You may not know it to look at me, but I’m wired up, baby. I’m into the 21st century in a big way, fully connected and exuding data like nobody’s business. Strapped on my right wrist is a Fitbit Ultra activity tracker, a high-tech buddy that records how many steps I take, stairs I climb, and calories I burn, puny though those numbers may be. (There’s an updated model, the Fitbit One, which I have on order.) Its little blue L.E.D. display not only gives a running scoreboard of my pedestrian moves but beams motivational messages such as steponit and yourock. Cynics may scoff, but I like being told that I rock, because, to be candid, there are days when I don’t feel I sufficiently rock and could use an extra cat pat of appreciation. Wrapped around my left wrist, like a tiny rubber hose, is the Jawbone Up bracelet, a more discreet monitor. It doesn’t have an L.E.D. screen to goose my morale (it downloads its data at the end of the day into my smartphone by means of a jack), but it too records steps, stairs, and burned calories, and, in night mode, the hours spent in light and deep sleep, how many times I wake up, and other goodies. I have been wearing both trackers for a few weeks now and am unable to present a definitive status report. For some reason the numbers refuse to reconcile. According to Fitbit, I took 7,116 steps on November 27; Jawbone has me at 2,192, a bit of a discrepancy. I prefer to believe Fitbit’s higher tally is the correct one, because that is the cotton-candy cloud on which I dwell, but perhaps I’m fooling myself and Jawbone has me accurately pegged as a potted fern. It is somewhat dismaying to check my daily graph on the Jawbone app and behold a few skyscraper spikes of activity between wide plateaus of suspended animation; by comparison, my Fitbit chart looks downright jazzy. Further testing is clearly indicated, as they say in those clinical trials.
Along with my digital wristbands, I am packing an emWave2 pocket-size Personal Stress Reliever, which, through an earlobe attachment or thumb sensor, measures heart-rate variability (H.R.V.) and doubles as a biofeedback meditation assistant. By breathing in unison with a climbing and descending column of illuminated beads and thinking happy thoughts of ballerinas, I seek to raise my coherence level from red (low) to blue (medium) to green (high), achieving a steady-state flow of relaxed awareness that will undulate through the day, until somebody annoying calls. It’s like a mood ring for the heart. I practice with the emWave2 five minutes at a stretch, because any longer than that and its beeps begin to bug me and drop me into the red zone, which defeats the purpose. On sunny days I dude myself out with a pair of Pivothead sunglasses, which have a spy camera dead center in the nose bridge that can take multiple shots at sequential intervals. Another technological advance in voyeurism, perhaps, but I didn’t purchase them with pervy intent, honest, Officer. Ever since I read Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (later reissued as Your Life, Uploaded, perhaps so as not to be mistaken for the Arnold Schwarzenegger film), I’ve been intrigued with the notion of digitizing life into a present-tense documentary, a first-person narrative capturing and preserving events as they unfold and filing them away as visual evidence rather than putting them through the filtration process of the brain, where they survive as scraps and scratchy flashbacks of unreliable memory. I could paste the highlight shots together to form a David Hockney Polaroid mosaic that could be hung as a mural in one of our finer saloons. So far, however, my eidetic scrapbook is shaping up to be the most boring series of vacation postcards ever (the sun always seems to be in the wrong place), but the Pivothead, marketed more as a sporty accessory, is really just a stopgap until I land an Autographer, a truly everyday-wearable camera yet to be retailed whose built-in sensors and fancy algorithm determine which decisive moments to snap: a necklace with a lens shutter that knows when to blink. Then watch me swan around the esplanade, literally taking in the sights.
