So Tuesday night’s big reveal of Xbox One – Microsoft’s new incarnation of their console – appears to have been a disaster of spectacular proportions. This is interesting in itself, though not totally unexpected; people often react to new things in less than positive ways. But what’s especially interesting are the things that Microsoft got wrong and the specific elements that people are finding so problematic. On Microsoft’s part, they first amount to a baffling inability to understand the actual living situations of its own market, but they also amount to the continuation of a trend that I’ve written about several times before, namely: the worrying inclination of companies and their designers to remove agency from tech owners.

In other words, owners increasingly = users.

The first – and again, baffling – problem about the reveal was that the new Xbox appears to have been designed for the world of ten or fifteen years ago, a pre-tablet and smartphone world where people have an entirely different relationship with their TVs. The TV is the center of what Xbox One is and does; the reveal seemed to focus just as much on new ways to watch TV shows as it did actual games that one might use it to play. In other words, Microsoft appears to be attempting to sell a game console by marketing it as something other than a game console – which is puzzling. Even more puzzling is who Microsoft appears to think their market is: People with large TVs and large living rooms (that can handle a Kinect, which is now a required component of the console; more on that in a minute) and lives that might conceivably revolve around a TV in the first place rather than a smartphone or an iPad. In a post for Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander takes particular issue with this:

[B]y the end of the console event, I sat disoriented, feeling like I’d seen one of the Big Three take a hard left into a past decade, a fictional privileged nation where everyone owns a giant television they want to talk to, where they entertain themselves with high-end fictional simulations of football season and futuristic, nebulous wars abroad. Where we supposedly want whole-body play. Where the fantasy is that all our living rooms are big enough for that.

This is a catastrophic misconception of how the lives of my generation – Millennials – tend to look and how we tend to use our technology. Maybe our parents had big living rooms and big TVs that were the centerpiece of the house; we carry around small, nimble, intensely portable devices through which we consume a growing percentage of our entertainment media. In essence, Microsoft – a tech company, by no means always bad at what they do – made it look as though they have literally no idea what the digital side of our lives looks like. Alexander again:

My parents and their Boomer friends have those theoretical American homes, the kind with the spacious sofa and the dominant television altar, where they mainly watch on-demand recordings of cable shows…I’ve got friends who love immersive worlds and epic battles, sure. They have thousands of dollars in student debt and tiny, impermanent living spaces; their generation isn’t exactly about to broadly become the next generation of home owners. We play games on consoles and we watch shows on television and we Skype and Tweet from laptops, netbooks, iPads, PCs.

I live in a basement. I’ve lived in a basement for the last four years, because I’m in graduate school and it’s what tends to be most conveniently available in my area. A Kinect is not on the table for me, even if I wanted it (I don’t). The living situation of most of my friends looks similar.

And hey, about that Kinect – apparently it’s always listening to you. Even when it’s “off”. Which isn’t necessarily as creepy as it sounds, but.

The second major – and, I’d argue, most important – thing about which gamers are up in arms is the degree to which a number of features seem to limit the control an Xbox One owner has over their own machine. First and foremost, the device will apparently require regular internet connectivity – not constant, but regular – in order to work. As usual, no one speaking in any official capacity is calling this DRM, because no one likes to officially label anything DRM, but it feels uncomfortably close to the kind of always-on feature that made SimCity such a disaster. A number of people have pointed out the practical issues with this: what about people who live in areas where broadband internet is sparse or nonexistent? What about people like members of the military stationed overseas, for whom gaming is often a valuable form of recreation?

But aside from even the practical issues, this is yet another instance of someone buying something but not really owning it – not being free to set the terms under which it’s used. It doesn’t matter to Microsoft if you want to play Call of Duty (primary selling point: now there’s a dog!) offline in single-player campaign mode. If you have no internet for any significant length of time – say, a day or more (as yet the actual timeframe is unclear) – that’s not happening. No dog for you.

Added to this, it doesn’t appear that the console will allow players to easily make use of used games, given that it won’t run games off of a disc (Microsoft is apparently working on a digital trading service). And then there’s the mandatory Kinect thing. All of these problems amount to a console that you pay for but don’t really control. Which isn’t new – I own a PS3 and I can either “choose” to install firmware updates or to be unable to play any new games – but it’s another step down the road.

But I’m actually pretty happy. Why? Because people are making a stink about this. People still care. Losing control over something they pay for is not an attractive prospect to them. As long as at least some people regard this state of affairs as unacceptable, I think there’s hope.

Don’t talk about it too loudly, though. The Kinect is listening.

Sarah flails their arms for the camera on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry

There’s A LOT more to (self-)tracking than Quantified Self

When people ask me what it is I’m studying for my PhD research, my answer usually begins with, “Have you ever heard of the group Quantified Self?” I ask this because, if the person says yes, it’s a lot easier for me to explain my project (which is looking at different forms of mood tracking, primarily within the context of Quantified Self). But sometimes asking this return question makes my explanation more difficult, too, because a lot of people have heard the word “quantified” cozy up to the word “self” in ways that make them feel angry, uncomfortable, or threatened. They don’t at all like what those four syllables sometimes seem to represent, and with good reason: the idea of a “quantified self” can stir images of big data, data mining, surveillance, loss of privacy, loss of agency, mindless fetishization of technology, even utter dehumanization.

But this is not the Quantified Self that I have come to know.

As I so often remind people, there’s a lot more to self-tracking than just Quantified Self; these days, there’s a lot more to “quantified self” (lowercase) than just Quantified Self (title case), too[i]. One thing that seems to get lost in all this is that, while Quantified Self may be at the forefront of some new methods of self-tracking, it did not initiate the growing popular interest in self-tracking; rather, Quantified Self came to exist because people were already self-tracking, and some of those people were interested in discussing their self-tracking experiences with others. While Quantified Self does undoubtedly help spread interest in self-tracking (just as increasing interest in self-tracking helps drive the growth of Quantified Self), I think the group’s more significant cultural impact has been to make the very concept of self-tracking more visible—and in so doing, to make tracking-in-general more visible. It is this last function, of making more visible a particularly disconcerting thing that usually fades into the background (e.g. being tracked by others), that I think is at the heart of some people’s deep discomfort when I say “Quantified Self” out loud.

Yet in losing track of the distinctions between Quantified Self (title case) and “quantified self,” or between Quantified Self and self-tracking generally, we also lose track of what I increasingly believe is most noteworthy about Quantified Self: its reflexivity. “QSers” don’t just self-track; they also interrogate the experiences, methods, and meanings of their self-tracking practices, and of self-tracking practices generally. Over the last two years I’ve watched reflexive engagement with self-tracking become an increasingly important part of Quantified Self culture, which is something I find very exciting. In fact, I argue that Quantified Self’s most central object of concern has slowly shifted from the tools people use to track, to the data those tools and other self-tracking practices generate, to self-tracking practices as meaningful ends onto themselves, to developing “reflective capacities” not just through self-tracking practices, but in regard to self-tracking practices. Whether or not one sees Quantified Self as a harbinger of Data Doom, the group is also working to ask questions and develop practices that could help to resist the very doom that the words “quantified self” sometimes seem to signify.

