tracking humanity: the quantified self movement

Tracking HumanityThe Quantified Self Movement

by Maggie Appleton

April 2013

Whitman College

Thesis in Anthropology

Page 1 ! Maggie AppletonTracking Humanity

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Autoethnography 7

Chapter One The Quantified Self Movement 10

Chapter Two Born of Western Cosmology 36

Chapter Three New Science, New Medicine, New World 64

Chapter Four Technological Embodiment 80

Chapter Five Watch Your Data Before it Watches You 125

Chapter Six Becoming Gods of Capitalism 156

Conclusion Evolving Humanity 192

Bibliography 196


Introduction

The Quantified Self movement is concerned with exactly what you might expect

quantifying the self. Aligning their identity with units of measurement and numerical data, they

seek a self-knowledge that will lead to the improvement of both the individual, and implicitly,

the greater society the supposed ultimate goal of progressing humanity forward. The ideology

of the Quantified Self movement is important to us because it is not only theirs, in many ways it

is our own. Based in ideas native to the Western world that have now reigned for centuries, their

curious conceptions about the body and self are ones we share. Understanding the historical

emergence, beliefs, concerns, and interests of this community will teach us about ourselves as

much as it does about them.

Beginning with an exploration of the historical foundations of the West, my theory builds

off the work of Marshall Sahlins in bringing attention to how we have a very particularly

constructed idea of the self, as a need-driven and imperfect being living within a dualistically

divided body and mind. Seeking to fix our supposed imperfections, we cultivated the dominance

of science and medicine over our natural bodies by beginning to understand our physical form

within the metaphor of machinery. While the Quantified Self movement in many ways ascribes

to these beliefs, and is clearly built upon these foundations of imbuing objective, empirical and

quantifiable data with legitimacy, they also challenge and seek to revolutionise the modern

institutions of science and biomedicine. Primarily concerned with the generalised knowledge that


Introduction

the two impose upon individual bodies, the Quantified Self ideology believes each singular

person should be able to determine their own personal truths and treatments, leading them to

establish and advocate for the joint concepts of personal science and personalised medicine.

I then move to discuss how the technological devices pervasively used within the

Quantified Self community are leading them to new experiences of embodiment a

technological embodiment that redefines the boundaries of the self, and engaging us in debates

over animated agency, emotional intimacy, and holistically interdependent and interconnected

systems that challenge many of our default anthropocentric attitudes towards the world. These

emerging relationships with technology are indicative of those going on within our greater

society, yet Quantified Selfers could be considered the frontier of those fully embracing these

new embodiments. They construct new identities and ways of being through technology,

especially through the medium of data. Massive troves of immaterial online information become

representations of selves in the public sphere, as well as potential channels for manipulation and

domination on a socio-political level. Though many have read the data-collection practices of the

Quantified Self community as solely self-surveillance, we find they are actually choosing to

generate and control their own information rather than wait for greater social and political forces

to do it for them. We are now all implicated in acts of self-quantification and the rise of data-

selves by nature of being digitally connected, a state which raises a plethora of political and

personal complications for us to navigate. If we are already intertwined in a system of data

surveillance, self-trackers may be the ones turning the system into a source of identity, positive

meaning and empowerment.


Introduction

Though they are politically resistant in the field of data surveillance, their underlying

ideologies still inherently tie them to fulfilling the needs of a capitalist economy. They strive to

be optimal citizens: organised, productive, timely, fit, and responsible, giving off the social

perception of a well-ordered and lived life. This pursuit is driven by a conviction in the natural

goodness of capitalism that resembles religious belief, yet one that fails to result in the

transcendent state implicitly promised. The existence of the Quantified Self movement, a

collection of individuals seeking to improve and upgrade themselves in order to manage the

unreasonably demanding requirements of the capitalist economy using the same ideological base

that brought it into being, should lead us to critically question what they mean by seeking

improvement in the interests of progress. We should ask what we they progressing towards

and whether it truly serves their own interests.

Throughout this critical exploration, and despite the occasional bold conclusion, I do not

mean to other the Quantified Selfers. When taken in cultural context, their practices and beliefs

are reasonable and rational. The ways we enact these same beliefs are simply more familiar to us

we have been performing them for so long they do not seem alien or absurd to our eyes.

Whereas amassing, meticulously graphing, and developing formulas based on the data points of

a morning routine puts these convictions into such a stark light that we react with shock, and

often quickly move to ridicule those who practice it. Out of a lack of empathetic understanding

(and perhaps some confusion and fear), many have defaulted to portraying Quantified Selfers as

a misguided, fringe population numerically desecrating the sanctity of the human self. My


Introduction

research explores and challenges both this inaccurate portrayal of the community, as well as the

notion that we have a sacred pre-defined human nature in need of defending. The movement is

not what many take it as. They are often holistically humanistic rather than reductively

mechanical, diverse rather than monolithic, evolving and dynamic rather than static, and

critically questioning rather than passively complying. Above all other qualities, I found the

Quantified Self movement to be defined by a diversity and complexity of opinions. Members

expressed wide varieties of dynamic, evolving ideas and contradictory ideologies. To study,

think, and write about the movement as a whole concept and bound community was a

challenging and confusing task on numerous occasions. Despite these rifts and differences, the

Quantified Self community indeed shares fundamental and core beliefs about the value of self-

improvement through quantified self-knowledge, providing them with enough common ground

to engage in building a meaningful social world.


Introduction

AutoEthnography

I should begin by stating that I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Quantified

Self movement. My relationship to the community is definitely an etic one, I am an outsider

looking in. However, I argue we are all increasingly becoming degrees of quantified selfers,

whether through small actions of intentional tracking or passive interpellation into the

unavoidable data streams flowing from modern digital life. Many aspects of my life are tracked,

just as many of yours are but it is not a significant, intentional or purposeful goal of mine to

quantify my life. I admit to having a few applications embedded in my digital realm that reflect

quantified aspects of my life back to me a GPS location tracker on my iPhone, a Google

Chrome add-on that track and graphs my internet browsing patterns, and for a short period while

I was writing this thesis I used the tracking software Daytum (an online system quite popular

amongst the Quantified Self community) to record each time I consumed a cup of coffee.

Intended as a minor and lighthearted foray into intentional tracking, I lasted about two weeks

before routinely forgetting and losing interest in the practice. The motivating values that drive

this community and their practices indeed require more, and run far deeper, than a passing sense

of intrigue in aesthetic applications.

A collusion of factors brought me to study the topic of the Quantified Self movement.

First, I knew I wanted to closely examine an issue that critically examined neoliberal values and

the assumption that capitalism is a natural and organically formed system. As a cultural

cosmology, capitalism is a fascinating construction, one I feel many people miss the great many


Autoethnography

intricacies and ironies of because they cannot step back from it and see it for what it is. Of all the

things anthropology has given me, the encouragement to dig around the roots of all human

cultural systems, especially ones I am implicated and intertwined in, has been most meaningful.

My second interest revolved around our technological relationships. As a generation x, digital

native, with an emotionally-burdensome attachment to my iPhone that fascinates me as much as

it concerns me, I wanted to explore the vast and visible influences of technology on the culture of

everyday life that I have seen come about even in my short lifetime.

My final impetus is far more challengingly personal to write about. I experienced a

turbulent and extensive period wherein I became firmly convinced that the realness,

significance, and consequential gravity of numbers trumped that of my own embodied

experience of being. I gripped to them, dependent upon the illusion of control they provided.

