Fitted

July 29, 2015 6:34 AM

Activity trackers train users to love lives that are all work.
posted by almostmanda (133 comments total)

This is a really good essay about a society that forces all its citizens to wear fitbits.

The society that FitBit builds is not only a network of isolated selves. It is one which the only possible way to relate to others is through competition.

*Groan*
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:37 AM on July 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

So...don't wear FitBits?
posted by happyroach at 6:43 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only fitness
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:44 AM on July 29, 2015 [48 favorites]

The author appears to have some issues beyond the wearing or not-wearing of a fitness tracker that affect the tone and meaning of the article. I can't really get behind the premise.
posted by tzikeh at 6:46 AM on July 29, 2015 [9 favorites]

The thing is, I worry about people who pop on these FitBits, because it is a training module. The thing you carry with you will report on your progress, and then the next thing is...why not tell work what you're doing for a lowering of your life insurance premium? Hey, why don't we start just making our work badges into little FitBit-like devices, just to make things easier?
posted by xingcat at 6:47 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

I just got a new phone and one app or another set a steps goal for me. At 8000 it said not to stop because I was 80% of the way there. I set the goal to 1 going forward. Mission Accomplished.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:47 AM on July 29, 2015 [14 favorites]

The thing you carry with you will report on your progress, and then the next thing is...why not tell work what you're doing for a lowering of your life insurance premium? Hey, why don't we start just making our work badges into little FitBit-like devices, just to make things easier?

Giving out pedometers is already a thing, voluntary I believe, in some workplaces to lower premiums. I would do it if offered. I let Progressive monitor my driving too to get rates lower.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:48 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I love the activity tracker on my phone. I don't obsessively check it, though, and if I don't make my 10,000 step goal, oh well. But it is effective at getting a bird's-eye-view of my activity trends, and I appreciate that.

People who obsess over their FitBit and then imagine dystopian, FitBit-fueled futures which they then feel obligated to scare-blog about are, most likely, just obsessive people. Replace FitBit with Yoga, CrossFit, P90X, religion, whatever. You will get the same results.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:48 AM on July 29, 2015 [22 favorites]

Replace FitBit with Yoga, CrossFit, P90X, religion, whatever. You will get the same results.

I'm unsure of that. I mean, Yoga, CrossFit, etc., are things you do on your own, and aren't networked into a for-profit company that is using your data for whatever they want. I refused the little clippy thing on my car that tracks my driving, even though I'm an excellent driver, because I really don't want them to have that kind of access into my life, but when will it become a requirement to have those trackers on your car? And what can the data that's gleaned from them be used for, beyond making sure you're going the speed limit?
posted by xingcat at 6:51 AM on July 29, 2015 [17 favorites]

So I fill all three rings on my Apple Watch maybe once or twice a month - my awareness of that is less "wow, I am a failure 28 days a month - why did I chose a lazy life of white collar desk work and internet couch funtimes", and more "that's great, I'm getting my rings filled twice a month - maybe I should try and go on another hike next month so I can feel good about getting my rings filled like last time."
posted by oceanjesse at 6:53 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Catholic Church says the essential data point is the age 33. We will be resurrected as we were, or would have been, at 33 because that’s how old Jesus was.

Holy shit! I only have 6 months left! Going to need at least 20,000 steps a day.
posted by blairsyprofane at 6:54 AM on July 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

Seems like the author is more exhausted by constantly making logical leaps into The Looming Dystopia than by any physical exercise.
posted by Etrigan at 6:58 AM on July 29, 2015 [15 favorites]

I believe in work efficiency rather than output. My theory is you only have so many steps you can take in your life; so don't use 'em all up now. Go for it? No, get somebody to bring it round.
posted by Segundus at 7:04 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Drinky Die: Giving out pedometers is already a thing, voluntary I believe, in some workplaces to lower premiums.

One of the large hospital systems in NY had a contest amongst all of their campuses and affiliates where the team that accumulated the most steps in a given period won a trip to Paris. I don't know if they ever repeated the contest as there were many reports of people running in the gym with ten pedometers dangling from them or the secretary jiggling her leg with several devices attached.
posted by dr_dank at 7:15 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

This felt akin to a lot of other bad articles about the evils of modern technology; I think that disordered eating and exercise habits existed well before the Fitbit was a twinkle in anyone's eye, and I don't really think it's bad that more people are more interested in tracking their physical habits to improve their health. The data breach is crappy and scary, I don't deny that at all, but the ugly truth about the modern age is that the idea that your data is secure and private is the greatest lie the tech industry has managed to sell. Some of the other stuff in there though - take the example of the older woman competing with her son on steps:

Sometimes his mother wakes up before midnight and sees that her son has snuck in an unexpected mile or two thanks to the time change; she starts pacing frantically around their small apartment. In the morning she comes into the kitchen, rubbing her arthritic knees, but beaming.