Self-tracking—treating your body and brain waves as an info dispenser—exemplifies the irresistible converging of microchips, medical advances, social media, geek fashion, affinity branding, and the hardy American tradition of personal improvement. Benjamin Franklin, with his meticulously kept chart book notating his progress in achieving the 13 virtues—frugality, industry, etc.—was a founding father of self-help programming, exhibiting a recordkeeping punctilio converting daily fluctuations into accounting reports with pen and paper. No need for dusty ledgers today—smart-phone apps can take dictation for us. The goal isn’t a steady uptick of Christian virtue and wise prudence, but a greater transparency of our personal biomechanics in the quest for vitality, mental clarity, sleep quality, pain management, smoother operation, enhanced productivity, Zen tranquillity. Really, is that too much to ask of these carcasses we’re carrying around? I, for example, have begun counting the number of Diet Pepsis I consume per day along with the number of times I pee, because I detect a distinct correlation. Keeping tabs on oneself is rooted in the basic human curiosity to check under the hood and, if need be, tinker: self-tracking as the gateway to self-hacking. Daydreams are no substitute for diligent effort, and self-tracking compels concentrated attention on the small details that form a pattern, the blinking lights on the instrument panel. (Just a few minutes ago, my Jawbone vibrated, signaling that I had been idle too long and needed to move about a bit.) What’s different and epochal this time, as compared with the days of Ben Franklin, is that the pursuit of personal betterment is associational, collaborative, open-source, downright chatty—an outreach enterprise combined with an ongoing science fair known as Quantified Self.
The Quantified Self movement—motto: “Self Knowledge Through Numbers”—was founded by a pair of visionary editors and writers from Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf. Of the two, Wolf has been the more visibly evangelical, his talk at ted and New York Times Magazine article “The Data-Driven Life”—both in 2010—elucidating the concept and practice of self-tracking as a tool of personal and social enlightenment, infusing his findings with the enthusiasm and optimism of a feel-good guru. From the original seedpod have sprung Quantified Self meet-ups in cities across the world that feature “Show&Tell” demos from quanters on research studies they’ve been conducting on themselves. To prevent Show&Tells from devolving into spacey open-mike-nite monologues or PowerPoint droners, do-it-yourselfers are requested to limit their human-lab reports to 5 to 10 minutes (including the Q&A) and hit Quantified Self’s three primary questions: “What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn?”
This November in New York, I attended my first Quantified Self meet-up, held in a SoHo loft whose loud floors and trash barrels reminded me of the gallery spaces of yore where No Wave bands broke new barriers of noise torment. Here the prevailing sound was encouraging applause before and after each Show&Tell segment, an applause I associated with Weight Watchers meetings, assuming I’ve ever been to any. Notice how the Web sites for many of the self-tracking gizmos (Jawbone Up, especially) resemble Weight Watchersmagazine: a predominance of soothing pastels amid ample white space with the smiling faces of success-story models, who float like Frisbees through carefree afternoons. Whatever it takes to ward off any hint of discouragement, the great underminer of self-discipline. The weekly weigh-in is the focal data point at Weight Watchers meetings, followed by a group session where (ideally) everyone can share and no one is judged. It’s like church with a scale at the end of the procession line instead of an altar. With its continuous data streams and hive‑mind chatter, Quantified Self is Weight Watchers exponentialized, an emerging neuro-cellular confraternity.
Or is it just another false dawn with niftier doodads? Skeptics worry that data harvesters will induce passivity and wan alienation, cocooning compulsive self-trackers inside their feedback loops and subtracting emotion and serendipity from the human equation—the poetry, the ambiguity, the moonbeams in a jar. Thereby reducing life to one long flowchart or, if you’re a more journalistic type, charticle, with death setting the margin tab. Such low-burning fires don’t excite the imagination. Epic myth and pop culture favor the bold gesture and rash gamble over marbled reason. Star Trek’s Mr. Spock may have been a stoic paragon of logic and deduction, but it was James T. Kirk, with his hunches and heroics and bendy body English, whose leadership carried the heavens. Here on earth, however, we now have a Vulcan president—Barack Obama’s resemblance to Tuvok of Star Trek: Voyager has been much noted—whose re-election was predicted on the button by ace statisticians such as Nate Silver, of the FiveThirtyEight blog, Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos, and political-science professor Drew Linzer, while those who relied on gut feeling (Dan Rather), “vibrations” (Peggy Noonan), “subjective observations” baked in experience (Commentary editor John Podhoretz), and Beltway spume (Politico) looked like basket weavers after getting it so wrong. The future belongs to cool foreheads and crisp numbers, the future is now, and if quant sensors and data convergence can hasten the arrival of Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point of supreme collective consciousness, when man fuses with God, that’s a party I don’t want to miss. In the meantime, I better start getting my numbers up. Otherwise, I run the risk of my Fitbit telling me yousuck, and the last thing I need is a personal heckler.
