What’s a Self Anyway? Is it Fashioned, Quantified, Regulated, Nudged?
At this year’s Quantified Self conference, the first breakout with Natasha Schüll addressed foundational themes in QS: What does all this tracking aim to accomplish? What does this nerdy community’s obsessive behavior portend for the wider world? Will we delegate the labor of self-regulation to these data-swooping technologies?
The QS movement began as a HomeBrew-styled meetup in Kevin Kelly’s home. Just as the Apple II closed the HomeBrew chapter of PCs, hardware manufacturers seemed to me to be poised to own this space. This felt even more plausible as consumer device competition killed off early pioneers (e.g. Zeo sleep tracker started in 2010, but closed 3 years later). In all this time, my training as an experimental psychologist has long made the QS community feel a natural posse. I’d agree with Schüll that the public face of the group often poses as a ‘techno-libertarian’ optimization fantasy [read more]