September, 2008: the very first QS meetup (Image credit: Kevin Kelly)

Though Gary Wolf (@agaricus) and Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) founded the group in 2007, I first became aware of Quantified Self (that’s capital Q, capital S) sometime in the spring of 2010, when I was studying direct-to-consumer genetic testing, “citizen science,” and the DIY Bio movement as part of my work on what I’ve termed biomedicalization 2.0. For a while thereafter, whenever I heard “quantified” and “self” together, it was usually someone talking or writing about Quantified Self. But in early 2012, I started hearing the term all over the place, and I observed it being applied in an increasingly broad array of contexts that had little to do either with Quantified Self or with what I saw going on within the Quantified Self community. This really hit home in April of 2012, when a venture capitalist named Tim Chang wrote a three-part series on “Quantified Self” for TechCrunch. Although Chang was ostensibly writing about the same group I’d been observing, he’d drawn some markedly different conclusions. As he said in an interview, “This notion of quantified self is not just about health and wellness. It’s about your consumer habits all throughout your day, from what sites you surf, what you buy, to what you like to brag about on your Facebook and Twitter.”

Chang’s quote demonstrates why it’s important to differentiate between “quantified self” (lowercase) and Quantified Self (title case)—because wow, they are different beasts. Granted, Quantified Self has adopted what anthropologists Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman aptly describe as a “big tent policy,” and there were certainly folks who thought Chang’s characterization was spot-on. My own reaction, however, was an incredulous, “Wait, what?” Or, as then-Director of Quantified Self Alexandra Carmichael said, “‘QS is about gamification and shopping’? Where can I vomit….” If I’d had any doubt, Chang’s interview was a clear sign that the term “Quantified Self” had escaped into the lexicon and, as “quantified self,” taken on a life of its own.

@accarmichael: chang says “quantified self is… about your consumer habits all throughout your day”; all i can think is, ‘uh, since when?’

— whitney erin boesel (@phenatypical) April 24, 2012

Yet if the way “quantified self” is used no longer necessarily has much to do with Quantified Self, it is not just because use of the term has expanded; it is also because Quantified Self itself has changed and evolved over four international conferences and almost five years of local meetups (so much so, in fact, that some in the QS community now wonder if the name “Quantified Self” still describes the group accurately). In 2007, for instance, when Kelly asked, “What is the Quantified Self,” his answer stated (in part),

We are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. We welcome tools that help us see and understand bodies and minds so that we can figure out what humans are here for.

When Wolf asked again in 2011 (just before the first Quantified Self conference), “What is The Quantified Self,” his (much longer) answer described Quantified Self as a “users group,” and stated,

These new [tracking] tools were being developed for many different reasons, but all of them had something in common: they added a computational dimension to ordinary existence.  Some of this was coming from “outside,” as marketers and planners tried to find new ways to understand and influence us. But some of it was coming from “inside” as our friends and acquaintances tried to learn new things about themselves. […]

Users groups, when they succeed, are wonderful things; informal but deeply engaged learning communities operating outside the normal channels of academic and commercial authority. Here at the Quantified Self, we want to know what these new tools of self-tracking are good for, and we want to create an environment where this question can be explored on a human level.

Already, even before the first international conference, the focus of Quantified Self was shifting from “collecting self-tracking tools to help ask big questions” to “asking big questions about our self-tracking tools and what we do with them.”

Poster from Quantified Self 2011 (Image credit: Dave Asprey)

Earlier this month, there were a number of us at Quantified Self Europe 2013 who had also attended one or both of the US-based Quantified Self conferences in 2011 and 2012; some of our group had also attended the first Quantified Self Europe conference in the fall of 2011 (which I unfortunately did not). As Wolf had said in his opening welcome speech, Quantified Self Europe was indeed notably different from either of the US-based Quantified Self conferences I’d attended, and discussing the differences I observed with other QS conference veterans was one of the highlights of #QSEU13 for me. What were the differences? Most notably, everyone I spoke with agreed that the European conference feels much less “startup-y” than the US conference does—yet this is not because no start-up people come to it. When Wolf asked how many people in the plenary room were developing an app (or some other commercial product) that “depends on open data,” for instance, I was surprised to see somewhere between 30-40% of the conference raise their hands. (If you want to know what the “startup-y” part of the Quantified Self community looks like, here’s a recent example.)

If people from start-ups were less visible (as such) at Quantified Self Europe 2013, academics seemed to be more so. This may partially have been due to a (possible) higher concentration of us: at Palo Alto’s Quantified Self 2012 last fall (618 attendees total), the breakout session I helped lead for academics, researchers, and people interested in research about Quantified Self had about 28 participants (4.5%), whereas the informal breakfast session I hosted before the second day of Amsterdam’s Quantified Self Europe 2013 this spring (285 attendees total) had 23 people join despite the 8:00am start time (8.1%). It felt different to be an academic at Quantified Self Europe, too: While I’ve always felt comfortable and welcome within the Quantified Self community (so much so that this feeling was Reason #2 for picking my dissertation project, right after, “Oh wow, mood tracking is fascinating”), I’d never felt so appreciated as a social scientist before, at any conference or in any context at all—and I really don’t think that sensation was just me having a two-day moment. Across disciplines, across professions, and across reasons for being at the conference, there was no shortage of people excited to debate hard questions about (for example) what a “self” is and how it might come into being. Cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll led a breakout session called “Reflections on Algorithmic Selfhood,” and the discussion was so good that 90% of the (packed) room stayed more than 15 minutes past the session’s end to keep talking. While there were a number of people I recognized as other academics in that room, there were a number of non-academics, too.

Some of the biggest differences, however, became apparent when I compared Quantified Self Europe 2013 to Mountain View’s Quantified Self 2011, the very first Quantified Self conference. In Mountain View, medical doctors and insurance company representatives were a highly visible contingent; many of them were at the conference to look for apps or other tools that they could bring into their practices and businesses. By the end of Quantified Self Europe 2013, however, I could still count on one hand the number of times I’d heard anyone say the word “compliance.” Some of this was undoubtedly due to the huge structural, political, and economic differences between most European healthcare systems and the US healthcare system, but my observation made me stop and realize that I hadn’t met any insurance company representatives last fall in Palo Alto, either; nor had I seen a significant physician presence at Quantified Self 2012. I saw a doctor give a presentation about how mindfulness had improved his relationships with his patients, talked for a bit with one of the doctors I’d met at Quantified Self 2011, and remember at least one medical researcher in my breakout session, but that was about it.

Sacha Chua’s rendition of Eric Boyd’s report on QS 2011 (Image credit: Sacha Chua)

Obviously these are just my own experiences at these three conferences, and I’m sure other conference attendees’ mileage did indeed vary. At the same time, other multi-conference attendees at Quantified Self Europe 2013 corroborated my observations. As one said, “In 2011, [medical doctors and insurance company representatives] had to be there”; especially with all the press leading up to that first conference, “QS was seen as the next big thing.” He agreed, however, that it now seemed as though many of that group had quietly disappeared, perhaps because they’d realized that a bunch of people “operating outside the normal channels of authority” were unlikely to teach them much about getting patients to follow orders. After all, if Quantified Self had a motto, it would be, “Do what works for you”; the overarching theme of QS Show & Tell presentations is not, “Here’s what you should do,” but rather, “Here’s what worked for me.”[ii] To those of us who pay attention, it is abundantly clear: the ethos of Quantified Self is curiosity, not compliance.