So...she's getting exercise (which many people at any age find difficult, and which actually helps with arthritis) and she's connecting with her children and feeling happiness from it (solitude and loneliness are bad for everyone, but they're literally death for older adults). This is presented in the essay as a bad thing, but that's a story Fitbit should be featuring in ads. Knowing moms, I'll bet she crows a little bit to her kid (my mom gives me shit every single day she beats me on steps, which is most of them because she's active and I am a sedentary programmer) when they talk or text. Or the thing about the couple that chats about steps - my SO and I chat idly about all kinds of dumb shit, and I don't think there's much moral or intellectual superiority in talking about steps or Real Housewives, or why people think Wolverine's such a badass when there are like a thousand people in the Marvel universe who could beat him up and take his lunch money.

Also, this: "Isolation is literally a technical requirement of the FitBit." Wat. I mean, in the sense that you use it on your own, yes. You could write this same sentence about almost everything - maybe not some vehicles, but I mean, everything else. Books, shirts, chairs, pencils, headphones, they all "literally technically require isolation". Wearing an activity tracker doesn't inherently make taking a walk with someone unpleasant and isolated, any more than spending a rainy day curled in bed with your person becomes an isolated experience if you're reading books separately.
posted by protocoach at 7:19 AM on July 29, 2015 [13 favorites]

Hi. I'm fat. I'm fat, and I'm prone to inactivity. I wear a fitness tracker. (Well, an Apple Watch, but I also wore FitBits and Jawbones before I got this thing.)

Honestly, it has been incentive to get my ass to move. I've already lost weight, and inches off my waist. I was doing Couch to 5K before the damn heatwave hit NYC, forcing all of us---fit and unfit alike---to curl up inside of our air-conditioned hovels, rather than try to maintain our shapes under the oppressive heat of the sun, or pushing through air humid enough to swim through.

Is there stuff to be worried about with Quantified Self and who has access to that data? Of course.

But the idea of having a device that helps you get a sense of your activity, and spur you to do better if you want to is not. I'm not trying to get in better shape so I can do more work. (Well, I kind of am, but not my day job work. I want more energy to work on the stuff I like doing outside of my day job for my own edification and entertainment.) I'm trying to get in better shape for me, damn it. Let me have my $400 digital fucking carrot on a digital fucking stick, okay? Nobody's forcing you to wear one.
posted by SansPoint at 7:20 AM on July 29, 2015 [20 favorites]

...imagine a boot stamping on a human face -10,000 times. Hey congratulations you met your step goal for today! Wanna try for 15k? Why not keep going forever?
posted by cnelson at 7:28 AM on July 29, 2015 [66 favorites]

But the idea of having a device that helps you get a sense of your activity, and spur you to do better if you want to is not.

Yeah. Wake me when these devices start giving the wearer an electric shock when they fail to make the 10,000 steps or whatever. (Then again, that will probably be sold as a premium service.)
posted by chavenet at 7:29 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

The irritating part is the author clearly does not actually believe any of this. She's an academic--she wouldn't dare put such unqualified, easily falsified statements in any of her academic work. But when it comes to shaming people whose self-control is aided by fitness trackers? Well then, let the generalizations fly!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:30 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

chavenet Yeah. Wake me when these devices start giving the wearer an electric shock when they fail to make the 10,000 steps or whatever. (Then again, that will probably be sold as a premium service.)

Well, it's not a step tracker, but...
posted by SansPoint at 7:31 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Is there stuff to be worried about with Quantified Self and who has access to that data? Of course.

What I would like - and what is almost certainly a pipedream - would be an open-source tracker where you could store your own data and run your own analysis on it.

Yeah. Wake me when these devices start giving the wearer an electric shock when they fail to make the 10,000 steps or whatever. (Then again, that will probably be sold as a premium service.)

'Bout that.
posted by protocoach at 7:31 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

This damn hivemind...
posted by protocoach at 7:33 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah. Wake me when these devices start giving the wearer an electric shock when they fail to make the 10,000 steps or whatever. (Then again, that will probably be sold as a premium service.)

I was in a meeting once where one woman's fitbit just started going crazy buzzing. I guess they do that when you've been sitting for too long? Anyways she tapped it gently, then ever more forcefully until she was full on flogging her wrist with a furious vengeance. The whole meeting ground to a halt as we stared at her.

I have never seen someone as embarrassed as her when she realized that we were all watching her. 10x worse than any electric shock at motivating someone to get their steps in, especially prior to any long meetings.
posted by selenized at 7:44 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

She's an academic--she wouldn't dare put such unqualified, easily falsified statements in any of her academic work.

I lol'd
posted by grobstein at 7:58 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

FitBit recommends walking at least 10,000 steps a day. I aim for 15,000, because what kind of person does only the minimum?

