The camera slowly scans Chris Dancy’s face, first focusing on a profile of his bespectacled eyes, then quickly switching to a frontal shot to examine his contemplative expression at close range. Seconds later, the angle shifts again, the panorama now filmed as though from behind Dancy’s shoulder. The foreground looks blurry to start with. But once the lens adjusts, the viewer clearly sees the nearby cityscape at which Dancy longingly gazes. All the while, the video sequence is layered with a voice-over in which Dancy intones predictions of a proximate digital future in a self-assured and measured baritone:

The film is brief, only two minutes long. But at the point when credits would typically roll, the clip is revealed as an extended commercial for the Swedish telecommunications company Telia Carrier. “Carrier Declaration # 6: Power to the User” reads the penultimate frame before cutting to the company logo. The video’s length indicates that it was intended for more casual and viral online viewing rather than for scheduled TV ad placement that, given the steep price of airtime, rarely exceeds thirty seconds.

Telia Carrier released Declaration # 6 in 2017 as one part of a larger advertising campaign featuring technophiles like Chris Dancy as well as mavericks and daredevils such as domino artist Lily Havesh (Declaration # 1: Be a Control Freak) and Sven Yrvind (Declaration # 2: Challenge Everything). Havesh has attracted a large following with elaborate domino chain reaction videos that she films and shares online. Yrvind has earned accolades for crossing oceans in the world’s smallest boats. As people who, according to company advertising, have all used telecommunication in unexpected ways to reach their goals, these record setters act as fitting ambassadors of the firm. Their extreme hobbies underscore that Telia Carrier is likewise located on the edges of technological possibilities, taking telecommunication to new lengths and uncharted territories.

Yet, even as Dancy anticipates the enduring quality of digital connections, the advertising campaign he starred in has not stretched quite as far. Telia Carrier, which has also since rebranded as Arelion, has by now taken the hyperlinks supporting the footage on its website offline. Advertising is a cyclical business, and major corporations develop new campaigns on an annual basis to guard against “wear out,” the point at which commercials begin to loosen their grip on the fickle attention spans of potential consumers.

By placing this commercial on his personal website, Dancy has extended the film’s promotional life and message. Here, it occupies a prominent place at the head of his “About” page, though it now mainly advertises Dancy himself. The video adds visual interest to the adjacent content summarizing Dancy’s varied exploits, such as a short biography that introduces him as “the most connected man on earth.” For impatient readers eager to cut to the chase, Dancy has also added a byline that includes some of his other credits: “Featured on Showtime’s Dark Net, the cover of Businessweek, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the BBC, Fox News and Wired. Purveyor of TED talks. Subject of TED talks” (Dancy, Reference Dancy2017). Visitors may follow the web links embedded in the publication titles to read each piece in full. But for those rapidly scrolling through the content, an excerpted quote from NPR Marketplace set in bold and an oversized font screams the punchline: “You probably know someone like Chris Dancy, but not really. Chris Dancy is arguably the most quantified self in America, probably the world.”

People like Dancy frequently figure in the popular press as emblems of a data-driven future, as those who simply operate on the leading edge of coming digital trends. I first learned about Dancy in just such an editorial and was equally intrigued by his apparent commitment to wiring himself with countless sensors and the voluminous digital records that this activity has produced as by the publicity he has garnered for these efforts.

This book focuses on the promises and failures of such digital connections. But it takes a slightly different tack in studying them. To date, the bulk of popular and academic commentary on the subject have concentrated on the social implications of these emerging digital practices.¹ And little wonder. Even though popular media outlets often paint Dancy’s preoccupation with data as both rare and extreme, data collecting is an activity that has become mainstream. Until recently, credit cards, online browsing patterns, government censuses, and medical records have been the main sources of consumer, citizen, and patient information – archives that have largely been kept in specialty hands. Yet, affordable digital sensors have dramatically expanded the scope of information that a nonspecialist public can personally gather. In the United States, where the bulk of my ethnographic fieldwork has been based, it is now easy to find clothing, watches, and jewelry embedded with miniature biosensors that measure a seemingly expanding range of attributes, including blood glucose levels, stress, sleep quality, and mood. This set of devices is commonly described as wearables, or wearable technology (WT). Supplementing these are the sensors placed in objects of everyday use, such as refrigerators, coffee makers, mattresses, showers, cars, mirrors, and door locks, to name just a few, that collect information about one’s whereabouts, household habits, and patterns of use. Such gadgets have become collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT).²

This book shifts the lens to direct attention onto the makers of wearable and IoT tools to investigate the forms of labor and capital that organize contemporary self-monitoring technology and the digital imaginary. In particular, drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork with US-based developers of these applications and with those who participate in technophile forums such as the Quantified Self (QS), the book evaluates the work and influence of the people who introduce such gadgets into the social sphere. Chiefly, this monograph pursues two related goals: it looks to understand the world of digital professionals in the self-tracking arena through QS, and to examine QS as an effect and performance of the consumer wearables and IoT market. Dancy plays a vital role here, still. As “the most quantified self in America” if not “the world,” he is not only an avid technology user who most vividly embodies the wired future, as popular and academic observers often emphasize. He is also an experienced information technology (IT) professional. Even his website indicates that his avowed commitment to self-monitoring is as promotional as it is personal. As the website catalogues his digital exploits, it also advertises his consulting services.