Similarly, some of the main themes that I saw running through discussions at Quantified Self 2011 were issues of how to design n=1 experiments that are more scientific, how to learn (or teach people) to do more statistically rigorous analyses of self-tracking data, and how self-trackers might pool data from their n=1 experiments to do larger research studies—all of which are concerns related to making Quantified Self practices fit more readily into the molds of institutional science and biomedicine. By Quantified Self 2012, however, the focus had shifted: as I wrote at the time, the overarching theme of that conference was mindfulness. Many people still wanted to make objective (“objective”) sense of their self-tracking data, of course. But overall, I saw more discussions about “how I feel my self-tracking practice has affected me” than about “here’s what I’ve proven with my self-tracking data.” Problems of “proving” things to medical providers remained very real for some individual QSers, but at the macro level, Quantified Self had moved on to do “what works for me”; it no longer seemed hungry for institutional science’s approval. This trend held at Quantified Self Europe 2013, but something else was becoming more visible as well: namely, the extent to which Quantified Self has become reflexive about itself as much as about self-tracking. At Quantified Self 2011, Kelly had asked, “Who owns your face if you go out in public?”; at Quantified Self Europe 2013, Wolf asked, “How do you say, ‘Please don’t life-log me?’” On the conference main stage, Quantified Self was now taking up the issue of how doing “what’s right for you” can affect the people around you, too.

Gary Wolf (L) and Kevin Kelly (R) at QS 2012. (Image credit: Marc Smith)

Of course, I don’t yet know how many of the differences I see across my three Quantified Self conference experiences are due to “when”—aka, due to cultural changes taking place within the Quantified Self community as it continues to grow and evolve—versus due to “where” (cultural differences among and between the attendance catchment areas of Silicon Valley and Amsterdam)[iii]. I also don’t yet know the extent to which the international Quantified Self conferences reflect what goes on in the local meetup groups, or the extent to which the international Quantified Self conferences influence what goes on in the local meetup groups, or whether there are some local meetup groups that have no relationship to the conferences at all. In some ways, it may even make sense to treat the conferences as a “local meetup group” in their own right, because the substantially higher cost of attending any given one of them (especially if travel is involved) undoubtedly impacts who is and is not present to participate[iv]. If QSers are, on the whole, a privileged group—and they are—then many Quantified Self conference attendees are among the most privileged of the privileged. As I go forward with my fieldwork and get to know more of the local meetup groups, it will be interesting to see how much the Quantified Self conference “scene” either does or does not resemble which local meetup groups. (Right now I can tell you that the San Francisco meetup group feels pretty similar to the Bay Area conferences, but that probably doesn’t surprise anyone.)

At the same time, my gut feeling right now is that the Quantified Self conferences are shaping the way Quantified Self is developing—as a community and as a cultural phenomenon. The conferences are certainly the most visible Quantified Self events, and there are now more than a few meetup groups that were started by people who returned home from a Quantified Self conference inspired to become local organizers. There’s also the unique way that a Quantified Self conference is put together: rather than build conference programs from submitted papers or abstracts, organizers assemble each “carefully curated unconference” by researching and then reaching out to registered attendees. Organizers click on every Twitter or personal webpage link that attendees provide during registration, in order to get a sense of who is coming and what they care about; they then get in contact with individual attendees to find out more about what those people are doing, and ask attendees who have given memorable Show & Tell talks at local meetup groups if they’d like to reprise those talks. While the smaller sessions aren’t recorded by conference organizers, the sessions in the plenary hall are video recorded and later posted online. In this way, a Quantified Self conference is a lot like a biofeedback session for the Quantified Self community: it reflects aspects of what the group is doing now to help shape what it does in the future.

Hacking a HeartSpark pendant (Image & hack credit: Rainy Cat)

If I’m right about my biofeedback analogy, then I think the increasing emphasis on critical engagement and reflexivity that I see at the Quantified Self conferences is a very positive sign. True to stereotype, many QSers do still love their gadgets—but at its core, Quantified Self is about neither “sell[ing] this technology to ourselves” nor accepting technology uncritically; if Quantified Self could make questioning a Fitbit’s definition of “step” as popular as using a Fitbit, for example, I for one think that would be a great thing. As Wolf pointed out in his welcome speech for Quantified Self Europe 2013, there’s a difference between being Silicon-Valley style “reckless” and being “brave” when it comes to new technologies. And as Quantified Self turns more and more toward the latter, it may help us learn not only how to live with new technologies, but also how to shape their development—and how to resist them.

Whitney Erin Boesel considered titling this post, “Who’s Afraid of Quantified Self?” …but then she didn’t. She’s also @phenatypical on Twitter.

The Cyborg project, as articulated by Haraway, is at its core, a utopic project. It is the melding of mechanical and organic, digital and physical, human, machine, and animal in such a way that categorizations cease to hold meaning, and in turn, cyborg bodies break through repressive boundaries.

And yet here we are, at the pinnacle of a cyborg era, inundated with high tech, engaged simultaneously in digital and physical spaces, maintaining relationships with organic and mechanical beings, constituted with and through language, medicines—and increasingly—machines, and we STILL have to deal with bullshit like this (click below to view): 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let us break down the problems. This is a classic play on the Car Show Girls who act as ornamental adornments for capitalist goods. These women (described problematically as girls) are literal objects. This objectification is laid bare by the replacement of sexy “girls” with sexy bots. “Respect the Tech,” the commercial instructs, implicitly including both the bots and the car. Further, with a terrible attempt to portray feminine strength, the bots physically dominate a male admirer who handles the product inappropriately (again, the product here extends to the female bodies represented by the bots). This #FeministFail portrays female strength as ironic and unexpected, exciting in its performative enactment by sexualized bodies, and activated in response to threats not against themselves, but against the capitalist good through which they are constituted.

This speaks to the social, cultural, and structural embededness of technology and technological representations.  Technology is made and used by humans. Technologies have culture written into them. When culture is sexist, racist, and homophobic, or progressive, sex-positive, and accepting, so too will be the technological default. Perhaps the cyborg project is a utopic one, but our culture is not. Technological objects and their portrayals are rooted in raced, classed, sexed, and gendered environments. They are used for varied ends, disproportionately so by those with greater financial and social resources.  Far from de-categorization, the portrayal of technology here hyper-categorizes. The Car Show Girl has always represented a patriarchal view of the ideal woman—silent, pretty, fun, subordinate — and yet she has always been limited in her perfection by the quarrelsome nature of her human body with its leakiness, sweat, smells, moods, emotions, needs.  The bot brings this ideal woman to full fruition, replacing these objectified female bodies with fully sanitized objects in an ideal female form.

So is the utopic cyborg project for naught? Can we expect only hyper-categorization, solidified forms of racism, sexism, classism, digital dualism etc.? For my money (which to be fair, isn’t much), I say no. These built-in “isms” of technologies may be the default, but they are not the inevitable ends. The purposive architect and/or user can certainly create, construct, or utilize technological means for radically equalizing purposes. To do so, of course, one has to take note of a problematic default, and explicitly guide technologies down an alternative route.  This KIA commercial is an egregious example of how the cyborg project, when left to default standards, can go awry. And yet through my words in this post, facilitated by myriad technologies—a keyboard, a blogging platform, YouTube— I’ve taken this object of popular culture and used it for my own ends. The object now exists, easily spread, shared, commented upon, as not only a sales tool, but a blaring specimen of deeply embedded social inequalities.  I—and we—can co-opt the object, reformulate it.

Put away your fluffy utopic visions, my fellow cyborgs. Instead, bring out your sharp eyes, employee your analytic skills, utilize available tools. The cyborg project is not a naïve journey, nor is it a lost cause.