The kind of person that only wears 15 pieces of flair?
posted by bigendian at 7:59 AM on July 29, 2015 [31 favorites]

The irritating part is the author clearly does not actually believe any of this. She's an academic--she wouldn't dare put such unqualified, easily falsified statements in any of her academic work. But when it comes to shaming people whose self-control is aided by fitness trackers? Well then, let the generalizations fly!

Is the art of the essay really so dead that this is how we react to it? I didn't find a lot of easily falsified statements in this article. I found a lot of interesting thoughts on the kind of society and the kind of people that would embrace a device like the FitBit. I thought it was insightful and fascinating. It's cultural critique, not sociology. It's interpretation and philosophy, really a work of phenomenology. Her essay says: here is what the FitBit represents to me: a mode of confession, of self-revelation appropriate for a society not of human beings, but of discrete units of quantification, collections of metrics and metric aspirations placed in competition with one another. The world of the homo exorexicum. It's precisely the point that it's a form of self control. That's what's remarkable about it. And it's not intended to shame anyone, but to ask, what kind of world is this, the one in which FitBits exist. What does it say about FitBit that it has no women board members but its market is dominated by women buyers. Why do women in particular want this sort of self-control?

Anyway, I think this piece is more thoughtful than implied by that sort of throwaway snark.
posted by dis_integration at 8:00 AM on July 29, 2015 [19 favorites]

I didn't find a lot of easily falsified statements in this article.

You don't think these claims are easily falsfified?

"Isolation is literally a technical requirement of the FitBit." No.

" The device produces a complete archive of our lives by abstracting them from any and every context. " huh?

"Nothing of ours—nothing female—has ever been private. " NOTHING?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:08 AM on July 29, 2015 [9 favorites]

I think the overarching theme behind the essay, of which the Fitbit is only an illustration, is sound. It's undeniably true that we (i.e. the relatively well off middle classes in the US, UK and increasingly the rest of Europe) are being conditioned to erase the boundaries between fun and work and increasingly treat fun as work through that sort of cookie clicker conditioning.

This is not an entirely new thing of course, especially not in countries drenched in Calvinism like the US, where aimless fun is always treated with suspicion.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:13 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

"The device produces a complete archive of our lives by abstracting them from any and every context."

Yeah, no. It just tracks how many steps you took, or how many flights of stairs you climbed. Some track your heart rate. I used to have a phone app that literally tracked my movements: I could call up a map to see where I walked, where I ran, where I rode transit, where I stopped, and what places I stopped at. THAT is more in line with the author's idea about creating a "complete archive" abstracted from context, but not quite.

I turned it off, both because I got no useful insight in knowing I tended to cover the same territory every day, and because it got bought by Facebook, and those bastards don't need to know where I go every day.
posted by SansPoint at 8:15 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Isolation is literally a technical requirement of the FitBit.

Literally, because the FitBit is for one person only. That's all that means. Its metrics are isolated to the individual who wears the fitbit and has a database of fitness data that is about them and them alone.

The device produces a complete archive of our lives by abstracting them from any and every context.

This sentence makes sense in the context of the paragraph. The FitBit measures only the effects of the accelerometer and then transforms that abstraction (abstraction from any other context, like the person's other characteristics, her thoughts feelings motivations family work church and so on) into a kind of profile of the individual: as the one who walked/ran this many steps in this amount of time.

Nothing of ours—nothing female—has ever been private.

This is a bit hyperbolic but I'm willing to run with it. You know, A Room of One's Own and that sort of thing. Women as, historically, property bequeathed from men to other men in the marriage exchange, etc.
posted by dis_integration at 8:15 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Hey.

When I was like 15, I was (like a bunch of mefites, I expect) an Internet very-early-adopter; my social life, even with the people geographically local to me, generally took place on IRC and USENET, I played hella MUDs, and so forth. The story of the past twenty-someodd years has been the story of how all this social Internet technology, which was so deeply satisfying and liberatory when it was an optional weird thing that a few weirdos did, became utterly soulsucking as it was taken up into broader society, stopped being optional, and started being mandatory — when "managing your brand" on Facebook and Twitter became a requirement for a vast swath of job categories, when being always-available via email became a job requirement for basically every office worker, when easily monitored and controlled social behavior on company-managed slacks and Facebook clones replaced less-easily-monitored water cooler interactions, when companies like Target started enforcing higher paces of work from their clerks through "gamifying" the checkout process, and so forth and so forth and so forth.

The doomsayers from the 1990s, the ones I ignored while I was busy hacking Eggdrop bots, were totally right. The people today who adopt the position that "this stuff is optional and fun so all this dystopian whining is silly! you're being silly!" are not being wise and level-headed. They are being short-sighted and naïve.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:19 AM on July 29, 2015 [54 favorites]

MartinWisse It's undeniably true that we (i.e. the relatively well off middle classes in the US, UK and increasingly the rest of Europe) are being conditioned to erase the boundaries between fun and work and increasingly treat fun as work through that sort of cookie clicker conditioning.