Quantitative data constructed by the legacy of science and medicine spun a web over my cosmos,

present in nearly all my moments of consciousness. The gradual shift back to validating my

internal world was not quick, simple, or comfortable, and took many forces of love and support

to get me there. It is a mountain I am still summiting.

The problem was obviously not the numbers themselves; the situation was complicated.

But it got me wondering how many other people in complicated intersections of their lives, who

were taught the things I was taught about the world, ended up turning to numbers as an outlet for

distress. It had me wonder whether their distress resembled mine, bound to ideals of achievement

and transcendence propagated by the same historical cosmology that determined their irrationally

rationalist expression. Perhaps I was looking for some culturally-situated companions who used


Autoethnography

methodical maths to manage their pain. Much of me wanted to consider the different ways of

living numerically, to understand how others found satisfaction where I found struggle.

Watching the world through the lens of data is all at once saliently addicting, affirming,

and invoking of self-achieved power. Yet this viewpoint is narrow, its walls built by a forceful

history that make them difficult to peer over, difficult to step back from and gain clarity. I was

drawn to examine the Quantified Self ideology because I felt deep empathy for the practice of

chasing self-improvement at all costs, and concern for the sometimes strict empiricism it relies

upon. Empathy is perhaps the greatest tool we have for understanding; having felt some degree

of the powerful force of quantification myself, I feel able to understand the underlying beliefs

driving this social movement on an individual level. They were once my beliefs too.


Autoethnography

Chapter One

Introduction to the Quantified Self

Heart rate: 67bpm. Blood pressure: 110/74. Blood-oxygenation: 97%. Weight: 126.3lbs.

Hours of sleep: 7.23. Quality of sleep: 83%. REM cycles: 5. Caffeine intake: 126mg. Steps

taken: 2,405. Calories expended: 809. Emails received: 54. Emails sent: 13. Motivation level: 4.

Stress level: 7.3. Location: the world of the Quantified Self the self understood and expressed

through numbers, data, and quantified statistics. Summed up by their tagline self-knowledge

through numbers, the concept of the Quantified Self encompasses a both a cultural ideology

and a community of people who congregate both online and offline that ascribe to it

(Quantified Self 2013). This distinction between the Quantified Self movement or phenomenon,

and the Quantified Self community is an important one. There is an understanding of a greater

movement taking place on a social level, believed to be a historical force in itself, with some

trackers even calling it our millenniums renaissance (Top Coder Inc 2012). The movement is

driven by specific and historically-located ideas and beliefs guiding this technologically-oriented

approach to self-tracking. With it comes an international community whose members self-

identify and connect through self-tracking.

Self-Tracking

What members of this community hold in common is the practice of self-tracking: they

collect and store data and information about particular aspects of their life and self. This practice

revolves around designing projects that target specific variables. The kind of things that people


Chapter One - Introduction to the Quantified Self

choose to track is seemingly infinite ranging from the common areas of sleep, time, physical

exercise, and food intake, to the more creative variable of monitoring of Twitter activity, shower

temperatures, snoring, and perceived quality of social conversations (Quantified Self 2013). It is

a running joke within the community that any aspect of life you can imagine being tracked,

probably is being tracked a Quantified Selfer somewhere in the world. Keeping tabs on the self is

nothing terribly new: Benjamin Franklin is one historical figure known to have written of his

adherence to thirteen key values each day (Dembosky 2011).1 Self-trackers often like to harken

back to such historical individuals, attempting to convey the message that surveying the self in

pursuit of improvement has been a noble and worthwhile activity for hundreds of years (Kelly

2012b). The practice seems to have been an especially prevalent theme in the history of Western

culture, appearing everywhere from religious virtues to nationalistic demands of responsible

citizenship. Appreciating the influence of these historically-based ideas on the current Quantified

Self movement is central to understanding how and why it has emerged. In many ways that is

part of the real significance of this movement: self-tracking has long been a part of ourselves and

our cultures. It is a practice that all of us can relate to, and engage with in small ways one that

is not only growing rapidly, but also shifting forms. Advancements in technology have now

infinitely expanded the realm of self-tracking making the practice exponentially easier

compared to the old pen-and-paper method. From body monitors to smartphone applications, we

are now enabling a new age of the measured self.



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).

History and Founding

The Quantified Self movement does not begin or end with any single individual or set of

people. Instead of being founded, its origin story is told as a natural emergence out of the way

human interaction with technology were already taking shape. It would be more accurate to say

certain leaders emerged who encouraged and facilitated the rise of the culture, shaping the

phenomenon by giving it a name and a central digital space where they could communicate,

organise, and establish their identity. These leaders were Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly who set up

Quantifiedself.com the website acting as the online hub of the movement. The two were

journalists already invested in exploring the social and personal meanings behind technology

when they met as co-workers at the forward-thinking magazine Wired in 2007. One an editor and

one a writer, they began to collaborate over their shared interest in a technologically-driven trend

both had noticed gaining ground among their social circles in the bay area of California; people

subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far

beyond the ordinary (Wolf 2010b). They attribute the rise of these habits to four factors; the

growing ubiquity of personal mobile devices allowing people to carry powerful computing

capacities around in their pockets; advances in the quality, affordability and miniaturisation of

electronic body sensors and tracking tools; social medias normalisation of perpetually sharing

intimate information; and the rise of the digital cloud the massive increase in capacity of

online data hosting and storage, making its collection seem immaterially infinite (Wolf 2010a;

Kelly 2011). By 2008, the community had grown enough for Kelly and Wolf to feel they needed



to establish a supportive limited liability company: Quantified Self Labs (Quantified Self 2013).

Acting as an organisational support, the structure of the company is simple. There are no full

time employees and they have a stated goal of not making organising QS feel like

work (Butterfield 2012:16). The community aims to promote an egalitarian and democratic

power structure by downplaying officiality and hierarchy.

Community Organisation

The community aspect of the Quantified Self movement is intentional and active;

bounded together by voluntary, self-expressed membership, they connect through online hubs

that typically include forum posts, twitter conversations, blog entries with streams of discussion

comments, and informative resource pages such as wikis. On the central website

Quantifiedself.com, they define themselves as a collaboration of users and tool-makers who

share an interest in self-knowledge through self-tracking (Quantified Self 2013). As of April

2013, there are currently 111 registered meet-up groups consisting of 18,558 members across 31

nations in 89 citiesthese mini-communities are represented in New York, San Francisco,

London and Tokyo, and also extend to places such as Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, Beijing and Cape

Town (Meetup 2013). However, as a geographical trend, the the vast majority of tracking

communities are condensed within the Global North.

Meet-ups are regularly scheduled, organised events where members can share their

stories of self-experimentation. Run through the website Meetup.com, each geographical area



has local voluntary leaders who facilitate the monthly gatherings. These meetings centre around

a series of slide-show presentations, called show-and-tells, which are usually filmed and later

uploaded to internet blogs and websites (Christensen 2013). Anthropologist Adam Butterfield

conducted his masters thesis specifically on Quantified Self community meet-up groups and

succinctly defined their content as personal stories of self-tracking projects (Butterfield 2012).

While this is a simplified description of how the ideology gets communicated between its

members and the general public, in a literal sense its is fairly accurate. The emphasis on

storytelling using meaningful data is a key component of the Quantified Self movement.