Jenny Davis is a regular contributor for Cyborgology. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jup83

*Special thanks to Jill Detwiler and Matt Gasner for bringing this KIA ad to my attention

Describing “types” of capitalisms, their components, the central logics they operate by is always a risky game: nothing is ever entirely new, there are always outliers, the different types always overlap, and so on. However, I’d like to speculate very briefly on a specific trend within Silicon Valley capitalism, what strikes me as an anti-capitalism sort of capitalism. I’m speaking of this type of capitalism not as something that is fully realized in reality, but as an “ideal type”, a hypothetical possibility that we can determine if or how much validity it has in illuminating the world–or at least one small chunk of the contemporary economy. Mostly, I’m just musing on a smart, fun piece by Sam Biddle about the rhetoric of Tumblr founder David Karp before Yahoo’s acquisition of the site for one billion dollars.

The rhetoric is familiar for those who follow Silicon Valley and is indicative of a particular type of capitalism. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs often talk about not caring about profit, that they do what they do not to make money, and then subsequently cash in. Here, I am not referring to the notion that a Silicon Valley start-up should grow first and worry about profitability later–that’s a seemingly slower capitalism, but not anti-capitalism-capitalsim–instead,  I am talking about pretending not to care about profitability at all as a useful component of profitability. As Biddle writes,

As time went by, Karp went from saying he wasn’t “motivated” by revenue in that ’08 interview to even stronger anti-business proclamations: Advertisements on Tumblr would “turn his stomach.” He most recently, in grownup startup-speak, claimed profitability is “not a metric that is particularly important to [Tumblr].”In other words, making money is for chumps.

Last year, I identified this trend within one of Silicon Valley Capitalism’s most important mouthpiece’s, TED, saying,

TED smells of corporatism. With the Facebook IPO around the corner, we are all well aware of the big venture-capital sums floating around Silicon Valley (the new Wall Street?). What’s infuriating is how Silicon Valley capitalism consistently attempts to sell itself as outside or even above corporatism. In announcing Facebook’s IPO, Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has consistently violated user privacy in the name of profit, stated that “we don’t build services to make money.” He actually said that.

All of this is admittedly speculative, but there certainly seems to be within Silicon Valley a sort-of capitalism against itself, a capitalism that not only appropriates anti-capitalism, not only uses it, but is founded on it. The notion of working to not make money is radically anti-capitalist in the strictest sense, even if we know that much of what Karp, Zuckerberg, and the rest do smells a lot like normal capitalism. Indeed, Biddle’s most provokotive statement, for me, was,

Now Yahoo will own Tumblr, and Karp will be an immensely rich 20-something, because he refused to demonstrate that his company is worth anything

This may be an example of a larger trend towards a capitalism that doesn’t exist in spite of, doesn’t merely appropriate, but exists and even thrives precisely because of its anti-capitalist base. This isn’t exactly like how, say, punk so quickly got sold back to us by capitalists, or how capitalists have slapped Che’s face on t-shirts sold at Urban Outfitters, but instead a type of capitalism that is predicated, knowingly or unknowingly, on the idea of anti-capitalism. It’s not a capitalist logic that can co-opt anti-capitalism, but capitalism where anti-capitalism is an inherent part of its logic. Said differently, Silicon Valley’s habit of acting outside or above capitalism as an essential part of their business model is the essence of anti-capitalism-capitalism.

So: is this really a feature of a certain type of capitalism? Does Silicon Valley really operate by this logic very often? Are there other zones within the economy that operate by a similar logic? And what theories or theorists might be most useful in articulating this trend? I’m immediately reminded of Fred Turner’s brilliant work on Silicon Valley capitalism, particularly his Burning Man at Google talk, here:

Last, it seems logical to ask if this is more or less insidious than capitalism in general? Some are still surprised to find out, say, Google is a for-profit company. Presumably, some people really believe Silicon Valley entrepreneurs when they say they don’t care about making money. This appears to be a capitalist attempt to hide capitalism, to exploit its wealth-generating capabilities without having to assume its responsibilities and drawbacks. The post-profit Silicon Valley has, for some, been quite profitable.

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

“no sense arguing with the digital humanities. They don’t really exist. This is the age of the managerial humanities”

“The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium”

“Microphones + Crooning + Nazis + Radio + Bing Crosby + $50,000 = Silicon Valley”

“MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much”

“Jane Austen’s internet success isn’t so surprising”

“a handful of people wearing Google Glass, now standing next to me at their own urinals”

“during this period, it was more common for digital animation to be emulated using hand-drawn techniques”

“Cars didn’t end up awarding us freedom, nor did they serve to better connect us to our friends and communities“

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

via http://pauloctavious.com/boa/

Don Emmert /AFP/Getty Images

This entire process is ourselves talking to ourselves. It’s an exercise in massive, masturbatory self-analysis. And while we engage in this self-centered groping, they watch, silent and impassive. To the extent that they give us answers at all, it’s placation. They become the blankness to which we attach anything. They are not self-defining. They allow us that control, a consensual kind of tyranny, a sado-masochistic power exchange. They understand that much. They know what we need to believe. They know what we need.

June is the month of drones, as Adam Rothstein and Olivia Rosane of The State present Murmuration, a festival of drone culture. I’m excited about this – no big surprise there – and given that I’ve been writing for it a bit, I’ve been returning to some of the other things that have been written before now on the subject of drones, and what drones are, and what we are to drones and vice versa, and what difference it all makes anyway.

Rothstein and Rosane have both called for more drone fiction, for fiction as a means by which to approach the complex and slippery semi-fictional liminality of drones. I’ve echoed that call. Fiction doesn’t mean untrue; sometimes fiction is the only tool we have with which to approach any kind of truth at all, for a given value of true. And we’re at a point in our cultural trajectory where drone fiction is necessary.

So I’ve been writing drone fiction. This exercise has taken the form of three pieces, one of which has been shelved and the other two of which are in front of various people now. The two pieces I’ve left on the table have ended up being sibling pieces, despite the fact that I didn’t intend to write more than one piece at all. And it’s been interesting watching what elements have emerged as the focus. In retrospect none of it surprises me, though I probably wouldn’t have predicted it prior to writing. Creative writing is like that; it can be a kind of Rorschach test, a place where the subconscious emerges in front of you. So these are the things I care about. This is what I really want, this is what scares me.

When I wrote my expanded call for drone fiction, I listed three possible elements on which to focus: the casualties, the operators, and the drones themselves. I thought the first two would be the most obvious and probably the most approachable, but the third possibility interested me the most, partly because it seemed to me to be the most difficult. What’s involved in making a drone a character? Can it be done without anthropomorphization? Should it be done that way? What happens when it’s not?

Fighting with a drone is like fucking a drone in reverse. It’s all me. The drone just dodges, occasionally catches projectiles at an angle that bounces them back at me, and this might amount to throwing. All drones carry two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, neatly resized as needed, because all drones are collections of every assumption we’ve ever made about them, but a drone has never fired a missile at anyone they were fucking.

What’s emerged over and over – what I didn’t expect to emerge, and what I’ll be interested to see if it appears in the work of others – is emotion. Emotion as a central component of humanity, of human connection, and of how connection works when emotion may not be present, or may be unrecognizable. What’s emotion to machines? We’ve always held them to that standard, made emotion the Turing Test against which they’re measured, and it’s a test we always load in our favor. So what happens when the power dynamic shifts, and a machine no longer tries to be a Good Robot? What happens when it’s just us, neurotic and twitchy and in a panicked kind of denial, insisting that everything not only be under our control but already is?