Technologists laboring in the self-tracking arena are guardians and caretakers of these devices in a compounded sense. They are people who create the digital ecosystems that support contemporary data gathering. They are also more than the makers and marketers of digital tools. Their beliefs about data, social views, perspectives on personal analytics, as well as their professional ambitions and anxieties affect how this technology becomes embedded into the everyday. Looking at the way technologists interact with and within QS offers valuable insight into the forms of work and desire that shape the business of self-tracking. Studying how their involvement with the forum intersects with the pressures and practices of the self-tracking market also offers novel means for engaging with the politics of digital representation and the transformations in digital entrepreneurialism that are shaping digital practices today. Doing so ultimately underscores the deeply qualitative, disorderly, and situated nature of digital tools.

Interfacing with Digital Entrepreneurialism

Digital professionals are notoriously difficult to study ethnographically. Not only does research with technologists generally require “studying up” (Nader, Reference Nader and Hymes1974 [1969]), but it often involves navigating professional settings protective of proprietary ideas and therefore wary of outsiders. As a result, the technology sector largely remains an empirical “black box” (Pasquale, Reference Pasquale2015). Even those who can be considered industry “insiders” only ever enjoy limited and situated insight into corporate practices, and therefore they themselves continue to experience access as “a protracted, textured practice that never really ends” (Seaver, Reference Seaver2017).

Sherry Ortner (Reference Ortner2010) has offered one solution to studying elite and ethnographically elusive spaces by theorizing a mode of research she has called, invoking a computer metaphor, “interface ethnography.” Computers have long served as tools to think with, not just as instruments to work with. They have become “metaphors for the mind, for culture, for society, for the body, affecting the ways in which we experience and conceive of ‘real’ space,” writes media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Reference Chun2011, p. 65). In the context of computing, the interface typically describes a platform or a mechanism that allows people either direct access to computer functions or to servers located far away from the people using them. The graphical user interface (GUI), first used in a computer developed by Xerox PARC in 1973 but popularized by Apple in the 1980s, refers to the former. These companies developed the technology and iconography that computer users today largely take for granted: visual shortcuts such as folders, windows, and desktops to represent otherwise complex mechanical operations, thus allowing lay users to more easily engage with computer processes. The web interface describes what technologists often call the “front end” of computer programs, such as the app or web page that allows people to interact with information that is in fact located on distant servers. Although Ortner (Reference Ortner2010) uses the term “interface” in a more general sense, she subtly draws on the computer interface for meaning. Interface ethnography, she writes, involves participant observation conducted “in the border areas where the closed community or organization or institution interfaces with the public” (p. 213). In other words, it connects researchers with otherwise inscrutable and difficult to reach subjects in the same way that computer interfaces proffer untrained users access to obscure and remote computer functions.

Ortner (Reference Ortner2010) has turned to this style of research to study reclusive Hollywood. While she found it difficult to penetrate the rarefied settings that made up this industry discursively and spatially – the production studios, the movie sets, the exclusive celebrity circles – she was able to negotiate access to this protected sector through public functions such as screenwriting classes, film festivals, and industry panels that featured renowned actors, writers, and producers. These events provided “halfway” access to otherwise restricted professional environments (p. 219). Even though these sites were physically “disconnected,” they remained “structurally/culturally connected” to what Ortner understood as the broader Hollywood “community” (p. 221).

In many ways, my work has likewise been enriched by participation in “halfway” activities where the technology industry presents itself to the public. Countless conferences, speaking engagements, and talks organized by industry insiders make it possible for outsiders like myself to interface with digital executives beyond their restricted workplaces. These events are often publicized through technologists’ social media accounts. Typing keywords like “wearables,” “self-tracking,” “Internet of Things,” and “personal data” into the search windows of event-organizing platforms such as meetup.com has put me in touch with an even larger number of workshops, seminars, presentations, and events staged by and for professionals in the wearables and self-tracking arena. Following Sherry Ortner, I attended dozens of such events in New York City, Boston, Washington, DC, and San Francisco between 2012 and 2017. I met many of my interlocutors in meetup groups.³ In addition, I attended several industry conferences along the East and West Coasts centered on wearable computing and personal data, including Strata Hadoop NYC 2014 and 2015, Wearables and Things 2014, Wearables Tech Expo 2015, Wearables 2.0, KDD 2014 (Knowledge Discovery and Data), the Consumer Electronics Show 2015 and 2016, and the Microsoft Hardware Workshop 2016. These experiences yielded connections that led to the opportunity to spend several weeks in the office of a small New York City startup working on developing a wearable device and to collaborate on a small project with another team working on a wearable prototype. These interactions were complemented by interviews with staff members – communication directors, developers, and marketing leads – of several other startup firms.

Gatherings of this sort – made all the more common by the growing popularity of event-organizing platforms such as meetup.com – are promotional as much as they are informational. Increasingly, they create the means for the expanding “entrepreneurial” digital workforce to foster business relationships, secure credentials, and even attract occasional media attention made necessary by a virtually connected but progressively fractured employment environment (see Martin, Reference Martin1994; Rosenblat, Reference Rosenblat2018; also Chapter 4).⁴ These venues provide access to computer engineers, product managers, data analysists, and entrepreneurs involved in the development of self-tracking tools as well as to the technological imaginary, professional challenges, and industry tensions that shape this work. My research with experts in these settings also rendered the concept of interface ethnography literal. Many of the people with whom I interfaced in forums such as these were tasked with developing the mechanical and metaphorical bridges between self-tracking technologies and their users. My interface ethnography involved fieldwork with those who create the computer interfaces through which people confront self-tracking devices, their personal data, and the world.