Understanding how and why these stories are told is central to understanding the Quantified Self

movement and the cultural forces driving and shaping it. Throughout this thesis I will cite many

tracking tales told through blog posts, personal websites, filmed presentations, and second-hand

accounts in articles. At meet-up presenters are advised to base their talk around three prime

questions; first, explain what you did; second, explain how you did it; and third, explain what

you learnt (Wolf 2011). Some meet-up communities further structure the story-telling form by

suggesting that speakers limit their talks to five minutes, encouraging simple and clear

communication (Christensen 2013). The purpose of these presentations is to offer ideas that

others might spark inspiration from: different tools and methods for self-tracking, different

variables to track, inventive solutions to common problems like trouble sleeping or stress at

work. The movement sees themselves as trying to cultivate a culture of sharing (Christensen

2013). The ultimate value they share is seeking self-improvement, and through sharing stories,

hope to collaboratively encourage and support one another in that goal. Conferences follow a



similar structure but are much larger events, usually drawing members from all over a region

(such as Europe or the Pacific Northwest) instead of a single city.

The glue holding this community together is undeniably the website Quantifiedself.com.

Much like an ever-expanding family tree, it branches outwards connecting a seemingly infinite

number of links to online data logging tools, company pages for commercially produced tracking

devices and services, YouTube and Vimeo videos of presentations, reviews of smartphone

tracking applications, notable personal blogs of self-trackers, and relevant journalistic and

academic articles. It is the central hub of this internet-based society.

Quantifiedself.com features many aspects typical of websites that facilitate open and

interactive online societies; social forums, active commenting on blog postings, occasional

surveys, prompts for open discussions, frequent guest writers, and interviews with notable

community members (Quantified Self 2013). This includes a number of recurring features such

as: What Were Reading a compiled list of the latest publications and articles related to the

Quantified Self movement, Toolmaker Talks question and answer posts with the developers

of popular tracking devices and applications, and Numbers from Around the Web a showcase

of especially interesting self-experiments and the resulting data from community members

(Quantified Self 2013). This small slice of what type of content is posted should make apparent

this website is by no means written or controlled by a single or small handful of individuals.



While Kevin Kelly, Gary Wolf, and Alexandria Carmichael are the official moderators, the

majority of the material is generated from a large and diverse number of contributors.2

Being an online social group, the nature of the Quantified Self community is fairly fluid,

with members interacting over multisited situations with complex, spatially diverse

geographies (Wilson and Peterson 2002:455). In their review of the Anthropology of Online

Communities, Wilson and Peterson point out that they are likely to be bound by asymmetrical,

indirect connections, as people are able to identify with the idea of being part of the community

without necessarily making direct personal connections with others (Wilson and Peterson

2002:455). They may simply feel engagement and membership by reading the thoughts and ideas

of other members on websites and blogs. The practices of connection can sometimes be socially

passive. This quality makes the Quantified Self community an imagined community, a concept

developed by political scientist Benedict Anderson to describe a socially-constructed unit where

its members understand themselves to be part of a bound whole even in the absence of face-to-

face interactions or social events. Becoming part of a community simply requires they imagine

themselves to be so, much like being a member of a nation (Anderson 1991). However, in the

case of the Quantified Self community, there are also many socially active and physically

interactive ways members are bound together. Though geographically spread out over nations

and internet cables, there is still a face-to-face aspect of the Quantified Self community in their

regularly organised physical meet-ups and conferences. Quantified Self has been described as a

grass-roots movement brought together by the internet (Harrell 2011), emphasising its nature as



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).

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

communities where members are more likely to make direct and personal connections with one

another.

Leadership, Power Structures & Cohesion

Although Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf are often referred to as the leaders of the

movement, the community tries to cultivate an open and democratic power structure where no

single person or set of people speak for everyone. There are, however, many members who are

more outspoken and active in publishing ideological writings on the Quantified Self, sometimes

referred to as thought leaders (Erwin 2012). These are individuals who usually run high-traffic

blogs about their Quantified Self lifestyles, regularly publishing advice, reflections, and

generally contributing content to the online community and the discussions happening within it.

Quantified Selfers may not exactly align their tracking beliefs and habits with members who

might be considered popular (who themselves hold a diverse range of beliefs around self-

tracking), yet these individuals may have greater power and sway within the community thanks

to their ability to influence the opinions of their readers. These informal leaders are frequently

featured in interviews, articles, and publications about the movement. They appear to be

prominent and well-respected figures within the community, with smaller self-tracking blogs

frequently referring to and citing them in posts. However, they should not themselves be taken as

absolute representations of the movement, nor should they be assumed to speak on behalf of the

entire community (Erwin 2012). In his ethnographic work, Butterfield found it is certainly not a



monolithic community where everyone involved shares the same ideas about, and interests in,

self-tracking (Butterfield 212:49). Though Kelly and Wolf may have run the first Quantified

Self meet-up, both believe the movement has taken on a life of its own, and in some ways,

taken on a different meaning (Butterfield 2012:16). The Quantified Self ideology itself has

evolved in its short six year history, with different philosophies, values, and areas of focus rising

and falling in popularity none consistent throughout or representative of the whole community,

but fluctuating and developing through community discussions and dialogues. Above all other

qualities of the movement, this lack of deterministic authority and communal openness to change

maturation, and development of what it means to be a Quantified Selfer might be of the most

seminal importance to understanding it authentically.

On Ethnographic Sources

The vast majority of my ethnographic material is drawn from blog postings, essays,

interviews in journalistic publications and newspapers, and filmed presentations created by

people who make up the dedicated core of the movement. They are the leaders and avid

participants, the organisers and enthusiasts, the writers and researchers. You will notice a

repetition of names throughout my work: individuals like Kevin Kelly, Gary Wolf, Ernesto

Ramirez, Konstantin Augemberg, Larry Smarr, gwern branwen [sic], and Buster Benson, among

others, are all continuously cited across its chapters. The dominance of their voices is due to the

dominance of their influence across the Quantified Self community, and the extensive efforts

they put into writing and publishing about it. I recognise that this leaves my analysis vulnerable



as an inaccurate representation of the more common or typical Quantified Selfer who may not

widely promote their beliefs and philosophies about self-tracking in publicly accessible places.

However, there is no normal when it comes to the Quantified Self movement its membership

is characterised by a wide diversity of opinions, habits, and levels of involvement. I have done

my best to cast my net wide in selecting blogs, recorded talks, and stories to quote from and

analyse presenting accounts ranging the thought leaders who upload every detail of their day

to public websites, to those who have only dabbled in a single experiment of self-quantification.

Yet I concede my sources are limited to those who have chosen to freely share their experiences

over the internet, a potentially self-selecting group. I have also likely left out the voices of many

slightly less prominent thought leaders, simply by limitation of the sheer number of them

heading up different factions of the community, and that their opinions overlapped with those

already represented. I have to some degree relied on the insights of anthropologists who are able

to be physically present at Quantified Self meet-ups and conferences, primarily the work of

Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman, and Adam Butterfield. Their expressed insights about the

community, after engaging with people face-to-face and conducting many interviews, I believe

grants them considerable legitimacy as second-hand ethnographic sources.