This is happening, but I don't think fitness trackers, per se, are deserving of that much blame. A much bigger problem in the erasure of work boundaries is the growing requirements in Western economies, (or at least America) to be Always On. The smartphone (which often is a fitness tracker too) is more to blame than the FitBit.
posted by SansPoint at 8:19 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Literally, because the FitBit is for one person only

If isolation was *literally* a technical requirement of the FitBit, then how could I have taken a walk with my wife yesterday while wearing one? I wasn't isolated. I didn't violated a technical requirement of the FitBit.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:20 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

For sheer creepy trackingness, the activity tracker can't hold a candle up to the smartphone.
posted by Slothrup at 8:22 AM on July 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

I found a lot of interesting thoughts on the kind of society and the kind of people that would embrace a device like the FitBit. I thought it was insightful and fascinating. It's cultural critique, not sociology. It's interpretation and philosophy, really a work of phenomenology.

And there are a lot of people in this thread who are part of that society, and part of that culture, who are pushing back against that interpretation because it doesn't match their actual lived experiences.

Literally, because the FitBit is for one person only. That's all that means. Its metrics are isolated to the individual who wears the fitbit and has a database of fitness data that is about them and them alone.

If all the author's doing is pointing out that the device is used by one person, then the sentence is pointless. So is everything. If, as I read it and as other people seem to have read it, the author's arguing that it is isolating to use a Fitbit without actually coming out and just saying that, it's disingenuous, because again, by that metric, literally everything is isolating. Only I can wear this shirt, so isolation is a technical requirement of this shirt. That is a silly sentence and no one would ever say that seriously, but that is the argument they're making about the Fitbit.
posted by protocoach at 8:23 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

dis_integration: Literally, because the FitBit is for one person only.

Not really. FitBit, and many other fitness tracking hardware includes a social feature, in that you can compare steps with your friends who also have FitBits. Of course, I never bothered with that because I was the only person in my friend group with a FitBit, and because I didn't care. I wanted to play Single Player. But the option is there.

And, yes, nothing is stopping you from wearing your FitBit while walking around with friends, a significant other, whatever. Two weeks ago, I went from an Air Guitar competition to a night dancing with friends, while wearing my fitness tracking watch. I was totally not isolated, and boy howdy did I meet the goals I'd set on the device, as I found out the next day.
posted by SansPoint at 8:24 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Isolation is literally a technical requirement of the FitBit.

Literally, because the FitBit is for one person only.

Only one person can eat any particular thing, but "Isolation is literally a technical requirement of food" is a ridiculous statement too.
posted by Etrigan at 8:25 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Isolation is in the same sense literally a technical requirement of clothing. Let's all go naked!
posted by saulgoodman at 8:25 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

People who obsess over their FitBit and then imagine dystopian, FitBit-fueled futures which they then feel obligated to scare-blog about are, most likely, just obsessive people. Replace FitBit with Yoga, CrossFit, P90X, religion, whatever. You will get the same results.

I do this but with Netflix and my goal is to get them to ask me if I am still alive several times a day. It's hell. HELL ON WHEELS!

John Campbell: [in passing] Good morning.
Cullen Bohannan: No it ain't...
posted by srboisvert at 8:27 AM on July 29, 2015

I turned it off, both because I got no useful insight in knowing I tended to cover the same territory every day, and because it got bought by Facebook, and those bastards don't need to know where I go every day.

See, I keep it on in case I'm ever falsely accused of a crime. Which is probably counterproductive because it's probably statistically more likely that I commit one than that I'm falsely accused of one.
posted by Drinky Die at 8:28 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Not really. FitBit, and many other fitness tracking hardware includes a social feature, in that you can compare steps with your friends who also have FitBits. Of course, I never bothered with that because I was the only person in my friend group with a FitBit, and because I didn't care. I wanted to play Single Player. But the option is there.

Isn't that the point. You isolate, then you compete. That's capitalism.

You can share food. Food can be a communal function. Maybe the FitBit can too, but that's not how it often functions. I get a badge, then you compete to get a better badge. We "gamify" our exercise.

I dunno, I'm not going to defend every bit of this article, but I think there's a bit of a failure of interpretive charity going on here.
posted by dis_integration at 8:30 AM on July 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

I'm waiting for the FitBit I can strap onto my esophagus.
posted by rocketman at 8:30 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

For sheer creepy trackingness, the activity tracker can't hold a candle up to the smartphone.