Among this set, QS, a global forum most often associated with digital enthusiasts and tech early adopters such as Dancy, has served as the principal interface with the help of which I negotiated the mechanics of the self-tracking market. A forum such as QS, however, is more than another keyhole through which to peer into a hard-to-see world. QS has offered distinct analytic advantages compared to the other set of industry activities I engaged with throughout my fieldwork. In contrast to the typically short-term and ad hoc business functions I’ve attended, the long-running and recurrent nature of QS activities has provided consistent and extended access to the beliefs and practices of those who shape our digital experiences. More, while most other forums I visited were explicitly promotional, spaces to openly advertise both devices and the people selling them, QS’s reputation largely as a user community offered alternative ways to engage with technologists’ perspectives, concerns, and professional predicaments. Participating in the goings-on of QS thus supplemented my engagements with official and sporadic industry functions that socialize the makers of self-tracking applications and wearable tools.

What an analysis of QS and its relationship to the tech sector makes possible to see is likewise of interest to how digital capitalism works more broadly. In this book, I interpret QS as a central network that manifests how the so-called quantified self technologies, as wearable and sensor-enabled devices have also come to be popularly known, operate and become situated by their makers. I also look to the forum as a pivotal instrument for processing the forms of performance, despair, and desire that animate the digital economy. Chiefly, QS serves as an interface between the public promises of self-tracking developers and the business dynamics that shape both the gadgets and the technologists making them. Interacting with the language, participants, and organizing activities of QS has thus helped me to place the often-critiqued glib and worrying public assertions about the functions of self-tracking applications and wearable gadgets issued by technologists elsewhere into the context of their makers’ personal ambitions and professional challenges. It’s for these reasons that, in contrast to Ortner who has viewed interface ethnography as research that skirts the edges of the field site, I have come to appreciate QS as a key portal to digital entrepreneurialism rather than only one of its many peripheral touch-points.

Establishing New Connections

Readers familiar with QS may first find the forum an unlikely interface with the conditions of possibility that make the self-tracking sector work. Commentators generally interpret QS in the following three ways. They see it as a digital trend with worrisome social effects and as a gathering of at times eccentric “early adopters” of wearable tools such as Chris Dancy. Or else, they approach it as a collective of motivated patients, citizen-scientists, and technologists who are operating on the margins of neoliberal health policies. This coverage shares a common focus: those examining the social implications of QS connect the collective with emerging patterns of device use, regarding it as a lens onto the varied challenges of the digital future and as a field site that proffers ethnographic access to the people already living it. Popular media, much like Talia Carrier did in its advertising, may only simplistically highlight the exotic quantity of such applications as they mark their inevitable quality. However, even as scholars offer more nuanced commentaries, they too emphasize the broad-reaching consequences of QS in a way that situates it largely as a social barometer rather than as a vector of the technology sector. In these accounts, QS is not inherently an interface but rather a social gathering of data fetishists and a methodological approach that refers to the practice of monitoring and measuring various aspects of one’s life with self-tracking technology.

The books The Quantified Self by Deborah Lupton (Reference Lupton2016) and Self-Tracking by Dawn Nafus and Gina Neff (Reference Neff and Nafus2016) epitomize some of these scholarly positions. Nafus and Neff interpret QS as a grassroots community that has coalesced in the spaces opened up by neoliberal policies, particularly in the chasm created by inadequate healthcare that has compelled advocates, tinkerers, and frustrated patients to take their health into their own hands by digital means. Lupton, for her part, examines those who participate in forums such as QS as representatives of a more general and passive social type. The expression “quantified self,” she argues, does not only characterize the organizing activities of tech aficionados. She adapts the phrase to describe more diffuse social tendencies. While Nafus and Neff discuss participation in the activities of QS as voluntary, driven more by a common exasperation with the limits of healthcare and people’s desire to overcome them, Lupton uses the expression in this expanded sense as a provocation. She sees “quantified self” as a label that all people generating data increasingly wear, whether they want to or not. The “quantified self” thus appears in Lupton’s work as a significantly more docile identity, one that generally characterizes technology users interpellated by an expanding number of opportunistic “quantapreneurs” developing self-monitoring tools.⁵

Historians of science such as Rebecca Lemov (Reference Lemov and Daston2017) have additionally explored the longer historical tail of such digital practices. In particular, Lemov has drawn a red thread between notational customs of personages such as Benjamin Franklin – an American polymath who often epitomizes the liberal, religious, economic, and scientific concept of the self-made and self-regulating man and who memorialized his pen-and-paper self-tracking habits in his autobiography – and the data-collecting practices of people like Chris Dancy. This work places Dancy’s digital monitoring and his participation in the organizing activities of forums such as QS in the context of a wider history of the responsible and self-choosing subject. This account also highlights the specifically American character of modern digital enthusiasm as it stresses its connection with notions of self-sufficiency and the American ideal of the self-made man.