The Self-Tracker Identity

Identifying as a Quantified Selfer (the predominant self-referentially used term)

requires two things; first, a lifestyle based around tracking data about oneself, and second, a



conscious willingness to identity as such.3 Being an identified Quantified Selfer is voluntary and

self-assigned, an ownership of their tracking activity as a significant aspect of who they believe

themselves to be. It is a public expression of a set of values and ideals that privately can hold a

wide variety of meanings. Beyond the core belief in seeking self-improvement through collecting

data, the rest is left up to the individual: track what you want, how you want, and do what you

like with the data (Wolf 2010a). This open-ended invitation to have total agency of your own

self-tracking lifestyle makes involvement and membership in the movement exceedingly

undefined. What exactly it means to be a Quantified Selfer falls on a wide spectrum, and there

are degrees to which a person can identify with and be involved in the community. Those who

present at conferences and actively organise meet-ups likely take the identity more seriously than

those who simply wear a popular commercial tracking device and occasionally read the

Quantifiedself.com blog posts. Essentially, the level of involvement is flexible and the line

between being a Quantified Selfer or not is fuzzy at best. This grey-area around what counts as

being a member of the tracking movement requires some clarification as to who exactly I am

discussing in this research. Therefore, I wish to clarify that am considering the baseline of

membership to be an explicit, public and purposeful ownership of being a Quantified Selfer.

Despite the wide variety of forms being a Quantified Selfer can take, and the insistence

by community members that there is no such thing as an average self-tracker, they certainly

perceive a certain type of person to be drawn to the movement (Augemberg 2013a). They



3 Throughout this thesis I will use the terms Quantified Selfer, Self Quantifier, quantifier, self-tracker, and tracker interchangeably. This is based on the way I found those five terms to be used within the ethnographic material of the Quantified Self community. For the purposes of this paper you should assume they all refer to the same social identity being discussed here.

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

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

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

inspired by scientific curiosity, they also revel in questioning existing mainstream social

institutions like biomedicine and technoscience, believing their practices go against the grain of

normal society. They repeatedly speak about themselves in narratives and terms that imply

independence, difference, rebelliousness, radical thinking, and being defiant of the status quo,

such as being self-proclaimed pioneers (Kelly 2011; Wolf 2010a). Joining the movement

seems to be more likely if you possess these certain character traits, but community members

also suggest being part of the movement strengthens these qualities and subsequently changes

the kind of lives people lead. Augemberg argues that the practice of self-tracking, Quantified

Selfers become different from other people with regard to mentality, psychological traits,

lifestyle, and behaviours (Augemberg 2013a). There is no doubt the movement understands

itself as a social collective of like-minded individuals sharing an established set of values,

qualifying them as a community.

Demographics

The demographics of the Quantified Self movement are hard to come by there is hardly

a centralised registration system keeping tabs on membership. We can tell the vast majority of

those who at least participate in meet-ups and conferences live in densely populated, 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 location of San Francisco and the bay area of California (Meetup 2013).4 The notoriety

of this area as a professional hub for cutting-edge and powerful institutions of technology makes

it unsurprising that the Quantified Self movement has been so successfully established there.

Cities where Quantified Self groups have become especially popular tend to have active

technology communities, such as a large number of start-up companies or hacker

spaces (Butterfield 2012:42). The majority of journalistic articles that discuss the kind of

people who involve themselves in the Quantified Self movement focus on the young

professionals working in high tech companies, usually with occupations like internet

entrepreneur, or web programmer (Long 2013; Dembosky 2011). The unofficial hypothesis is

that those involved in technology and tracking in their careers are the most willing to let it

overflow into their personal lives. Butterfield referred to the identity as geek elite (Butterfield

2012:1). With this label comes the adjoining culture associated with the Silicon Valley and bay



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

area of Lululemon wearers, yoga-practitioners, and vegans, who shop at farmers markets and

bike to work, alluding to the liberal and crunchy stereotypes of a population concerned with

embracing idealised natural ways of living while enjoying the lavish comforts of capitalist

consumption and technological privilege (Maqubela 2012).

Gender in the Movement

The predominance of men who are actively involved and visible in the Quantified Self

movement compared to the number of women has become an acknowledged issue within the

community. Fewer women in attendance at meet-up sessions, and the notable absence of tracking

tools for menstrual periods (a cycle that would otherwise lend itself well to improvement through

experimentation) are often provided as evidence of the movements gender gap (Christensen

2013; Cornell 2010; Eaves 2012). In surveying the gender of posters, commenters, and filmed

presentation videos on QuantifiedSelf.com, one blogger found the male-to-female ratio to be

80/20 (Cornell 2010). Indeed, in articles and publications written about the movement, the self-

tracking individuals highlighted are usually male. I found only a handful of stories about women

involved in the Quantified Self movement in over thirty popular journalism pieces surveyed for

this thesis. Those who have noticed this trend attribute it to factors that align with gender

stereotypes pervasively familiar throughout Western culture: men like tools, while women like

connection and community. Members of the movement express beliefs such as a smaller

percentage of women are really interested in data. They want narrative (Christensen 2013), and

that women would never want to look at relationships as experiments (Cornell 2010). These



opinions focus solely on the use of technology in Quantified Self practices and disregard the

strong community aspect of the movement, making them poor explanations for the gender

discrepancy. However, there is the possibility female outsiders to the movement might perceive it

as a gadget-fuelled boys club (despite the inaccuracy of this understanding), deterring them from

attending meet-ups. There are also speculations that the social realms the movement tends to

draw members from are already male-dominated fields such as science and technology (Cornell

2010).

Public Awareness

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

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

practices of the Quantified Self culture have been introduced to a wide audience by numerous

journalistic investigations portraying its inner workings. Usually framed as a human interest

piece, it has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, Fast Company,

BBC.com, The Atlantic, and The Economist, among many others (Bowden 2012; Christensen

2013; Harrell 2011; Hunt 2010; The Economist 2012; Weintraub 2013; Wolf 2012a; Wortham

2012). The first news articles began to appear in 2009, and have seemingly snowballed since

then. Subsequently, the term Quantified Self and awareness about the social movement have

become increasingly visible in the public sphere. Especially over the course of the past year,

many journalists have referred to the mainstreaming of the movement, of it having exploded



in both size and scope (Snyder 2013; Christensen 2013). Considering the movement a fringe

phenomenon is a fading opinion.

The double-edged sword of the range of publicity that the Quantified Self movement has

received is that they have undoubtedly been presented inaccurately more than once.

Anthropologists with Intel Labs, Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman have spent the past year and a

half conducting research on the Quantified Self community, and point out the common reductive

presentation of a self-absorbed technical elite who [use] arsenals of gadgets to enact a kind of

self-imposed panopticon, generating data for datas sake is a falsity (Nafus and Sherman

2012b). The true Quantified Self movement is far more complex and nuanced, a social

movement with specific social dynamics, people, and practices rather than the generalised

brand name it has purportedly become (Nafus and Sherman 2012b). They argue the name is

thrown around to allude to the use of novel and flashy digital gadgets, without the accompanying

social context of who is using them and why. Below I describe this generalised use of tracking

technology in society, much of which occurs outside and apart from Quantified Selfers. My

discussion of it serves to place the specific community of the Quantified Self within a larger

context of social patterns, and consider how the ideology that leads them to self-track might also

be pervasive in a wider population. Indeed, we perhaps should be more concerned for those

individuals who attach data-trackers to their bodies without also engaging in philosophical

conversations about why they do so.