If you have an iPhone 6, go check the Health app. It's constantly monitoring your physical activity, no FitBit required. Creeeepy. (But kinda cool anyways. It uses the barometer sensor to figure out if you're climbing stairs!)
posted by neckro23 at 8:31 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Isolation is in the same sense literally a technical requirement of clothing. Let's all go naked!"
I was gonna go "not all clothing!" and google up a hilarious image of two people wearing a single suit and stick it in the thread but then I remembered that this isn't Facebook. This is how my brain works, now, inasmuch as it can be said to work, at all. That is what counts as comprehension and participation for me, now. I'm with You Can't Tip a Buick: I am deeply unnerved by the world I live in and the adaptations I've made in order to live in it. I can't read two paragraphs of text on a piece of paper without a major deliberate effort. I have lost my writer's bump. I don't like it.
posted by Don Pepino at 8:32 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

The insurance industry adopting this was the next logical step. Actuarial data was originally based on what people were not doing... as in, I'm not getting into accidents, or the number of years without having a major health problem.

That paradigm has shifted to basing premiums on what we are doing... as in I'm driving the speed limit consistently or I'm getting 10,000 steps a day consistently.
posted by prepmonkey at 8:33 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't see what the problem is. My bracelet always reminds me to have dessert. It suggest that a good midday snack should be a lot of candy or potato chips. Routinely, it tells me to take a nap and not move around a lot.

Holy shit, guys. I think I accidentally bought a FatBit.
posted by ColdChef at 8:34 AM on July 29, 2015 [19 favorites]

You can share food. Food can be a communal function. Maybe the FitBit can too, but that's not how it often functions.

You say "Can" and "Maybe" and "often", but Weigel says "literally" and "requirement". Hyperbole is the greatest thing ever, but it can go a bit far sometimes.
posted by Etrigan at 8:34 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

> I do this but with Netflix and my goal is to get them to ask me if I am still alive several times a day.

Oh, that "are you still there?" question always makes me feel weird. Look, Netflix, I'm just binge-having-something-on-in-the-background. Don't judge me.

Also, maybe give me an easy option to watch just one episode and then stop instead of automatically going on to the next. And tell me to get up and walk around, or go to sleep, or whatever is time-appropriate.
posted by cardioid at 8:34 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

dis_integration Isn't that the point. You isolate, then you compete. That's capitalism.

It's a really low-stakes kind of competition and capitalism, though. I walked more steps than my significant other yesterday. Wahoo.

And what is so bad about "gamifying" exercise, especially if, like me, you're not a fan of it? Is it "gamifying" weight loss when you step on the scale every day? (Or, in my case, once every two or three days.)

I know, I know, slippery slope, and all. Gamification has potential harm when misapplied, like forcing your checkout clerk at Target to make you sign up for a store card and do this and that. If you're doing it to yourself, though... can't see any reason to get so worked up about it.
posted by SansPoint at 8:35 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm coming out somewhere in between the two poles on this one. It seems plausible there's a point here worth considering. But these fitness tracker things are tools people choose to use to exercise more self-control--self-control is by definition the opposite of being oppressed/controlled by others. And the tone of the article does seem sort of doggedly determined to see only the most pessimistic side of the technology and its cultural meaning. It just seems to go too far and only consider one of a number of possible points of view on the same phenomena. (FWIW, I've only seen women in my life using these things to set and achieve personal goals for themselves, and I haven't used one, so YMMV.)
posted by saulgoodman at 8:38 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

For sheer creepy trackingness, the activity tracker can't hold a candle up to the smartphone.

What is that smartphone is playing 'Dust in the Wind'?
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:40 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

You say "Can" and "Maybe" and "often", but Weigel says "literally" and "requirement". Hyperbole is the greatest thing ever, but it can go a bit far sometimes.

But she's right. Isolation is literally a requirement of the fitbit. The fitbit literally measures the fitness data of an individual, and literally is required to do that. She doesn't mean: IF YOU WEAR THE FITBIT YOU HAVE TO BE ALONE ALL THE TIME CRYING ALONE SO SAD AND ALL ALONE. You can be with other people. But part of you is isolated: the part measured by the fitbit. It creates an individual profile and an individual profile only.

It does this when you are with others too. This isn't hard to understand and interpreting it as saying: if you use the FitBit you must be alone is a hyperbolic misinterpretation. It performs a kind of isolation, that's all. A private little game with yourself that you're always playing when you're wearing it even if you're with other people, and even if you're competing with them in that same game...

Anyway, given the author's pedigree, I suspect she's operating according to the Adornian principle that the way to truth in philosophical thinking is through exaggeration.
posted by dis_integration at 8:41 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

saulgoodman (FWIW, I've only seen women in my life using these things to set and achieve personal goals for themselves, and I haven't used one, so YMMV.)

It's about 66% women, 33% men, as far as I've seen in New York City (for values of wrist-mounted trackers. There's also the clip-ons which are a lot more discrete). Smartwatches with fitness tracking features catching on are probably going to nudge this more towards gender parity. Of the four other Apple Watches I've seen in the wild, it's been an equal gender balance, but I obviously need more data there.
posted by SansPoint at 8:42 AM on July 29, 2015

Hyperbole is the greatest thing ever, but it can go a bit far sometimes.

