People pretty much sign up to be put in cages.
With all this biofeedback now available on our phones, the act of walking, living and breathing can—at least to the “datasexuals”
who embrace it—be an ongoing project with limitless potential for
improvement. But might such potential also lead to a kind of “Taylorism
within”? Applying scientific management to twentieth century business
created a workforce optimized for maximum efficiency. Likewise,
life-tracking is encouraging us to internalize this dream by optimizing
ourselves. Rather than a tool for liberation, we’re using the tech, in other words, to tune our lives for maximum “productivity.”
Perhaps none of this should seem surprising for a consumer society
that drives on anxiety. If bad breath had to be invented as a disease
mouthwash would help to cure a century ago, now the Quantified Self
movement suggests we must live in permanent beta, to aim not just at
maintaining ourselves but to become “better than well.” And so, Dave
Allen’s Getting Things Done and websites like Lifehacker help to turn our lives into a series of sanctioned tasks and goals, where one must carry a “Surprise Journal” to find areas for self-improvement in one’s life, and sleep comes in the form of “power” naps.
Compete! Compete with your friends, compete with yourself. Tell yourself you're becoming "better than well" if you must. But this is really all about becoming a more perfectly actualized consumer and a more easily manipulated and intimidated subject.
We’re living in an entrepreneurial model of humanity, a vision of human beings as start-ups,
where unfitness or obesity are viewed as “bugs” to be fixed rather than
as products of an economy based on long hours and precarious work.
Daily exercise has always been an individual responsibility, but sharing
our biofeedback via social media encourages people to compete like
businesses, vying for better health scores with the personal data that
makes us special. (Flex boasts that it reflects “your stats, not any
average Joe’s.”) Here we can all be Superman—“Join over 141,000 other
people who want to discover their inner superhero,” urges website Superheroyou—while,
back in the complex, unquantifiable real world, we often struggle to
maintain control over the most basic facts of our finances and job
prospects.
And people are agreeing to participate in this.
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