The media and public fascination with this community speaks to the importance of

understanding how and why it came to be. As a society we clearly find the beliefs behind it



intriguing and relevant to the future of our technologically-intertwined lives. Its expansion is also

leading to a shift in its perception; the more people hear about the practice of self-tracking and

perhaps the range of diverse approaches that it encompasses, the more it becomes normalised

and begins to seem commonplace.

Shifting Norms

Back in 2010 the relative early years of the movement Wolf wrote of extreme

quantifiers considering their behaviour to be abnormal, and calling themselves outliers (Wolf

2010a). While the community still associates with leading lifestyles that deviate from the norm,

many are experiencing a shift in the previously bizarre becoming more acceptable. Compulsive

recordings of bodily numbers are no longer necessarily characterised as some form of anxiety

disorder or signal of a lack of mental stability (Wolf 2010a). Still, in his ethnography Butterfield

found self-trackers reported reluctance to divulge the full extent their tracking habits to those

outside the movement, fearing they may be stigmatised and labeled obsessive compulsive, self-

absorbed, or a hypochondriac (Butterfield 2012: 60). They report others in their lives label them

weird, and yet simultaneously are assured that soon everybody is going to be doing this, and

you wont even notice (Wolf 2010a). The movements expansion seemingly instills confience

that greater social acceptance is on the way. It therefore greatly serves the interests of those

within the movement to promote the self-tracking lifestyle as increasingly normal and ordinary.

Many of the outspoken leaders of the movement are, naturally, quite optimistic about its

potential rising popularity. Kelly sees the next century as leading us into an age of quantification;



he believes industry will spur a new side to science and a new kind of lifestyle. He sees new

money, new tools, and a new philosophy stemming from measuring your whole life... It will be

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

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

trackers (Kelly 2011). How they will maintain this core aspect of their collective identity if

indeed their prediction of going mainstream is fulfilled remains to be seen.

Self-Producing Pioneers

Fittingly, one intriguing quality of Quantified Selfers is the high number who are also the

creators, inventors, and developers of self-tracking tools. In line with their philosophy of self-

customisation and personalisation in the practice of self-tracking, it makes sense that many feel it

is worth developing their own tools to serve their own specific interests and needs. Described as

technophiles, founders, and early adopters, they engage in both the production and the use of

their technological tools a continuous, circular feedback system (Dembosky 2011; Maqubela

2012). As most work in the industry of producing technological goods, they already have the

skills and knowledge to do so. The New York meet-up survey cited earlier found that 30% of

their members either work for a self-tracking related company or have created a self-

quantification tool (Paulus 2013). Being both the creators and consumers of cutting edge tools

and technological advancements legitimises their pioneer self-image to an extent. They closely

follow not only the new commodified gadgets and software applications that emerge on the

market, but also the advances in computational power systems one step removed from the public



eye inventions that could lead to possible new ways of integrating technologies into the self.

They are inventing entirely new devices to integrate into their bodies, leading the frontier of

technological development in an effort to be even more enmeshed in the digital age of

enhancement. In this role they are shaping the forms and purposes of the technology that

trickles down to the rest of us in the mainstream hordes of technological consumerism. We

should especially care about what they find significant, important, and meaningful - because to

an extent they hold the power to determine what kind of technology we will use, and what we

will use it for. There are concerns that should be raised around this form of power, especially

considering the limited demographic of WEIRD individuals that currently make up the majority

of the community. The political and social repercussions in areas such as healthcare and access

across socioeconomic lines will be expanded upon later on.

Trackings Rising Ubiquity

As part of the justification for the significance of this topic, I would like to briefly

consider the extent to which self-tracking is rapidly increasing throughout the general population

beyond the dedicated community that identify as Quantified Selfers. Active and involved

Quantified Selfers intensely track their physical bodies and lived functionality to such an extent

that they represent the extremes fringes of the population. However, milder practices of tracking

the self using technology are also expanding into the public sphere. There has recently been an

explosion of consumer goods and services designed to facilitate tracking all manner of lived

human experiences there are over 500 listed on the organised and searchable Guide to Self-



Tracking hosted by the Quantified Self website (Quantified Self 2013). Falling into a range of

categories, they encompass smartphone applications, wearable sensor devices, and online

websites, with many of them being comprehensive systems made up of a combination of these

three. The popular variables that get tracked include physical activity, dietary intake,

geographical locations, and sleep cycles. Some of the more widely-used products may already be

familiar names to many; the Nike+ Fuelband, the Zeo Sleep Manager, the Fitbit Activity Tracker,

and the Jawbone UP wristband number among the more popular tracking commodities available

on the international market.

Getting hard data on the number of people engaging in self-tracking practices is actually

quite difficult. Ironically, the personal nature of deciding to quantify ones self makes it hard to

quantify on a widespread social scale. This is partially because some people who engage in self-

tracking practices do not identify with, or are perhaps not even aware of the Quantified Self

movement and social community, and therefore would not be counted among the numbers

attending meet-ups and conferences. We can see there are vastly more people who have

purchased commercial tracking devices than there are self-identified Quantified Selfers. Thirty

million wearable sensors were shipped their new owners just in 2012, a statistic that only

begins to speak to the accessibility and increasing commonality of this practice in our global

society (Comstock 2012). On the latest call in 2012, Nike reported there were over 11 million

people who has joined their online fitness tracking community connected to the Nike+ system

(Laird 2013). The phenomenon shows no sign of slowing down, with one market research firm



predicting that by 2018 over 485 million people will own wearable computing devices, which

includes the rise of entirely new tracking and recording gadgets like Apples iWatch and Google

Glass (ABI Research 2013). The future potential of the tracking lifestyle seems rather promising

in light of these numbers.

Another broad indicator we can use is a Pew Research Centre report released in January

of 2013 entitled Tracking for Health. According to the study, 69% of American adults report

tracking a health indicator such as weight, diet, exercise, routine, or symptoms using any given

method (including on paper or in their heads). The report gives us a variety of numbers that

should be taken with a grain of salt but nonetheless provide an outline of the rising popularity of

self-tracking. It noted a rise in the development and use of tracking applications on phones, as

well as a significant increase in smartphone ownership up 20% just over the course of last year.

Of the 69% of Americans tracking themselves, 21% reported using a form of technology such

as apps or devices to track that data, and 34% reported sharing their information with other

people (Pew Research Centre 2013). The limitations of this Pew report are two-fold their

definition of a tracker is far more generalised than the social identity being discussed

throughout this paper. Secondly, they failed to consider the wide variety of trackable life aspects

that fall outside the general category of health. The report preemptively assumed health to be

a primary and perhaps singular motivator for self-tracking. In response to the Pew research, a

post went up on Quantifiedself.com arguing that the report would not have captured the majority

of tracking that goes on amongst the Quantified Self population (Ramirez and Wolf 2013). Even

with these qualifiers, we can see ample evidence of a growing popularity around the practice.



We should remain cognisant of the fact that these patterns of rising popularity are

assuredly taking place predominantly within the developed Global North, rather than as a

genuinely worldwide phenomenon. We should question claims stating that we, meaning to

implicate all of humanity, will imminently be embedding powerful tracking devices into our

lives. While these forms of technology are certainly getting cheaper and expanding into new

global markets, the vast majority of humanity does not own an iPhone and will not have their

lives transformed by its many available tracking applications anytime soon. While the great

benefits seemingly made possible by the quantified life may be saliently tangible to the

technologically-elite and relatively small Quantified Self communities of Silicon Valley, New

York, and London, this says little about the actual state of affairs in the rest of the world. It seems

far more likely the technological revolution enabling this supposed self-empowerment will

remain with the economically privileged for a while yet.