The problem is that not one person in a million can use it properly.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:42 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Gamification of fitness is not new or scary. It's called sports.
posted by Monochrome at 8:42 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

If you're doing it to yourself, though... can't see any reason to get so worked up about it.

Can you imagine reasons why this thing that you are currently doing to yourself might become mandatory in the near future? If so, that's why you should get worked up about it.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:45 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

dis_integration It performs a kind of isolation, that's all. A private little game with yourself that you're always playing when you're wearing it even if you're with other people, and even if you're competing with them in that same game...

Why is this a bad thing, though? That's what I'm not clear on. Not everything I do has to be shared with my friends/family/romantic partner.
posted by SansPoint at 8:45 AM on July 29, 2015

You Can't Tip a Buick Can you imagine reasons why this thing that you are currently doing to yourself might become mandatory in the near future? If so, that's why you should get worked up about it.

I can't. I can see it becoming the default, but I can't see it not being at least opt-out.

That's not a good thing, of course. I'd infinitely prefer that self-tracking stuff be opt-in, private, and secure. One thing I do love about Apple's ecosystem for health tracking is that it's local, private, and not shared with anyone---even Apple. This... has problems, because if you restore your phone from a cloud backup, you lose all your accumulated fitness data, but the alternative isn't much better.
posted by SansPoint at 8:48 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

You can be with other people. But part of you is isolated: the part measured by the fitbit.

Ok, so this is true then. But its so trivial as to be pointless.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:51 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

The guitar is an isolating device. Sure, you can use it to play music with others, but only you are the one strumming it's strings.
posted by Drinky Die at 8:53 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

That paradigm has shifted to basing premiums on what we are doing... as in I'm driving the speed limit consistently or I'm getting 10,000 steps a day consistently.

I think think is a legitimate concern.
posted by Beholder at 8:55 AM on July 29, 2015

If the example of how capital has incorporated the mandatory use of networked digital technology into the extraction of surplus value over the course of the years 1995-2015 doesn't make you intensely skeptical of more or less anything that makes us as weak individuals more trackable, I believe we may be residents of parallel dimensions. And I would love to move from mine to yours, because let me tell you, it's pretty cyberpunk grimdark over here in the universe where a kicky fun little online bookstore from 1994 turned into a bigger-than-most-governments everything store that monitors every second of its warehouse workers' days.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:00 AM on July 29, 2015 [14 favorites]

Relevant: To Increase Productivity, UPS Monitors Drivers' Every Move.

This is the sort of isolation the FitBit essay is talking about. To UPS, the driver is not a person who is part of a community, but an isolated collection of productivity metrics. If your metrics don't measure up, you're out. No fellow feeling there. (And yet, you say, they work together with others in a company! They're not isolated!)
posted by dis_integration at 9:07 AM on July 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

You Can't Tip a Buick: So, because the technology can be abused by top-down use, we shouldn't use it at all? I think there's a huge difference between choosing to track some personal data on yourself, privately, versus allowing your insurance company, your employer, or your significant other to get that same data on you.

What's the solution? I don't know. Regulation seems tricky to get passed, but not impossible.

But there's a lot of utility for those of us who want to know more about our habits. I don't want it to be shared with third-parties who stand to gain from it, but right now, it's private. Thankfully.
posted by SansPoint at 9:08 AM on July 29, 2015

dis_integration I don't have a problem with tracking the trucks, and the drivers within them, during business hours. If UPS is tracking what drivers do outside of work hours, then that is clearly wrong. Or, if they're tracking the drivers during business hours outside of the trucks, that, too, is wrong. There's a balance to be struck.

For example: firing a woman for uninstalling the app that tracked her when she wasn't on the clock. That shit is terrible. Tracking a truck, not so much.
posted by SansPoint at 9:11 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ye-e-es! The other day my mom was all, "Why did that UPS driver nearly run us down just now when we were strolling home from the garage sale on a lazy Saturday morning what in heaven's name?" And I said, "Funny story, mom, did you know they buckle their seatbelts BEHIND them and SIT on the BUCKLED SEAT BELT MOM because UPS requires them to wear a seatbelt but if they take the time to put the seatbelt on every time they get into the truck and take it off every time they get out of the truck, UPS will dock their pay and eventually fire them?" Next UPS will insert probes into the soles of their UPS regulation shoes to show how fast they book it up your front walk to hand you the Amazon box with your FitBit in it.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:12 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

That's what's so fascinating and scary about the FitBit. People are volunteering to track themselves and to share this tracking with the world. The bossman isn't telling them to do it. We are doing it on our own because we want to!

And why is it totally cool to do it during work and not off the clock? Our lives are our work more and more. We should ask for freedom there too.
posted by dis_integration at 9:14 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

What's the solution? I don't know. Regulation seems tricky to get passed, but not impossible.