In what I’ve written – which I hope will shortly be available to read in full in a couple of different venues – drones are ever-present, both violent and watchful, silent observers to which humans are constantly reaching out, desperate to connect. We imbue them with emotions that they may or may not have or regard as important; we have sexual intercourse with them in the hopes of forging a deeper kind of relationship. A consistent theme here is need – needing what we’ve made, needing it to need us. In as much as human operators are even recognized to exist, they fade into the background or vanish entirely. There’s just us and the drones.

Need is by definition a loss of power. And in as much as a drone is a cultural node, it’s a node of political and social power, equally capable of surveillance and lethality, technically exact but inscrutable. A shifting, endlessly accommodating idea isn’t especially trustworthy. But maybe we want to trust. Above all, we want everything to be recognizable. We want to be able to understand.

What I think may be most terrifying about drones – at least to me – is the prospect that they might ultimately be beyond understanding. But we’ll see what Murmuration can do.

This post has been purely self-focused; after the festival has concluded I’ll post a kind of retrospective on what other themes have emerged and what conclusions we appear to have come to, if any.

(And if you have something you’d like to send in for possible inclusion in Murmuration, you can do so here.)

Sarah engages in desperate emotional connection on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry

As best I can tell, the first person to notice that Starfleet Headquarters looks like Dr. Strangelove was SSgt Burton on an RPF message board.

Here, there be spoilers.

For Christmas in 2004 I received every episode of the original series on VHS. Each tape contained two episodes separated by the kind of cheesy music you might expect from a local news daytime talk show in 1992. I watched all 30 or so tapes, multiple times, sometimes with my high school English teacher during lunch after he had finished sneaking a cigarette in his beat up Civic. I have fond memories of eating turkey sandwiches and laughing at William Shatner’s fighting style. But what was more important (to us anyway) than the unchoreographed fight sequences were the literary parables. I see no exaggeration or hyperbole when people describe Star Trek as a philosophy or a religion, but I see it much more as a political orientation. The crew might go where no one has gone before, but the show rarely strayed from the very basics of the human condition. Star Trek holds a mirror to the society that produced it, and J.J. Abrams’ trek is most certainly a product of the Endless War on Terror.

First, let’s get something straight. Khan Noonien Singh is a genetically engineered human reigned over almost half of planet Earth from 1992 to about 1996 before being overthrown by rebels. Khan, along with a number of loyal superhumans, leave Earth in a sleeper ship named the SS Botany Bay and float in space for over a hundred years before Kirk finds the ship and reawakens them. He was the product of many different ethnic groups but identified as a Sikh. In non-canon novels written by Greg Cox, Khan’s reign was run through secret shadow governments that ran throughout Asia and Eastern Europe in the 90s.

The Khan that we see in 2013 looks more like a conniving bond villain than “the best of the tyrants.” Khan is a terrorist, not a deposed dictator. He is also white, which can be read as either Abrams’ total disregard for the multicultural message of Star Trek, or as hesitancy to cast a person of color as a terrorist in a movie that echoes American interventionism a little too well. Khan must be a terrorist and he must be white to the point of transparency because to do otherwise in one of the longest-running parables of western civilization would be too problematically formulaic for Abrams or the American movie-going public to accept.

That’s because tyrants don’t scare us anymore. They’re always the mustachioed men with weird obsessions and dubious military support. We’ve toppled a dozen of them since the 2009 Abrams movie and what scares us now are rogue agents with confusing loyalties. People that we know are armed and dangerous because we made them that way. Khan is blowing up Starfleet because they used him and manipulated him to built a war machine capable of defending against people like Khan. Self-justifying, perpetual war machines are what we have come to expect from governments. Even if you are defending the war, you have to justify this “new kind of war” by describing and identifying an enemy that demands a war of ambiguous lines and endless horizons. Talk about policing, intelligence, boots on the ground, or peace-keeping missions but don’t question the need for constant intervention. J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek might not be the Star Trek you want, but it is definitely the Star Trek America deserves.

To that point, Abrams reduces Kirk to a horny frat boy and Uhura to a doting girlfriend. Its hard to tell if this is something we can blame on Abrams’ love of Star Wars or the fact that America’s gender politics have gone into such a horrendous retrograde that we can’t expect much else from either character. Both have their moments, (and they’re amazing when they happen) but ultimately we have to accept that the Abrams alternate universe is not nearly as aspirational as the Roddenberry universe and perhaps that’s just what we need right now.

I want to back up for a moment and delineate the path that brought us here. The original series always had a Janus face for a political message: mutually assured destruction is no way to win peace, but you will always have to be ready to defend yourself against avowed enemies just on the other side of The Neutral Zone. Kirk and his crew rarely live their politics: when faced with warring civilizations the crew invariably destroys the very tools that make war clean, easy, and desirable. A clear message to super powers that are more than happy to fund proxy wars but never fight on their own soil. It is a hypocritical edict handed down from a unified humanity that will let a proud Russian steer the ship but allow a deep hatred for Klingons (who sport fu manchus and fight for the glory of the empire) run rampant in their ranks. It’s no surprise that as the Cold War fades into detente, the Federation signs a peace treaty with a Klingon Empire crippled by the self-inflicted wounds of over-production and infighting.

The Next Generation is equally fraught with paradoxes borne out of the same unwillingness to live one’s stated politics. At the height of Reagan America, a French archeologist presides over a UN In Space that has welcomed a Klingon (naturalized into the Federation by human parents) to the bridge but despises the children that he simultaneously hates and desires for himself. It is a series that, appropriately enough, opens with nothing less than a trial of all humanity heard by an omnipotent trickster god. It is a Star Trek that fully realizes Fukiyama’s decree that we are living at the end of history and all that is left to do is reconcile past differences and perfect an already spectacularly efficient system of exchanging goods and services.

The cosmopolitan multiculturalism of Deep Space Nine and the late second wave feminism of Voyager are one 14-season-long transgression of the never-ending-present that The Next Generation sets up. Q, the omnipresent trickster god that saw it fit to put all of humanity on trial is now physically assaulted by Benjamin Sisko and romantically rejected by Kathryn Janeway. Janeway goes one step further and, in a deeply underappreciated series, stands in literal judgment of the Q continuum itself for its desire to keep one of its own from committing suicide. In a trial of her own, reminiscent of the time Data defends his sentience and Spock is tried for treason, Janeway actually rules in favor of individual autonomy over the Foucauldian power of the state to regulate life and death:

But then there are the rights of the individual in this matter. I find it impossible to support immortality forced on an individual by the state. The unforeseen disruption that may occur in the continuum is not enough, in my opinion to justify any additional suffering by this individual.

Deep Space Nine shows us the morally dubious and difficult decisions that prop up great societies. It reveals the Federation as a dubious unity: a patchwork of good-enough decisions and lukewarm compromises that have more to do with who is in the room than universal morality. It requires unilateral decisions by imperfect people. It means ignoring the plights of others to prevent all-out war. DS9 complicate the Star Trek universe to the point of breaking, but it does show us the tattered edges and lose ends of what we thought was an expertly woven tapestry.

Star Trek as we had known it dies with Data –someone who’s sole purpose in life was to understand everything Star Trek was about—in the final Star Trek movie with the Next Generation Crew. This universe must die because we are no longer living in a world after history. America’s War on Terror is incompatible with the Gene Roddenberry vision of a socialist utopia that provides for every want and desire. Self-actualization is no longer a realistic goal once a week. The franchise struggles briefly through four seasons of Enterprise (which debuted just 15 days after 9/11) to translate the utopia of the 23^rd and 24^th centuries into a story of plucky, modest, and messy 22^nd century progress. It fails because the opening credits have none of the grandeur and stateliness of the other series, nor does it evoke anything new that we can believe in. We do not even believe we’re on our way to utopia.