As Chapter 1 explores, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, the two men who first coined the expression “quantified self” as a headline in 2007 when they were developing a story about trends in self-tracking for Wired magazine, a popular technology publication where they both worked as editors, and who have since built QS into an organized network of in-person meetings, conferences, and online discussion forums, readily invite and even set the tone for these associations, particularly in establishing QS as a gathering space for intrepid technophiles who continue to follow in the footsteps of historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin. The QS origins story reaffirms the expression as a handle that has helped to name the longstanding social interest in digital data that many, like Lupton, now see in deterministic terms: as all but inevitable. And it bolsters the representations of people like Dancy, who display a deep commitment to digital self-tracking, as forbearers of these trends. In interviews, Dancy often endorses this view himself. A 2014 article published by mashable.com, for example, quotes him as ominously proclaiming, “I’m just like you, but in the future” (Murphy, Reference Murphy2014b).

This popular and academic appraisal of QS and its participants has clear merit, especially as the latter often situate group activities within a social and historical framework that zooms out past its image as a quirky gathering of digital acolytes. This discourse has also consistently highlighted that plenty of QS participants have been patients, data activists, lawyers, nonbusiness aspirational computer nerds, athletes, and even people who don’t use digital tools to track. It likewise bares noting that these accounts often do recognize the forum’s connections with the tech sector. The idea that QS has been friendly to professionals and innovators in the self-tracking arena is indeed common knowledge. Not least because the group emerged from the heartland of the technology sector itself: Silicon Valley.

The associations between QS and the tech sector that I examine in this book, however, are of a different sort. While observers have focused attention on QS as an emblem of or as a gateway to a quickly approaching digital future with storied roots, these accounts typically don’t dwell on the business dynamics that have manufactured it as a point of interest, even if they regularly acknowledge technologists as its regular fixtures. Discussions of QS therefore remain largely disconnected from broader realities of digital entrepreneurialism and the role forums such as QS have played within them.

Against the common sense of this analysis, I focus specifically on the experiences of technologists who have taken on a large share of the work associated with organizing and managing this collective as a “community.” These are the contributors who have made it possible for me to interface with some of the central dynamics shaping the self-tracking market and digital practices today. This book also goes beyond an assessment of the group as a forum with techy appeal to examine it both as a product of digital capitalism and as one of its levers. In particular, by examining its connection to the tech sector, to the industry’s concept of the consumer, and to the forms of labor that organize the digital economy, this book offers another way to understand why the forum has been endorsed as a meeting ground for technophiles. Looking at QS in this way highlights the rise of what I call the extracurricular entrepreneurs and offers a more nuanced account of the manner in which digital fetishism overlaps with work in the tech sector. When thus evaluated as a gateway to the vagaries of digital labor, QS offers a unique vantage point from which to analyze the neoliberal, fragmented, and turbulent environment within which sensor-enabled tools are made.

Negotiating the Interface

Just like the computer interface, however, QS is not a straightforward mechanism for access. While technologists generally welcome the interface as an apparatus that has opened the computer up for use by a nonspecialist public, media scholars have expressed suspicion and anxiety over screens that regulate our everyday. Interfaces disguise politics, misrepresent intentions of their makers, and mask the conditions within which they were produced. While they gesture to a specific context and even reflect social values and constraints, they often remain mute on the actual labor powering their existence. Similarly, QS is not a direct lens to the key factors impacting the function and the social reception of contemporary self-tracking technology.

Media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Reference Chun2011) is among the early scholars who have analyzed the interface as an instrument based only on the fantasy of direct manipulation. Although the interface remains “steeped in a nostalgic view of machines as transparent” (p. 75), she examines it as a navigational tool that inhibits control as much as it promotes it – that hides as much as it reveals. In particular, Chun relates the function of the interface to ideology. Like ideology, it produces its subjects; it interpellates people by hailing “you as a potential user of the system” (p. 83). So, while the interface facilitates interactions, it does so by regulating the terms of engagement. As a dissembling system of displays, it is additionally difficult to fully process. It may direct the gaze and stimulate the mapping of associations between people and machines, but its surfaces disconnect users from the mechanical, social, and political logics that organize it.

Chun presents her reading of the interface as “an argument against common-sense notions of software” rather than as a critique of software as such (Reference Chun2011, p. 92). In the book Interface, cultural theorist Brandon Hookway (Reference Hookway2014) challenges this common sense further by exploring the additional contradictions of the interface as a mechanism of access. Hookway’s project is as philosophical as it is historical, and it’s one where he explores the interface as a “relation with technology rather than as a technology in itself” (p. ix). Like Chun, he sees it as a mechanism that both enables and conditions agency. He also looks beyond the interface as a self-evident technology that simplifies human–machine interactions and examines it as a context-specific “entanglement of power, agency, and subjectivity” (p. 31) that remains conditioned by social, political, and economic realities. Importantly, Hookway recognizes the interface as a “disputed zone” (p. ix). Information channeled through the interface doesn’t just flow freely from one side to the other as water does when conducted over an aqueduct. He interprets the interface as a border that acts as a “site of contestation between human beings and machines as much as between the social and the material, the political and the technological” (p. ix). Describing the interface as a threshold experience, Hookway stresses its liminal quality. He emphasizes its function as a technology of negotiation and transformation as much as translation.

I draw on these scholarly interventions to think about additional qualities of QS as an interface to the self-tracking market. In my reading, QS is not only an industry-adjacent forum that acts as a convenient ethnographic access point to otherwise elusive tech sector insiders. Nor is it simply a figurative screen that brazenly puts wearable entrepreneurialism on display. QS is a prism that constructs as it refracts digital knowledge and offers alternative perspectives on the dynamics that power the development of self-tracking tools. Analyzing QS in this way has allowed me to understand how this forum both refracts and creates some of the rhetorical, social, and professional connections necessary to make wearables entrepreneurialism work.