1. A preliminary to any solution is first acknowledging that there's a problem.
2. I'm not sure there is an individual solution — though spending what free time you have working with anticapitalist organizations can't hurt. This is my favorite right now, though I'm just a pinko fellow traveler instead of an actual member. If you lean anarchist instead of socialist, there are anarchists here who can point you toward anarchist organizations that might be more to your liking.
3. On personal, individual terms, though, it also can't hurt to try to do whatever you can to make new monitoring technologies socially unacceptable in your circles — something seen as shameful and lame, rather than hip and new and cool (this is how Google Glass was at least temporarily thwarted). You know the commonplace stories about how in America, unpaid overtime is mandatory in most office jobs, but in Western Europe, people who spend extra uncompensated time in the workplace are shamed and shunned for it? People need to be shamed and shunned for hooking themselves up to monitoring devices, because once they are seen as socially acceptable, it's inevitable that they become mandatory.

posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:15 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I thought FitBit was the mechanical vanguard of the Sharing Economy^TM? Shouldn't we all be in a perfect data-sharing Utopia© by now?
posted by blue_beetle at 9:18 AM on July 29, 2015

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Aldous Huxley
posted by bukvich at 9:18 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

dis_integration What if we're not sharing? Nobody can see the data on my movement and location, right now, except me. Why can't I collect this information on myself, for myself?

I object to top-down imposed tracking, and being forced to share this data with my boss, insurer, whatever. (With certain exceptions: If my job required me to drive around and make sure certain things got to certain places in a certain timeframe, it's reasonable to track the vehicle to make sure this is being done, and being done efficiently, as long as that tracking stops at the end of my working hours. Whether this happens is another matter entirely.)

To drive the point home a little more... if I bought an analog pedometer, and wrote down the number of steps I took in a paper notebook at the end of each day, would that still be so terrible and isolating?

TL;DR: Self-tracking good. Institutional tracking bad.
posted by SansPoint at 9:19 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I really like my new smart scale that sends a bunch of metrics to Apple Health every day. It's great to get a sense of moving trends over time for weeks, months, years. I might be able to figure out what's happening with my body and diet. I'm really on board with the new fascist regime!
posted by naju at 9:21 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

TL;DR: Self-tracking good. Institutional tracking bad.

Because of course we live in a world where powerful profit-driven institutions will totes let individuals reap the benefit of new technologies instead of imposing these technologies on individuals for the benefit of the institutions.

srsly it feels like this has devolved into an discussion of whether or not foresight is a good idea.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:23 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

What if we're not sharing? Nobody can see the data on my movement and location, right now, except me. Why can't I collect this information on myself, for myself?

But you are sharing, if you're using one of these devices. You share it with the company, and they share it with others, or they will, it's only inevitable. (Cue Zuckerberg: "can you believe these people trust me?").

Anyway, the point is the technology makes something like Ben Franklin's 13 virtues self-monitoring even more ominous, because now we can do so automatically, and share that data instantaneously. It's the same kind of sea-change between polaroid nudies and cellphone sexting. One was probably unwise, but fun and usually harmless. The other, if not done with utter vigilance, can ruin your life when the drooling masturbating masses get ahold of it. Something on that order is waiting for us with these tracking devices too.
posted by dis_integration at 9:25 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

You Can't Tip a Buick: Because of course we live in a world where powerful profit-driven institutions will totes let individuals reap the benefit of technology instead of imposing it on others for profit.

What if I buy a mechanical pedometer, and write my steps down in a notebook? If I remember the routes I walked, and draw a map in the notebook too?

dis_integration But you are sharing, if you're using one of these devices. You share it with the company, and they share it with others, or they will, it's only inevitable. (Cue Zuckerberg: "can you believe these people trust me?").

Not with the Apple devices. They make a big fuss about that. Whether you believe them or not is fine. I do believe them on this.

The vibe I'm getting, and you can please correct me if I'm wrong, is that learning about your habits, collecting data on yourself, no matter the method is horrible, isolation, and dangerous. (See also dis_integration's 13 virtues comment.)
posted by SansPoint at 9:28 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

(The 13 virtues remark was kind of inside baseball. It was an oblique reference to the centrality of Franklin in Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Self-awareness is great! Virtue too. But if you say "time is money" and the monitor what you do with your own time in order to ensure you extract the most profit out of it (the essence of Franklin's self monitoring), then something is rotten, yes.)
posted by dis_integration at 9:32 AM on July 29, 2015

Collecting data on yourself in a format that's easily shared, happens automatically, cannot be (easily) falsified, and that features the use of commodity devices is a dangerous thing.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:33 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

srsly it feels like this has devolved into an discussion of whether or not foresight is a good idea.

It kinda feels like this is a generic argument that could be applied to any and all technology. "Someone could, in theory, do bad things with it." Ok. Yes. They could. They probably will. Basically every technology humans have ever invented can and has been twisted to enable people to do bad things. Should we just stop inventing? How many people need to enjoy their Fitbit before it's worth it? How many people need to lose how many pounds to generate sufficient utils for you to be ok with the technology having downsides? Why is "I like this and want it in my life because it helps me achieve my goals" always assumed to translate into "I am a sheep who is being manipulated by the forces of global capitalism into thinking I want something that I don't really want"?