Establishing Cyborg Technologies

In the ongoing discussions surrounding these tracking technological machines and

devices, we are still at a loss for established and common labels with which to refer to them.

They are spoken about using interchangeable names like ambient devices, prosthetics,

transitive technologies, tracking technologies, wearable computing, wearable sensors,

embedded technologies, tethered devices, information and communication technologies

(ICTs), and undoubtably many, many more buried in the literature (Clark 2003; Hogle 2005;

Katz 2003; Quantified Self 2013; Schll 2011; Turkle 2009). In seeking a unified term for all of



the above categories, I will routinely refer to cyborg technologies throughout this thesis. As an

overarching definition, I understand these as tools, devices, systems, applications, trackers and

software that expand and enhance our cyborg-like qualities the extension of ourselves and

our capacities through the connective and expansive nature of modern technology. They rely

upon the reach of the internet, accessed by ambient connectivity systems like wi-fi and bluetooth,

to instantaneously and continuously both upload and download content from the digital cloud.

The practices of the Quantified Self community especially depend upon cyborg technologies and

use them actively in their daily lives and community culture, but they are not the only ones.

One ubiquitous category of devices which encompass many of the functions that are

significantly shifting our technological relationships is that of the smartphone. The smartphone

should perhaps be considered the ultimate cyborg technology, holding a special role in enabling

the rise of self-tracking as a now widespread social phenomenon. Gary Wolf claims the

smartphone has become the centre of [the] personal laboratory for self-trackers (Wolf 2010a).

With nearly half of all mobile subscribers using smartphones in the United States, their ubiquity

provides a huge number of people with easy and immediate access to tracking applications

(Butterfield 2012:15). We should be careful not be misled by the name we have for this kind of

device. Technological commentator Venkat Rao makes the important insight that our

smartphones are actually nothing like phones; voice is just one clunky feature grandfathered

into a handheld computer that is engineered to loosely resemble its nominal ancestor (Rao

2012). Smartphones have very little in common with the land-line, large-and-clunky handset

receivers plugged into the wall of your grandmothers living room. We now use our phones for



one-to-one voice communication for only a tiny fraction of the total time we spend on them

(Katz 2003). Instead of initiating communication with a singular person, communication happens

on a massive diffused scale the devices are used to publish to or collect from the internet as a

public whole. They have essentially become portable computers, powerful devices simply

disguised as mobile phones and should be thought of as such (Wolf 2010a).

Having established that cyborg technologies have been central in enabling the formation

of the Quantified Self movement, it is important to now clarify that at the heart of the Quantified

Self ideology, its not about the tools (Ramirez 2012a; Wolf 2010a). Members of the

Quantified Self community are eager to dispel the belief they are simply a group of 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 have temporarily tried wearing an activity logger or sleep

monitor only to abandon the practice after their assignments end, support the insistence of the

Quantified Self community that their culture is truly about self-knowledge, rather than an

addiction to the tools that can sometimes be used for that end (Smolan and Erwitt 2012;

Wortham 2012). Wolf has argued that portrayals of the movement as solely defined by

consumerist gadget love are inaccurate and misguided (Wolf 2013a). The overemphasised role

of flashy devices distracts from the central philosophy of the Quantified Self culture, which

focuses on the collaborative interactions of people and technology rather than on the

technological gadgets themselves. Our technology evolves and changes rapidly; too often people



become distracted by the barrage of novel devices, systems, and applications, forgetting to pay

attention to the meaningful way we integrate them into our lives and the implications of doing

so. Kelly and Wolf wanted this to be the driving focus of the community they were establishing

through their website. They envisioned a space both online and offline where people could

share their application of technology to personal projects (Butterfield 2012).

Self-Knowledge for Self-Improvement

A seemingly universal knee-jerk reaction to hearing of the Quantified Self movement is

to ask the obvious question why why self-track? Tracking can be an intensive commitment, a

vast amount of time and attention spent in the lives of those who believe the two are finite

resources. Given the growing pervasiveness of numbers in organised social institutions, many

might perceive the movement as a infiltration or imposition of quantification into that last sacred

realm of ones personal life. Yet, those who engage in self-tracking come to the practice

voluntarily, and appear to rapidly accumulate enthusiasm and enjoyment from the lifestyle.

When asked to explain what drives their tracking habits, most list what we might call practical

benefits. They name its ability to draw attention to and manage the struggles of life, and to

generally improve personal wellness and happiness (Dembosky 2011). What is deemed a

worthwhile life improvement varies among individuals. These might include increased physical

and mental energy, stamina, and strength; cognitive ability and clarity; better quality of sleep;

pain management; decreased anxiety and stress; increased productivity; and general smoother

operation of the self (Wolcott 2013). There are some who make grandiose claims about their



success, claiming to have increased their IQ by 40 points or extended their lifespan by decades

(Dembosky 2011). All of these reasons lead us back to a singular, salient goal that lies at the

heart of all self-tracking self-improvement.

The ideology that knowing about the self, in intricate and quantified detail will inherently

lead to improving the self is a belief system rooted in Western thought. The importance of each

individual making self-improvement a central concern runs back through foundational religious

beliefs, the thinkers of the enlightenment, and up through the modern demands of capitalism. The

emphasis that Quantified Selfers place upon it, in conjunction with the development and

promotion of technology that serves that goal, brings a deeply embedded cultural conviction into

the light. The existence of this community is an opportunity to explore ideas that many of us take

for granted in the culture of Western modern capitalism.



Chapter Two

Born of Western Cosmology

The Quantified Self movement appears as a quandary to many. A quagmire. What would

compel people to engrain pedantic and obsessively detailed, time-consuming quantification

habits into their lives? The activity can make little sense from outside its immediately

contextualised cultural sphere. I argue that the logic of the Quantified Self movement not only

makes perfect sense when taken within the historical context of the post-Enlightenment era, but

its development and rise in popularity could almost have been forecast considering the long-held

beliefs of the Western world. It is the logical extension of the idea of man as a dualistically

divided mind-over-body machine, striving for a higher goal of natural perfection by optimising

his functionality. It seems an inevitable response to our ideas of the self that were originally

Christian, co-opted by scientific rationalism, and eventually served the productive capitalist ideal

of the self-improving, self-made, and self-regulating man, all pursued through methods of

quantifiable empiricism. It is a set of very old and engrained ideas channeled through our new

technological world and distinctly shaped by our changing relationship to it. The Quantified Self

movement may be one of the most sincere adherences to the native beliefs of the West.

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

foundational cosmology of givens and assumptions about the way the world works native to the


Chapter Two - Born of Western Cosmology

traditions of the West5 a set of beliefs I will refer to as Western Cosmology. Thinking

about Western Cosmology is a theoretical lens borrowed from Marshall Sahlins in his 1994

lecture The Sadness of Sweetness. In it he approaches the belief systems of the West as we

would any other taking them apart as indigenous conceptions of human existence...at a

particular historical juncture (Sahlins 1996). Given the general demographics of the Quantified

Self movement as centred in technologically-advanced and devoutly capitalist social frameworks

of the Global North, how their world views have been shaped by the forces of Western

Cosmology would appear to be key to understanding how and why this movement has emerged.

