she loved on the basis of the evidence of low mood 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.


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 pre-

determined norm. To find their own healthy optimums and standards.

The ideal body that is being pursued by self-trackers may at first seem to be a

standardised product of the medical and scientific community. However, many individuals within

the Quantified Self community have reacted vehemently to this notion of standardising

themselves, arguing the practice of collecting personal data allows us to legitimise the specific

needs of each individual body. Wolf has firmly expressed his belief that people are not assembly

lines. We cannot be fine tuned to a known standard, because a universal standard for human

experience does not exist (Wolf 2010a). He notes that it is typical for pioneering self-trackers

to defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge (Wolf 2010a).


One of the great hopes that gets many people excited about the Quantified Self movement

is the promise of personalised medicine, where medical treatment dreams of being infinitely

more effective by designing drugs according to the needs of each particular person in each

particular case of illness (Kelly 2012b; Smarr 2012). The idea is that given an infinite amount of

specific data on each human body, we will no longer have to rely on understand at level of the

aggregate median. The movement has taken on the cause of actively challenging the established

medical and scientific standards we now live with, believing in many ways they represent the

new frontiers of these institutions.


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


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 yo

tracking humanity: the quantified self movement

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