For example, like the computer interface that negotiates the relationship between device users and internal computer functions, I argue that QS serves as an interface between technologists’ aspirations and practices. Chapters 2 and 3 explore these dynamics by analyzing how the notion that QS constitutes a community of people invested in digital self-tracking has both sustained and screened out technologists’ broader relationship to data, digital representation, and the imagined users of these devices.

The disjuncture between ambition and application is already audible in the contrasts between technologists’ public commentaries on the body, which they themselves at times compare to the computer interface, and the more complex perspectives on personal data and corporeality that often surface in candid conversations. On the one hand, it’s common to hear digital professionals describe the body, the skin, or as Dancy has put it in the transcript that opened this chapter, “biology and behavior,” as both literal and figurative interfaces that facilitate communication between machines and people. A commentary published in an industry report prepared by a New York market research firm PSFK offers another instance of this manner of speaking:

A wearable device developer I met at a tech conference further explained the benefit of apparel with embedded sensors: “Clothing is already something that is very intimate,” he observed. “Now, what if clothing could communicate as a friend to tell you about moments you were not aware of?”⁶

Such talk connects wired outfits and accessories with interpersonal intimacy. In these examples, the skin as an interface also serves a dual function. It links bodies with “smart” wearable devices as much as it offers people direct connections with their own “biology and behavior.” In these configurations, the skin is described as an interface that conducts information across borders much like the computer interface is popularly viewed as an entry point to obscure technological processes for lay computer users (see also Ruckenstein and Pantzar, Reference Ruckenstein and Pantzar2017). Fetishizing the skin as an interface allows devices placed on or near to the body to be hyped as providing, as the PSFK article claims, “a seamless flow of communication” without obstruction. The physical proximity of wearable devices to one’s body is also an element that connotes emotional closeness, resulting in descriptions of wearable tools as objects that come to know someone “personally.”⁷

These invoked human–machine interactions are both familiar and new. They once again mechanize the body while humanizing technology (Rabinbach, Reference Rabinbach1992; Crary, Reference Crary1999).⁸ And in doing so, they ascribe more agency to devices than to the people using them.⁹ Yet, these industry perspectives also represent a departure from the way engineers or artists developing early WT at the tail end of the twentieth century and at the start of the twenty-first initially conceptualized these gadgets. For example, members of the MIT Lab “Borg” club, such as engineers Steve Mann and Thad Starner, first saw promise in the conspicuous nature of bulky wearables and proudly wore their gear as armor.¹⁰ The more irreverent ideas developed by technologists and fashion designers in the decades that followed were also conceived as playthings that facilitated entrance into the extraordinary (Ryan, Reference Ryan2014). Cultural theorist Anne Cranny-Francis has noted that for these inventors, the period constituted a “straight-out erotics of power … which offered … freedom from mundane physical reality” (Cranny-Francis, Reference Cranny-Francis2008, p. 267, quoted in Ryan, Reference Ryan2014, p. 70). Today, technologists commenting on the social potential of wearable devices instead aim to minimize visibility of these devices so as to amplify their impact. “Once you have more than one thing, you start to look like, you know, Batman. It’s a little disruptive,” noted one digital executive I interviewed.¹¹ Thus adorned, the person’s body becomes a caricature rather than an informatics conduit. In his opinion, shared by many others, only technology that disappears from view and thus becomes “invisible” can properly channel personal information.

Critical data scholars frequently emphasize that such remarks reveal digital professionals as people who share only liberal and positivist understandings of data and corporeality (Lupton, Reference Lupton2013; Jurgenson, Reference Jurgenson2014; Morozov, Reference Morozov2014). From these perspectives, forums such as QS, whose tagline after all plainly calls for “Knowledge through Numbers,” only epitomize the reductive social imaginations of those using these devices as they reflect the limited perspectives of those selling them. The idiosyncrasies of the technology sector, however, contravene such neat divisions, as Chapter 2 explores. Looking beyond the popular language digital executives use to describe both bodies and data and at the more candid discussions that take place in forums such as QS helps to reveal that wearable devices and personal information take shape in the tension of professional ambitions, commercial imperatives, and entrepreneurial anxieties. If skin has become an “interface,” as developers at times have claimed, I evaluate how these developers do not just approach skin as an unproblematic conduit that can neatly interact with digital devices placed on its surface. They understand data and the bodies that produce them as inherently contested and multiple.

QS likewise serves as an interface between technologists and the technology sector itself. The interface, as Hookway highlights, does not only connect people with machines; it refers to a site of negotiation between people. Similarly, I look at QS as one mechanism through which device makers negotiate the professional arena. For participating technologists, the forum acts as a threshold experience. It renders their labor compatible with the demands and challenges of digital work. In the processes of making compatible, QS regulates appearances as it brings opposing forms of expression into communication and into service of one another. QS thus affects necessary transformations.

For example, as Chapter 3 examines closely, the notion that QS chiefly brings together self-tracking aficionados that has shaped its status as a community in the popular and academic imaginations is not just at odds with the practical realities of QS as a forum that convenes large numbers of technologists producing these gadgets. The staging of QS as a hobby rather than as a professional community has a meaningful role in the business sector itself. It facilitates the conversion of self-tracking devices from “solutions in search of a problem” into gadgets that are responding to observable consumer demand. As Chapter 4 elaborates, technologists “hustling with a passion” benefit from the forum’s hobbyist framing in other ways as well. As a collective that putatively fosters and showcases digital enthusiasm, QS helps transform the extracurricular activities of those working in the technology sector into vehicles of entrepreneurial passion that has become increasingly necessary for professional success.