Constructing the Self

Considering the centrality of the concept of the self in the label the Quantified Self, it

serves us to briefly review the legacy of this idea. Thinkers in the Quantified Self movement

have expressed considerable interest in understanding their own constructions of the self. In

his keynote presentation at the 2012 Quantified Self conference, Kevin Kelly began by drawing

attention to the concept of the self as a recent invention which for most of our time on earth

as a species...was not present (Kelly 2012b). By this he means that the modern individual is

undoubtably a cultural construction, having been formed by the influence of a great many

historical thinkers and notions. There is also a strong narrative in Quantified Self circles on the

nature of the self as still changing and evolving, as a process rather than a destiny (Kelly



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.

2012b). Indeed it sometimes seems our experiences of embodiment and conceptions of self are

shifting more rapidly now than ever before, driven by our new relationships with technology and

its integration into everyday life.

Conceptions and narratives of the self in Western Cosmology always seem to lead us

back to a broad hundred year period between the seventeenth and eighteenth century referred to

as the Enlightenment. We place a great deal of importance on the ideas of a few men living

within that time period and those later influenced by their legacy Rene Decartes, Francis

Bacon, Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, and Adam Smith, to

name a few. We credit them for laying down the foundation for modern scientific,

technological, and social progress (Merchant 1979: 99). They established our dependence on

concepts such as Cartesian Dualism, rational materialism, the scientific method, paid 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.

Constructing Human Nature

In outlining the fundamental beliefs about the self that we seem to hold as unquestionably

true in the Western world, Sahlins begins even further back than the Enlightenment, with the

Judeo-Christian story of the Garden of Eden. He presents the idea that since our primary origin

myth we have held onto a number of notions about the way humans are in the world. What we

first believed about humans was said to be handed down from the authority of God. Once we



entered an age of replacing religious doctrines with natural science, we changed very little of our

beliefs about the self, but re-labelled them as human nature justified by the forces of the

natural world instead of a deity this time (Sahlins 1996). Rational science was the one to provide

us with this narrative about natural man. We now hold onto a pattern of explaining our cultural

forms using nature, despite the fact that human nature as we know it has been determined by

culture (Sahlins 1996: 403). That which is thought of as natural is in actual fact a projection

of human perceptions of self and society onto the cosmos, as Caroline Merchant aptly puts it

(Merchant 1979: 69). Our own blindness to how we constructed and then affirmed this idea of

human nature is argued by Sahlins to have prevented many generations of theorists from seeing

the classic bourgeois subject embedded in it (Sahlins 2008: 2). Modern capitalism is then

affirmed and upheld by these ideas about mans nature that we continue to perpetuate, as a

cosmology that serves the needs of a growth-driven market and the self-regulatory

republic (Sahlins 2008; 63).

Human Imperfection

Sahlins theory centres around the notion of human imperfection as a central concern in

Western thought. The biblical tale of Adam and Eves fall from grace teaches that humans ruined

the perfection bestowed on them by God. Eves original sin of eating the forbidden apple was

the first act of impurity driven by need, and condemned man to struggle in a world of physical

toil and eventual mortality. This story provides us with the foundational premise that all human

action is driven by human need by either an avoidance of pain or a seeking of pleasure, and



usually some combination of the two interests (Sahlins 1996: 395-398). The search for

satisfaction, or the melioration of our pains, becomes the focus of our inner will, a belief that

could only have emerged from some very singular ideas of humanity, society, and

nature (Sahlins 1996). In Sahlins mind, the significance of this belief to the eventual

dominance of the capitalist economic system cannot be overstated. The presumed nature of

mankind as insatiably chasing after an elusive satiation through happiness and pleasure defines

modern capitalism, and aligns with the stated desires of quantified selfers. The intertwined

relationship of Quantified Self and capitalist ideologies is expanded upon in chapter six. For

now, we only need to consider how mans imperfect state of need becomes the baseline for the

Western conception of the self.

Dividing Bodies and Minds

The Western self is a split self each whole person is believed to be the sum of a

hierarchically stratified and dualistically opposed pair: the inferior, material body, and the

dominant, immaterial mind. While both components are needed to make up a person, the

internal experience of the self is understood as being located within the more powerful mind.

The body is cast as a materially sensing tool that the mind will use for immaterial experiences; a

lesser possession belonging to the far more valuable mind where the persons true identity lies.

The somatic division between our physical forms and our mental experiencing selves is known

as Cartesian Dualism, and was most famously propagated by the French thinker Rene Descartes.

While Descartes originated the idea, its rapidly pervasive trajectory was undoubtably the result



of being adopted by the institutions of science and biomedicine, which built their knowledge-

bases around the cultural assumption. The repetition and affirmation of the idea across organised

systems of knowledge deeply embedded it in our understanding of the self, and casts a long

shadow over our experience of living in our bodies today.

Scheper-Hughes and Lock assert that one of the problematic fundamental divides

presented by the cartesian model is the opposition of the real tangible body and the unreal

aerial mind. This division of mental and corporeal also brings with it a mountain of associative

baggage in the form of dualistic and opposing pairs; seen and unseen, natural and supernatural,

rational and irrational, high and low, women and men, wisdom and ignorance, cultural and

natural, prudence and lewdness, wealth and poverty, and so on and so forth (Scheper-Hughes and

Lock 1987: 7; Federici 2004; 135). These pairs reinforce a perpetual need for hierarchy in

Western Cosmology, a constant evaluation of the world into distinct categories where one is

almost always preferable over the other. A state that drives us in very specific directions, chasing

after the presumed better qualities of the world. We will see this become especially significant

in the desire for progress, a belief in the need for constant improvement by moving ourselves

toward that which we are told is good in and of itself, often without much scrutiny or

questioning.

Lower Bodies



It is significant that in our origin myth, the particular need displayed by Eve was a

dualistic hunger; both for the nourishment of an apple, and the wisdom it contained. Her physical

and intellectual desires satiated in a single bite. In that moment of consumption, she divided

them and condemned humankind to forever feel we lack enough of either. When we recount this

story, we accentuate that it was the fruit of knowledge, not simply a delicious apple that was

worth getting kicked out of Eden for. We can forgive the hunger for knowledge, but hunger from

the body is not seen as a worthy excuse. Having gained wisdom, the physical body immediately

become shameful, and since then has been portrayed as one of the most fundamental human

vulnerabilities throughout Western thought and writing. The western tradition finds the body to

be the source of epistemological error, moral error, and mortality (Csordas 1994; 8). We are

taught to experience discomfort with its functional needs and dependencies, as it links man to

the earth and birth and death, expressing his basic beastiality (Sahlins 1996: 401). While

corporeally weak, man was still assured his immaterial being was worthy of eventually rejoining

God in heaven, so long as he used it to keep the desires of his lesser material self in check. The

mind was put in charge of mastering bodily needs of exerting willpower and using its

dominance to control the needs, reactions, and reflexes of the body (Federici 2004; 149).

Progress was framed as any gains the systematic and controlling mind could make over the

chaotic and rebellious body. Constructing this dualism between the mind and body has

condemned man to a perpetual internal warfare of spirit and flesh (Sahlins 1996: 402). The

body became as a conflict zone between a reasoning, rational, immaterial mind and an unruly,

uncontrollable, physical body.