J.J. Abrams, a man that has openly stated that he does not want to write or produce a philosophical Star Trek, produced the perfect meditation on the 21^st century political condition. The generals of the Cold War have been massacred by a terrorist of their own creation, and must be saved by the young mind that has known nothing but this alternate universe of endless war. The Klingons are less like the Soviet Union and more like Pakistan: Admirals are content with sitting on the border and shooting missiles at individual targets based on bad intelligence.

Kirk always served as the balance between Spock’s logic and Bones’ passion. He took the best of each and applied them to the problem at hand. Kirk mediated this Enlightenment-era dualism of emotion and reason through the values of the era. Kirk’s job as captain was to apply reason and passion for the sake of the good and just. Whereas, in Roddenberry’s The Great Society, you defeated your enemy by sacrificing logic temporarily by letting it live inside passion (something cyberneticists and cognitive scientists would appreciate) the War on Terror asks that we sacrifice that part of ourselves that balances passion and logic through values (patriarchy and all) and let both weep at its loss. We only resurrect ourselves by sticking to a moral code that rejects revenge killings and seeks justice: letting your enemy stand trial restores you. It means letting your passion infuse you with the blood of the enemy.

The Star Trek universe is a foil for our own. When we watch Star Trek we see the hopes, dreams, fears, and optimism of a generation reflected back at us, draped in over-wrought Shakespearean acting and goofy uniforms. Star Trek, like most good science fiction, lets us step out of ourselves and talk about humanity, the state, and individual freedoms without the trappings of real world political parties and geopolitics. I can have a deep conversation about the state’s role in governing bodies by talking about Voyager, not Foucault. That’s the power of good story telling.

I know that Slate’s Matt Yglesias has recently written about the Star Trek franchise and he hits a few good marks, but he generally misses the mark entirely. (Proton torpedoes? What are you, new? ) The fact that he calls the DS9 metafiction episode “Far Beyond the Stars” as “bizarre” says everything you need to know about Yglesias’ shallow, elitist, milquetoast read of the Star Trek universe. Ronald D. Moore the writer of Battlestar Galactica and several episodes of Deep Space Nine (not this one) said it was “one of the best episodes in the entire franchise.” I am not surprised that Yglesias doesn’t see any “particular connection to Trek’s distinctive themes.” Its easy to see the Cold War allegory when it is long gone, but it takes an iota of thoughtful consideration to see your own world reflected back at you.

David is on Twitter: @da_banks

Correction: The post originally misspelled Khan as “Kahn” because,  well, irony I suppose.

Photo credit: Rajiv Mehta

I’ve spent the last span of days trying to figure out what I want to say (first) about Quantified Self Europe 2013 (#qseu13), which took place in Amsterdam on 11 and 12 May. The conference spanned a truly amazing pair of days, both of which I spent furiously live-tweeting and paper-scribbling field notes as my jet-lagged brain threatened simultaneously to implode and to explode (in the best of all possible ways) on both an intellectual and a personal level. The Twitter-length post is easy: “Wow, #qseu13 was so awesome!” A few chapter-length essays would be easy as well, given enough time. A blog post, though…blog-length is hard.

For the sake of continuity, I’ll start this first post by picking up where I left off last week. On the first day of this year’s Quantified Self Europe, I hosted a breakout session [pdf] called, “The Missing Trackers,” in which I posed questions about who might be missing from the Quantified Self community, what we might learn about the Quantified Self community by looking at who’s missing from it, and whether those absences might be a problem. Certainly there is a range of fairly obvious (and even banal) reasons that most people are not part of Quantified Self: perhaps they are not doing any self-tracking, or are not even interested in self-tracking; perhaps they do not think about their self-tracking as “self-tracking” per se; perhaps they have no desire to discuss their self-tracking practices with other people, or with people they don’t already know; perhaps they have simply never heard of this thing called “Quantified Self.” But do any of these absences say anything about Quantified Self itself?

My own thinking, however, was running along more Bourdieusian lines: Who might be eager to discuss their self-tracking experiences with other self-trackers, yet not feel welcome within the social milieu of Quantified Self? My goal was to lead the group toward a discussion of how some people might not feel comfortable in the Quantified Self community not because of any overt discrimination on the part of Quantified Self, but because their race, gender, social class, level of (formal) education, amount of income, comfort with new technologies, or general lifestyle marked them as different from the majority of other Quantified Self community members. At the macro level, Quantified Self likes to think of itself as being welcoming to newcomers, so I hoped to ask my session what current community members might do to be more welcoming of interested self-trackers who might have different levels of cultural capital [pdf].

This is not exactly the discussion that happened, however. While some session participants readily linked my questions to long-standing problems of race- and gender inclusivity within tech culture generally, others were unwilling (or unable) to push past examining the question of “Who’s not a part of Quantified Self” at the individual level. This group in particular remained focused on the non-trackers, and the reasons they offered for the non-trackers’ absences were largely matters of individual preference or personality (things which are more “social” than “individual” to a sociologist, but I digress). In the end, shifting our focus back toward the Quantified Self community, and the level of our analysis back to social groups, was a bigger task than I could pull off in an hour.

Photo credit: Iskander Smit

At the same time, I do think the discussion was worthwhile even though it wasn’t the discussion I’d intended. To my way of seeing it, a breakout session is a collaborative effort between the session leader and the session participants; while I saw it as my responsibility to help nurture good conversation by reigning in tangential comments and making sure there was space for everyone so inclined to speak (skills I’ll admit I’m still developing), I think clinging too rigidly to my intended outline would have been a mistake. Forcing my vision of the session onto the group also might have foreclosed one of the more interesting (to me) lines of inquiry that came up, which was basically an inversion of my original question: Who is in the Quantified Self community?

To me, the answer to this question had been self-evident: If you’re going to one of the Quantified Self Meetup groups, or coming to Quantified Self conferences, or engaged with the Quantified Self Forum as either a reader or as someone who posts, then you’re a member of (what I think of as) the Quantified Self community. Not everyone in my session was so sure, however. One man asked earnestly, “Am I a member of the community?” To me, the answer was obviously “yes”; he was taking part in my session at Quantified Self Europe, after all. But he wasn’t as certain: Quantified Self Europe was his first participation in Quantified Self and, though he was interested in self-tracking, he’d only decided to come to the conference when he saw “committed to being inclusive” on the registration page. Even though he fit the profile of an archetypal Quantified Self member in many ways, he saw himself as an outsider, and it had taken something he could read as an explicit welcome to make him feel comfortable attending. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but this possibility—that people whom I see as being clearly within “the Quantified Self community” might not see themselves as such—had actually never occurred to me; I was far more familiar with uncertain membership in the opposite direction, namely with folks who want to draw the membership lines of “Quantified Self” around any and all people doing any kind of self-tracking anywhere, whether those people have any knowledge of Quantified Self or not. (Interestingly, I see this over-attribution of membership more often from people who have nothing to do with Quantified Self than from people who have any connection to or involvement with the group.)