Chapters 5 and 6 explore additional associations between QS and the tech sector. On the one hand, forums such as QS play an important social function for a flexibly and insecurely employed workforce for whom QS provides access to vital opportunities for networking, reputation building, and credentialing. Indeed, the relationships and connections that participants come to form through their engagements with this forum offer support in a capricious digital market. On the other hand, when QS acts as a mechanism of professional self-realization, it helps to further press worker sociality and desire into the service of tech capitalism as it subtly regulates who can and cannot take advantage of QS as an instrument of career development. These chapters act as an interface to the troubled promises of inclusion that affect the organizing activities of QS, digital labor, and the way self-tracking devices work.

Has Digital Critique Run Out of Steam?

As I analyze how technologists developing wearables and IoT devices leverage QS to configure notions of data and transform digital self-monitoring into meaningful work, my research serves as an interface between recent debates within digital anthropology and critical data studies, and the practical realities of the self-tracking market. The contemporary proliferation of data and data-monitoring devices has certainly drawn enormous scholarly attention. The bulk of this analysis, however, has remained focused on the societal impact of digital tools that are perceived as equal parts formidable and inept, rather than on the entrepreneurial settings and frameworks that continue to produce these tools.

One crucial vector of this critique, and one that has received the lion’s share of media attention, is scholarship addressing questions of privacy. In these studies, Jeremy Bentham’s figure of the panopticon continues to loom large. Bentham’s design called for prison cells to be arranged around an observation tower to create the sense that the actions of prisoners were perpetually surveilled by a guard whether anyone occupied the post or not. Theorists concerned with privacy in the digital “age” use this image to suggest that those who routinely use digital devices now sit in the position of the prisoner: our actions are similarly perpetually at risk of scrutiny by an invisible witness. David Lyon, the premier scholar of surveillance studies, warned as early as 1994 that increased computing capacities have drastically improved mechanisms of surveillance. “Precise details of our personal lives are collected, stored, retrieved, and processed every day within huge computer databases belonging to big corporations and governments,” he wrote in the aptly titled book Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (p. 3). The questions Lyon raised three decades ago at the dawn of personal computing have only intensified in recent years with the spread of wearable and self-tracking devices. Under the premise that someone – or something – could always be watching virtually every action of every day, theorists have raised alarm at the way improved computing and processing power has produced capabilities for people to be monitored with growing precision and continuity, and on a vastly enlarged scale (Richards and King, Reference Richards and King2013; Dijck, Reference Levy2014; Beer, Reference Beer2018). Media scholars Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum (Reference Brunton and Nissenbaum2015) have thus proposed that strategies of “obfuscation” now offer the only refuge for people subject to perpetual digital monitoring. Given that most of these tools are developed by private companies and not public government entities, legal scholars have also expressed concern that the mechanisms powering social surveillance are shifting further away from civic discourse or critique (Pasquale, Reference Pasquale2015).

The uses to which powerful corporate conglomerates or government entities increasingly put personal data of ordinary, and especially of vulnerable, citizens are necessary to think about. However, data do not capture nor transcribe experience unproblematically. The personal information that digital devices now produce continues to be shaped by history, politics, and social perceptions. A number of studies have therefore examined the social nature of data-driven bodies, building as they have done so on research within anthropology of the body that has long demonstrated that somatic experience is as social as it is biological. Scholars working in this vein have considered how self-monitoring tools produce the “self-as-database” (Schüll, Reference Schüll2016, p. 8), construct an “informed body” (Viseu and Suchman, Reference Viseu, Suchman and Edwards2010), or configure “algorithmic identities” around parameters stipulated by advertisers (Cheney-Lippold, Reference Cheney-Lippold2011). This literature resonates with concerns of scholars who connect digital monitoring with the growing rise of surveillance and biopolitical regimes. Yet, in continuing to explore digitized bodies and selfhoods as man-made constructs, this scholarship only further emphasizes that “raw data is an oxymoron” (Gitelman, Reference Gitelman2013).

A related body of work has also considered that information systems and wearable devices produce more than algorithmically regulated subjects. For instance, authors attentive to the social life of data have documented the complicated and the oftentimes “ambivalent” (Schüll, Reference Schüll2016, Reference Schüll2019; Ruckenstein and Schüll, Reference Ruckenstein and Schüll2017; Kristensen and Ruckenstein, Reference Kristensen and Ruckenstein2018) agency of digital device users. Challenging narratives of certain digital control, this work points to the multiple shortcomings and affordances of machines (Nafus and Neff, Reference Neff and Nafus2016), the frequent inconsistencies implicit in device use (Ruckenstein, Reference Ruckenstein2014; Lazar et al., Reference Lazar, Koehler, Tanenbaum and Nguyen2015; Elsden et al., Reference Elsden, David and Durrant2016; Tamar and Zandbergen, 2017), as well as the different ways creative use of data by individuals inevitably subverts technologists’ biopolitical aims (Ellerbrok, Reference Ellerbrok2011; Nafus and Sherman, Reference Nafus and Sherman2014). As this literature reclaims user agency, it also calls attention to what many feel data professionals seem unable to acknowledge: that “real data is all leaks, or better put: real data is all context” (Dumit and Nafus, Reference Dumit, Nafus, Knox and Nafus2018, p. 270).