Higher Minds

The intangible be it the soul or mind of man has long been affiliated with an

idealised higher realm, whether religious or intellectual. We think our minds are the gateway to

immortality in struggling to accept our eventual mortality, we relegate death to the body and

seek to live forever through the legacy of our thoughts. This existential strife of being half

animal and half symbolic has been articulated well by anthropologist Ernest Becker in his

reflections in The Denial of Death:

The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature: ...he is out of nature and hopelessly

in it; his is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body

that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a

material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways - the strangest and most

repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split

in two: has has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of

nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground for a few feet in

order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in

and to have to live with. [Becker 1973]

Becker refers to this as the fundamental human predicament of believing we are simultaneously

worms and gods (Becker 1973). (Or half angel and half beast as Sahlins chose to put it)

(Sahlins 1996: 401). We become overwhelmed by the fear of both our highest and our lowest

possibilities, as both intellectually considering ourselves divine Gods (indeed telling ourselves



we were created in his image) and living within our animal-like earthly bodies. Bodies that we

resent for their simple needs such as sustenance and warmth and excretion and sexuality. These

needs are what has distinguished mankind from Gods self-sufficient perfection (Sahlins 1996;

397).

Metaphorical Bodies

Metaphor is one of the most influential cultural forms of constructing understandings in

its process of linking one domain of experience to another. Ideas about the body are continuously

projected into other realms of culture, as Mary Douglas once famously noted that just as it is

true that everything symbolises the body, so it is equally true that the body symbolises everything

else (Douglas 1996: 122). For Scheper-Lock and Hughes, this is encompassed in their theory of

the social body the idea that cultures use the body as a representational symbol to think with.

The body becomes a site of a constant exchange of meanings between the natural and the

social world (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). The stories we tell ourselves and the ideas we

hold to be true in regards to our bodies have profound effects on our experiences of embodiment.

The relationship between metaphors of the body and experiential embodiment then mirror and

play off one another. The power of the cultural metaphor is especially evident in the

ethnographic content of this thesis, as members of the Quantified Self movement equate their

bodies to functional machines, to sites of scientific experimentation, to battlefields of war, and to

collections of numerical data. These conceptions are constructed and defined in realms outside of

the human body and appropriated to them after the fact.



Scientific Domination of the Natural Body

Since the Enlightenment, one of the dominant metaphors we have used to understand the

body is that of the mechanical machine. Before the Enlightenment and industrialisation, human

bodies were thought about as interconnected parts of the larger organism of nature the earth

represented the body and the body represented the earth (Merchant 1979: 1, 69-81; Giblett 2008:

20). Ideas about the body transitioned from being considered a holistically natural system to a

reductively mechanical one with the rise of rational science. Beginning in the sixteenth and

accelerating up through the seventeenth century, thinkers in the West become excessively

concerned with enforcing order over the natural world. Nature was seen as a disorderly and

chaotic realm to be subdued and controlled (Merchant 1979: 127). This order was enforced

through a new form of institutional power scientific rationalism, defined by the dominance of

empirical observation, materialism, the experimental scientific method, common sense logic,

and the prioritising of human progress above all else. In the mechanical viewpoint of science,

the natural world is broken down into its smallest possible parts elements, particles, atoms

segmented units of passive, inert matter that only move or change when external forces act upon

them (Merchant 1979: 184). This world was there to be observed and classified through the

scientific method, then dismantled and reconstructed into man-made creations. Becker believes

social institutions like science and medicine help us deny our discomfort with our creature-like

qualities by imagining we have secure power, made possible by unconsciously leaning on the

persons and things of [our] society (Becker 1973). This manipulation of nature was said to be



the building of civilisation, the method through which man would achieve progress, improving

the world by suiting it to fit his needs rather than living within its existent forms a perceived

collective social good that would eventually sanction the rise of commercial capitalism

(Merchant 1979: 111, 172).

Mechanical Bodies

Within the framework of science, the natural body was subject to the same dismantling

into distinct parts, redefinition, and attempted alteration at the hands of objective knowledge,

quantified numbers, evidence empirically verified through experimentation, and scientifically

constructed facts. The preference for producing rigorous, logical, robust, hard, scientific

knowledge about the real world was applied to our bodies, a disposition the Quantified Self

movement has truly taken to heart (Martin 1992: 570). The mechanical body is entrenched into

our thinking by its adoption and extensive repetition by the biological sciences and biomedical

institutions, now widespread and explicit in our textbooks and literature. The parallels drawn

between the human body and mechanical machines are numerous and pervasive through the

writings of Western thinkers; from Descartes Discourse on Method to La Mettries Man a

Machine, the cultural metaphor has stuck hard and fast. As with any intellectual idea, the theory

has cycled through periods of popularity and irrelevance. It seems, however, that we are now

witnessing a revival of an increasingly mechanical view of the body in tandem with our

increasing dependence and integration of technology into our cultural lives (Hacking 2007). Just

as our machines have evolved, so too have these metaphors, as we now increasingly describe



ourselves in terms of computer functions. Metaphors used in the language of Quantified Selfers

affirms this conception of the human body as a machine to be tested, tinkered with, fixed,

updated, optimised, repaired, serviced, and re-built. Along with the rest of Western society, they

refer to being turned on, tuned in, wound up, having their buttons pushed, blowing a

fuse, and then needing to recharge (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 23). A few trackers

preferred car analogies, explaining their data-checking to be like keeping an eye on a dashboard,

a way of caring for the locomotive body so that at 200,000 miles [it] runs just as well as the day

you bought it (Smarr 2012; Christensen 2013).

Divided Machines

Understanding our bodies as machines builds into them a number of assumed qualities.

First, that we are made up of divided and distinguishable parts and systems we speak of these

all the time: the various individual organs; the nervous, circulatory, lymphatic, and respiratory

systems; the sleep cycle; the appetite; the senseswhich can all be taken apart and classified in

all their components and possibilities (Federici 2004: 140). The body and its processes are

deconstructed down into individual aspects of functioning, each addressed and optimised

individually rather than being treated as a holistic whole. As the person is believed to be made up

of many separate parts, being able to cohesively streamline them into a perfect working order is

admirable, and will bring social prestige upon their owner (Martin 1992: 582). The division of

the self into categories is ubiquitous among self-trackers, who select specifically defined parts of

themselves to quantify and experiment upon. They pick their fluid intake, or their blood glucose



levels, or their body weight, or the frequency with which they experience headaches. The

possibilities are endless, and yet they are all very specific and often narrowly bounded parts of

themselves individual aspects that are divided from the whole. Inheriting this technique from

the methods of scientific rationalism, they attempt to make improvements to each category in

isolation treating each as its own bounded entity. Much as the technician might read the

feedback data of a factory machine to evaluate its performance, these individuals become

technicians of their own body tweaking and adjusting variables and inputs as deemed

necessary.

Biohacking

Turning the body into a machine is in many ways the ultimate act of man attempting to

exert dominance over nature as an inferior system for his needs. The idea the biological bodies

we are born with could do with some upgrading is the product of very specifically historical

notions of anthropocentric dominance over the natural world. We can again see how these

notions trail back to the origin stories of the bible when Adam was handed dominion over all

things natural on this earth. A more radical modern manifestation of t

tracking humanity: the quantified self movement

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