The question of how to define or demarcate the Quantified Self community ended up resurfacing in other sessions I attended, and in some of the conversations I had with other conference attendees as well. Who is and isn’t a part of Quantified Self, and what distinguishes those who are a part of the community from those who aren’t? Of equal importance, how have the answers to that question changed since Quantified Self began in 2007, or even since the first Quantified Self conference in San Jose in the spring of 2011? (Interestingly, one question I didn’t see taken up was that of who gets to answer the previous two questions.) One person in my session felt that “Quantified Self” is about quantitative self-tracking only, and was frustrated both by talk of narratives and sense-making and by Meetup group “Show & Tell” presentations that include anything other than data analysis; he felt that Quantified Self was losing its focus, and going too far afield. Conversely, another person in my session suggested that the term “Show & Tell” for Meetup group presentations, and perhaps even the name “Quantified Self” itself, were no longer accurate; while these terms might have been apt descriptors when the first Meetup group started in Kevin Kelly’s living room, this session attendee argued that Quantified Self has moved beyond its comparatively narrow initial focus (which he felt was a good thing).

Photo credit: Rain Rabbit

Other conversations focused on what might be considered the “grey areas” of membership within the Quantified Self community. People who market self-tracking tools they initially designed for themselves were clearly in, but what about the non-trackers who attend Quantified Self events in order to market their companies’ apps and devices to a potentially lucrative target audience? What about the doctors and insurance company representatives who attend in the hope of discovering something they can use to increase “compliance” among their patients? What about the increasing number of academics who are taking up Quantified Self as a research topic? On the one hand, Quantified Self has generally been open (even welcoming) to academics[i]; the general attitude I observed during my breakout session for academics and researchers at Quantified Self 2012 in Palo Alto last fall seemed to be, “Hey, if you want to study us, that’s cool, so long as you share your findings; if we think they’re useful, we’ll integrate them into our practices.” On the other hand, some of the attendees I spoke to at Quantified Self Europe last weekend had observed some of the academics present using the word “they” rather than “we” in reference to the Quantified Self community; another commented to me upon leaving a social-scientist led breakout session that he felt he’d been “used for someone’s research project.” Even an academic researcher who is also a self-tracker mentioned his recent observation that he code switches between “we” and “they” when talking about Quantified Self, depending on his audience.

I’ll explore my observations about the shifting culture of Quantified Self overall (and some of my thoughts about possible contributing factors) in a future post, as there’s a lot to say there. For now, I think the best answer to the question of what distinguishes the Quantified Self community from the larger group of “people who do some sort of self-tracking” came from conference attendee and presenter Robin Barooah (@rbarooah), who suggested (both in a breakout session we both attended and in conversation following) that QSers are people who are interested not only in doing self-tracking, but also in thinking about the process and practice of “tracking” itself. For example, many people might purchase a Fitbit because they are interested in tracking their physical activity; other people are interested in selling you a Fitbit. Yet only some of each camp will be interested in thinking about new and different ways to use a Fitbit, or what else a Fitbit’s counted steps might tell them about their lives, or how using a Fitbit changes their experiences of being in the world, or what it means to use a Fitbit in the first place. For some unknown portion of this latter subset group, Quantified Self has become a community and an intellectual home.

*          *          *          *          *

Photo credit: Rain Rabbit

This theme of who is and isn’t part of Quantified Self also raised interesting questions for me personally. If someone had asked, I would have said that, yes, I do identify as a member of the Quantified Self community, though more because I’m present at the conferences (and some of the Meetups) and am taking part in some of the broader conversations about what it all means than because I’m doing any self-tracking myself. At the same time, “Are you tracking anything?” is a very common question at a Quantified Self event, and it’s one that has always made me feel a bit awkward. Until this weekend, I thought my awkwardness came from the fact that, no, I’m not actually tracking anything, even though “make a list of the most important mood tracking apps and use each one for at least a couple of months” has been on my to-do list for some time; I thought I felt uncomfortable because the question exposed me for being a slacker of a researcher. If this is going to be my focus area, I really ought to be self-tracking!

It hit me over the weekend, however, that I’m absolutely doing self-tracking. I may not be tracking in a highly formalized or quantitative sort of way, but I do indeed self-track, and some of my self-tracking projects have been going on for 10 or even 20 years (or longer, if you count what I could pull out of an almost-lifetime of various self-documentation practices). I have no good explanation (for instance) for why I’ve so often used the example that, “Any woman who can answer ‘First date of last menstrual period?’ is doing some kind of formal- or informal self-tracking,” without realizing that this example applies to me, too. Perhaps it’s that, since I’m not trying to conceive, the basic task of keeping tabs on my own body strikes me as unremarkably normal and not worth mentioning, whereas most of the (self-identified) self-trackers I talk to at Quantified Self events seem to have projects or specific questions or formalized procedures for recording their data. Whatever my latent conceptualization of “a self-tracking project” might be, my own practice of noting menstrual cycle patterns didn’t seem to qualify.

Yet I have other personal examples of self-tracking, too, one of which falls very clearly under the common Quantified Self theme of, “I have a chronic health problem and, in an effort to get some kind of a grip on the situation, I’m recording something about what my body does over time.” Maybe it never occurred to me that this is self-tracking because most self-tracking narratives within Quantified Self are bound up with narratives of finding or expressing agency, and I mainly note things that I experience as happening to me rather than things I experience choosing or doing. Maybe it’s because I only make notes when these things happen, rather than at regular time intervals like hours, days, or weeks; maybe it’s because my notation is mostly in words, rather than numerical values. Maybe it’s that, until comparatively recently, all this notation had neither led to any discovery nor reflected any positive change. Nonetheless, there it was staring back at me: more than a decade of my own self-tracking (albeit with a few years’ gap in the middle). Why had it never occurred to me to think of myself as a self-tracker, even after spending two years in the Quantified Self milieu?

Photo credit: Rajiv Mehta

I realized, finally, that the reason “Are you tracking anything?” has made me feel awkward isn’t only because I think my answer is “no”; it’s also because, on some level, I was already aware that my answer is “yes.” As an ordinary person alone at home (or in my relationships with a few close others), I am self-tracking; as an academic and a researcher, I am not self-tracking (and I feel like that’s negligent of me). My public self may not (yet) be self-tracking, but my private self is—which means that “Are you tracking anything?” therefore represents some pretty major context collapse, all wrapped up in a commonplace and seemingly innocuous question. “Are you tracking anything?” makes me glitch less so because I don’t know whether I’m self-tracking or whether my self-tracking projects “qualify” as such, and more so because I’m not certain how much of my personal/private self I want to allow into my professional/public identity performance.

Honestly, even blatantly implying Yes, I have a menstrual cycle in a professional/public context (as I just did, above) is past my comfort level, despite the fact that this is something most people would assume about me given my gender presentation and apparent age. Though I readily claim my identity “as a woman” in professional/public spaces, and though being a woman certainly has a lot to do with embodiment (as does any gendered identity), the embodied aspects of my own identity and selfhood are things I’ve preferred to acknowledge or discuss only in more personal/private contexts. To talk about any of my existing self-tracking projects at a Quantified Self event, then, is to bring my embodiment more to the forefront of my professional/public identity—and not just my embodiment, but aspects of it that relate to my body’s biological sex (menstrual cycle) or to its vulnerabilities (chronic health problem) at that. As someone whose professional/public identity is based so heavily on what I can do with my brain, calling more attention in a professional/public context to the fact that I even have a physical body[ii] is bad enough; the idea of pointing out to people (whom I want to take me seriously!) that sometimes my body breaks, and also that it has girl parts, is really pretty scary. While I’m sure there are women who are as comfortable (or more comfortable) with calling more attention to their physical bodies in professional/public contexts as they are in personal/private contexts, right now I don’t happen to be one of them. For me, launching into a discussion of my existing self-tracking projects would basically be like coming to a conference in my underwear.