Relatively few studies, however, have ethnographically explored the professional settings where these devices – and ideas about digitization – are constructed. Several scholars have of course already considered the “institutional context” within which digital data circulate and take shape (Christin, Reference Christin2020) and the “ways in which organizational histories become embedded in the objects … [technologists] create and produce” (Flynn, Reference Flynn and Cefkin2010, p. 42). An additional set of studies has also focused on the spaces adjacent to the office, such as the university programs where data scientists are trained (Lawrie, Reference Lawrie, Knox and Nafus2019), or on the freelance labor of those toiling in the shadows of algorithmic processes (Rosenblat, Reference Rosenblat2018; Gray and Suri, Reference Gray and Suri2019; Irani, Reference Irani2019). As these projects examine “designers and design process” (Schüll, Reference Schüll2012, Reference Schüll2016; Berg, Reference Berg2017; Ruckenstein and Schüll, Reference Ruckenstein and Schüll2017; Knox and Nafus, Reference Knox and Nafus2018), they open up fresh opportunities to evaluate professional settings that are otherwise decried as impenetrable and opaque.

My research complements and builds on these emerging debates. By highlighting the layered relationship of technologists to data and the self-tracking market, I emphasize how people contribute to the workings of seemingly impersonal and automated technological systems. This work therefore further stresses that digital devices can only ever produce “partial truths” (Clifford, Reference Clifford, Clifford and Marcus1986), that is, situated and incomplete information rather than irrefutable facts. This study additionally looks beyond the office or the data-science classroom to evaluate the impact of extracurricular activities, such as QS, on the way tech executives facilitate and agitate for the data-driven future. My research also responds to an empirical shortage. Despite the growing scholarly attention to professional settings in which contemporary digital devices are made, there still exist few book-length accounts of the way “experts make and remake data,” as Hannah Knox and Dawn Nafus recognize in the introduction to their edited volume Ethnography for a Data-Saturated World (2018, p. 11). This book offers an extended ethnographic study of the experts creating self-tracking technology and the industry dynamics that affect their work.

This monograph likewise aims to overcome a familiar analytic divide. Critical data scholarship largely continues to maintain a rigid boundary between those who produce and work with data in the commercial sphere and those who either use wearable devices in daily life or critique their operations in the academic domain. Following a mode of analysis that first emerged in science studies (see Latour, Reference Latour1988; Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu and Biagioli1999 [1975]; Cetina, Reference Cetina1999), this literature tends to expose those who professionally engage with data as unwitting participants in the production of fictions and as naive operators who believe that they are constructing undisputed facts. Technologists’ seemingly simplistic views on digitization are then placed in stark contrast to the vital complexity introduced by ordinary device users or by scholars in the social sciences and the humanities. And often, academic contributors inaugurate only themselves as people capable of seeing intricate assemblages and webs of significance, or of fanning out the practical multiplicity of only apparently stable and fixed people and things. Scholarly accounts thus become the chief interface between the narrow views held by digital professionals and the more nuanced realities of digital practices.

But, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, this mode of digital critique may have presently run out of steam. Latour asks the related question, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” in a 2004 essay that responds to the larger threat of conspiracy theorists who even then were beginning to adopt the doubting posture of the critical social scientist. Rather than wholly condemn the appropriation, however, Latour wonders if it is the expected function of critique, not just its proper messenger, that needs to be addressed as well. At one point, he even sarcastically if matter of factly highlights the absurdity of scholarly analysis that sharpens boundaries between critics and their subjects. Satirizing what he sees as a preposterously lofty position of those who believe that their chief role is to debunk the theories wrongly held by others, Latour writes: “When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see” (p. 239). While social scientists writing in this vein have long worked to deduct misguided thinking, Latour suggests that the better strategy may be to add something. Echoing his broader work, he advocates for scholarship that resurfaces rather than severs connections, for work that multiplies associations even between critics and their subjects. “The critic,” Latour concludes, “is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles” (p. 246).

My work is invested in establishing new connections between critical data scholarship and digital entrepreneurialism by demonstrating that more complicated professional agency is at stake in the making of commercial wearables and in the management of their futures. With QS acting as a central interface to volatile entrepreneurial dynamics, this book reconciles the business conventions, compromises, shifting labor practices, and growing employment insecurities that power the self-tracking market with device makers’ often simplistic promotional claims to better understand the impact that technologists exert on digital discourse, on the tools they make, and on the data that these gadgets put out into the world. In thus leveraging QS as a key mechanism for engaging with tech executives, their ongoing predicament, and their social influence, this book hopes to bridge some of the scholarly divide between analysts and digital practitioners.

Structure of the Work

To begin evaluating the interaction of “quantified self,” the concept, and Quantified Self, the collective, with digital entrepreneurialism, it’s necessary to first understand the influence of QS’s originators, Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, on this construct’s form and function. Chapter 1 reviews how the two writers have coined the term quantified self and established the group as an expression of what Wolf has called the “culture of personal data” (Wolf, Reference Wolf2009). While the founders defer to the explanatory power of culture in situating the collective within the technological imaginary, this chapter examines how their own personal backgrounds as journalists and Wired magazine editors have shaped the semantic meaning of “quantified self” as a catchphrase that refers to the means and outputs of digital self-tracking and especially to QS as a community of technophiles. Although the role the forum has come to play within the commercial self-tracking sphere analyzed in this book does not fully align with its originators’ intentions, the framing they established has set the tone for many of the ways the collective has become socialized in the technological arena as well as how it has come to work within it.

The three chapters that follow broadly explore how the concept of the “quantified self” as a trope of personal data and the notion that QS primarily constitutes a user community “interoperates,” to use a tech industry term, with the sector’s notion of the technology user, personal data, and technologists’ own parameters of professional identity. Chapter 2, for example, looks closely at the way digital executives talk about data in forums such as QS, among others. These exchanges reveal the contradictions, professional obfuscations, and hyperbole that continue to shape the self-tracking sector. Digital professionals may occasionally enfold concepts such as “the quantified self” into promotional “pitch theater” to stage self-monitoring devices as gadgets that produce faithful and objective data. My interactions with practitioners in these settings, however, point to the more varied social, legal, and fiscal advantages professionals reap from representing digital self-tracking and the data these devices produce as both plastic and precise. This chapter argues that the surface impression that technologists relate to data and modes of self-monitoring in reductive terms has to be weighed against ways tech executives pursue both digital ambiguity and objectivity as a meaningful corporate strategy.

Chapters 3 and 4 investigate QS as a collective that more specifically exemplifies some of the novel forms of sociality that support digital entrepreneurialism. These chapters analyze QS as one of a growing cadre of social devices that press worker sociality and desire into service of tech capitalism. In particular, these chapters examine QS as an interface that connects extracurricular entrepreneurs hustling with a passion with two figures central to the self-tracking sector: the desirous consumer for whom digital professionals innovate, and the devoted entrepreneur whose impassioned labor sustains this work.

Chapter 3 details how business executives have interacted with QS as a site that materializes a particular consumer “segment” and consumer “demand” in ways that accord with the often binary and voyeuristic principles of consumer-centric design. QS offers visibility into ways technologists produce the distance they seek between themselves and their customers. However, the manner in which they interact with the forum also testifies to the involved role digital professionals frequently play in formulating consumer desire.

The participation of tech executives in collectives such as QS likewise belies their intentions to occupy the position of a professional participant observer who is simply looking in on an emerging social scene. Chapter 4 looks at the way technologists have leveraged QS to cultivate a professional identity of a digital devotee. In particular, this chapter analyzes how the popular staging of QS as a space for private explorations of self-tracking makes it possible for technologists to recoup their business-driven engagements with the forum as hallmarks of their personal, not just of a more general, passion for self-quantification. Innovation is often enough framed as a product of masculinized heroics and individual acts of daring. Examining QS as an instrument of professional development refocuses attention on the feminized modes of free and affective labor that continue to move the tech industry forward. As these chapters explore the forum both as a mechanism and as a mirror of these professional imperatives, they highlight the knottier role desire plays in the digital economy.

The remaining chapters analyze QS as a device that further renders the labor of tech executives compatible with the demands of digital work and in the process creates new associations between technologists, tech hobbyists, and wearable gadgets. Chapter 5, for example, investigates “seamlessly” networked self-tracking tools as symbols of idealized professional mobility and looks to QS as a forum that responds to and registers these business challenges and ambitions. Technologists tend to fetishize frictionless digital mobility. Conversations with digital professionals who participate in forums such as QS indicate, however, that the appeal of well-networked devices speaks less to the emerging realities of WT or to consumer “needs and wants” (a concern thematized in Chapter 3) than to the ideals of lasting and sustainable tech sector careers that are often punctuated by instability and breakdown. These are the additional entrepreneurial desires that motivate the making of self-tracking technology and become inadvertently embedded in its design. QS also acts as a practical source of mutual aid that facilitates the desired connectivity and agility of working bodies. This chapter thus investigates QS as an interface that reconciles the technological fantasy and its repetitious recital with the difficulties tech executives themselves face in their personal lives and professional work.

Chapter 6 ultimately analyzes QS as a gateway to the notions of difference that continue to shape the tech sector and therefore the devices that derive from it. As it considers the structural inequality that still constrains technological innovation, this chapter also analyzes QS as a site more specifically connected to the forms of privilege that impact how entrepreneurial extracurricular labor is converted into business advantage. It emphasizes that the modalities of participation that have rendered QS a community of tech acolytes unevenly regulate who can benefit from the group’s role as an instrument of professional transfiguration, connection, and access.

In the Conclusion, I consider how QS has evolved since I completed my research in 2017. The composition and social function of this collective have been partially reshaped by its original organizers who have continued to focus group activities on citizen science and academic research. Groups such as QS have also been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has altered the nature and function of in-person post-work socializing more broadly. Nevertheless, the industry practices, challenges, and promises refracted through the QS interface in this book remain germane as they speak to some of the central dynamics that continue to impact the self-tracking market and the devices that emanate from it, if now in a different guise.

Makers of wearable and self-tracking applications are often criticized in popular and academic domains for conceiving of digital connections as unduly enduring and strong. By contrast, this monograph explores the multiple forms of insecurity and failure that shape entrepreneurial imaginations and digital possibilities. In particular, in analyzing QS as an interface between confident entrepreneurial assertions and the practical challenges of digital work, the book illuminates how technologists often knowingly invest in and work to stave off digital ambiguity as they seek to profitably operate in the tension between clarity and doubt. Viewed through this prism, the purported hubris of these professionals and their reputed blind faith in the stability of the data-driven future dissipate. Instead, the digital connections technologists make return as fragile and fraught.