Photo credit: Rain Rabbit

None of this should have been news to me. Last fall, for instance, I was having a conversation about gender ratios within the Quantified Self community, and I suggested that part of the reason there were fewer women than men doing Show & Tell presentations (as well as fewer women involved overall) could be that, for many marginalized groups, “visibility is a trap.” While plenty of women have given great Show & Tell talks (both at various local Meetups and at conferences), the fact that more men than women have chosen to do Show & Tell presentations is not insignificant. More recently, I even made the point that increased visibility has a greater potential negative impact for women—using myself as an example—while on a panel Saturday evening. Still, it wasn’t until I was scribbling down notes following Dorien Zandbergen (@dorienz) and Zane Kripe’s (@zanekripe) Sunday morning breakout session on “Encountering the Quantified Other” that I really put it all together with respect to myself.

As I wrote on a post-it note during an exercise in that session, “Maybe someday, when I’m brave enough, I’ll do a Show and Tell talk about what I’ve figured out.” As I’ll add now, maybe someday, when our society is more just, it will be less risky for me to do so.

Whitney Erin Boesel is usually pretty active on Twitter, though she is far more so when livetweeting a conference. You can catch the rest of her adventures over the 2013 conference season (or have occasions to use hashtag muting) by following @phenatypical.

All images from the Quantified Self Europe 2013 photo pool on Flickr. 

“paying in Bitcoin could be more convenient than converting to local currency while traveling abroad”

“Paul Miller was never more aware of the internet than when he made himself live without it”

“Airbnb indulges the fantasy that we might temporarily inhabit another life”

“the MOOC threatens the liminal space currently held by colleges and universities within the life course”

“after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information”

“Apparently no one has ever sent Nicholas Carr or Sherry Turkle a tastefully brief Snapchat”

“no one remembers what YOLO meant“

“The more we share in social media, the more clearly we define the negative space where the ineffable self resides”

“It was a dazzling taste of something I’d previously seen only in science-fiction movies”

“Finley creates a limited edition of paintings inspired by “sexts” that she receives”

“To deny the indulgence of verification is a small gesture which holds religious meaning to me”

“it activates the sensory linkages that allow us to experience touch and movement through our visual sense”

“After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away”

“what’s going on with gender, the gendering of various self-tracking practices, and Quantified Self?”

“In-person Bitcoin purchases rely heavily on QR codes. I’ve never seen so many people actually using QR codes”

“You don’t get a real sense of personal, individual self until the end of the 19th century”

“If a Tumblr post has no notes, is it art? Does it exist? For young artists using social media, the answer is no”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

Let’s play a guessing game: How far do you have to read before you can guess what I’m describing?

To begin, it’s both an organization and a group of people. It’s quite large; over a million people participate. They don’t all participate together, though; rather, they meet up regularly in much smaller groups, in cities all over the world. Participants are almost all doing some kind of self-tracking, which usually includes things about their bodies, their activities, what they eat, and sometimes how they feel. When the smaller groups get together, meetings include both presentations and time for participants to get advice from each other about their self-tracking projects.

If you’re a regular reader of Cyborgology (or someone I’ve talked to about my dissertation project), you might think I’m talking about Quantified Self—and that would not be an unreasonable guess. But in this case, the group I’ve described isn’t Quantified Self; it’s Weight Watchers International. Started in 1963, Weight Watchers now boasts 1.3 million members who get together in 45,000 cities spread across more than 30 countries. At minimum, all Weight Watchers participants are tracking their weight; most also track their physical activity and what they eat using a points system (though Weight Watchers does offer a “no food tracking” plan), and many members track other variables such as body measurements or how full they feel after different meals.

It would seem that Weight Watchers could make a good case for being “the original self-tracking meetup group,” and yet I’ve neither seen nor heard of anyone presenting their Weight Watchers data at a Quantified Self show-and-tell (if you have, please let me know). The closest I can come is a flier I picked up at the 2012 Quantified Self Conference in Palo Alto, CA last fall (#QS12), which was promoting a doctor’s “office hours session” (informal small group presentation/discussion) on what he calls “Manly Dieting.” I could spent a whole post going on about the phrase “manly dieting,” but for now I’ll just say this: The fact that “manly dieting” needs to be specified-as-such indicates that “dieting,” generally, is more commonly associated with women, and I’m starting to think there might be a connection between the gendering of “dieting” as “female” and the fact that I haven’t personally seen a lot of straight-up “dieting for weight loss” presentations within Quantified Self.

Another topic I’ve neither seen nor heard of at a Quantified Self show-and-tell (and again, please let me know if you have!) is fertility tracking. This was first brought to my attention by a woman I met at #QS12, who was tracking her ovulation and menstruation as a fertility patient trying to conceive—but who was attending #QS12 for professional purposes as an observer, not as someone engaged in self-tracking. A conversation with danah boyd (@zephoria) drove the point home further still: as she writes here, both “dieting” and “fertility tracking” are very much gendered “feminine,” which contributed to why she resisted those practices even as she “got obsessive” about tracking both what she was eating and some of her hormone cycling. boyd thinks the feminine gendering of “dieting” and “fertility tracking” plays a role not only in her own initial resistance to such practices, but also in their seeming absence from Quantified Self—and I’m strongly inclined to agree.

So…what’s going on with gender, the gendering of various self-tracking practices, and Quantified Self? It’s not that there are no women in Quantified Self. Although there’s no concrete data on Quantified Self membership overall, Ernesto Ramirez (@eramirez) helpfully pointed me toward a demographic survey of the New York (city) QS Meetup group, which found itself to be 67% men and 33% women. That’s not an even gender balance, but it does suggest that women are a strong minority. Yet, we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that only women might be interested in practices gendered as “feminine,” nor should we assume that women would automatically be interested in practices gendered as “feminine”; as boyd aptly demonstrates, sometimes women strongly resist feminized practices!

Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be leading a breakout session at Quantified Self Europe 2013 (#QSEU13) called “The Missing Trackers.” As I often tell people when I’m explaining my dissertation research, Quantified Self may be at the forefront of a new wave of self-tracking; yet, as far as self-tracking generally goes, Quantified Self is just the tip of the iceberg. Doctors (for instance) have been asking patients to self-track variables like blood pressure, blood sugar, and even mood since well before Quantified Self started in 2007; while one of the things I find most interesting about Quantified Self is the number of people who are doing what I call self-directed self-tracking (aka, self-tracking they’re doing because of their own interests, not because someone else asked them to do so), plenty of those practices predate Quantified Self as well. (Example: when they redid the walls in their kitchen, my parents saved a strip of horrible orange-yellow-green wallpaper from next to the doorway, where my younger brother and I had eagerly recorded our increasing heights as children.) And of course, let’s not forget that not all self-tracking is quantitative, even within Quantified Self.

Given all of this, who’s probably self-tracking but not doing so as a part of Quantified Self? What can we learn about Quantified Self and the people who are a part of it by noting what kinds of people aren’t a part of it? What about who attends QS Show & Tell sessions vs who presents at them? Are these absences or differences in participation problems, or merely things that are? If they are problems, what can or should be done about them?

Check back next week, and I’ll let you know how #QSEU13 answers these questions.

Whitney Erin Boesel is presently in Amsterdam for #QSEU13, but she’s still on Twitter when she can find an unlocked wireless signal; she’s @phenatypical.

Tracking map image from here; QS Nederland image from here.