But if you say "time is money" and the monitor what you do with your own time in order to ensure you extract the most profit out of it (the essence of Franklin's self monitoring), then something is rotten, yes.

Ok. Gotcha. We're really not coming from anywhere resembling the same place. That's fair.
posted by protocoach at 9:34 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm only trying to "profit" from it so I can drop 30 pounds. Can't I just want to get healthier for myself without enabling the subjugation of humanity under the cruel yoke of technological capitalism?

I think I'm done with this thread.
posted by SansPoint at 9:35 AM on July 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

If you must monitor yourself in order to lose 30 pounds or whatever, for Christ's sake be quiet about it. It's not good to make that sort of thing seem normal.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:36 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

But there's other overweight folks who want to lose weight too, and these might be useful tools for them. So, am I helping them more by alerting them to the tools and their potential pitfalls, or am I hurting them more by keeping my big, fat mouth shut?

Either way, this is my last reply in this thread.
posted by SansPoint at 9:40 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: isolation is literally a requirement.
posted by ericales at 9:42 AM on July 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

The examples brought up to dismiss the "isolation is literally a requirement" line are hilarious in their irony. Really, a guitar? Food? You can't use a Fitbit for the benefit of a crowd. You can't pass one over for someone to borrow for a moment. Isolation is literally a technical requirement.
posted by deathmaven at 9:49 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Dropping down from the abstract to the concrete: I run three times a week. I'm a super skinny guy, but I've historically been in that "guy who doesn't eat that much and has a high metabolism and never works out" demographic full of people who look healthy but who have surprise heart attacks in their late 30s. So I started running, though sporadically instead of regularly.

The thing that got me reliably running three times a week was finding a friend who also runs three times a week. I could have instead gotten a device to narc on me for not running, but then I wouldn't have conversations with my running buddy, and we never would have taken up the sports we play together, and I would have spent radically less time hanging out with him talking religion and politics and plotting our mutual escape from wage labor and rental housing.

I would, in real concrete terms, be way more isolated than I am if I had paid for a fitbit instead of planned with a friend. I would be way less political. I would be even crankier and unhappier than I typically am. My life would be, in invisible ways, smaller if I had used technology (a device to narc on me if I don't run) to circumvent the organization and planning required to regularly run with other people.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:50 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

You can't pass one over for someone to borrow for a moment.

Yes, you can. You just can't both use it at the same time.

Like a guitar.

Or you can use several of them to participate in a group activity.

Like a guitar.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:51 AM on July 29, 2015

I can't wait for Run An Empire to come out, by the way. I am totally going to conquer the local neighborhood and park.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:53 AM on July 29, 2015

I would, in real concrete terms, be way more isolated than I am if I had paid for a fitbit instead of planned with a friend.

You could easily have done both. Many, many people do. They are not mutually exclusive.

People need to be shamed and shunned for hooking themselves up to monitoring devices, because once they are seen as socially acceptable, it's inevitable that they become mandatory.

This is totally ludicrous. What do you think a smartphone is?
posted by dialetheia at 9:54 AM on July 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

You can't play a guitar without a damn guitar, please drop this example, it is unbelievably stupid.
posted by deathmaven at 9:54 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Keep saying that. I'm sure you'll convince someone eventually.
posted by Etrigan at 9:55 AM on July 29, 2015

You can't play a guitar without a damn guitar, please drop this example, it is unbelievably stupid.

You can't use a fitbit without a fitbit. I don't know what your point is but the example makes complete sense. It's the isolation thing that makes none.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:56 AM on July 29, 2015

How do you use a fitbit?
posted by deathmaven at 9:57 AM on July 29, 2015

Mod note: This feels like it's sort of wandered down some random culdesac and is going in tight circles at this point; maybe folks can drop anything that feels like it's just been going back and forth over one point or another a bunch and tack back toward the article a bit?
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:01 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

How do you use a fitbit?

I use mine as a suppository, that way I get the benefit without the ostentation.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 10:15 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm not going to defend every bit of this article, but I think there's a bit of a failure of interpretive charity going on here.

This, exactly. One of the issues going on in this thread is that it’s being intentionally derailed by snark—and, really, that snark is serving a political purpose of undermining pretty well-founded feminist theory. You don’t have to agree with that theory, but the out-of-hand dismissal is re-performing a lot of shitty masculinism here. I have no idea whether that’s intentional or inadvertent, but really, cut it out.

So, since I have a little bit more familiarity with the critical tradition that then author is coming from (although I encounter it through the humanities-facing social sciences, rather than being trained within a crit-theory department), let me attempt to clarify the “technical requirement” thing that’s getting folks here hung up. I’m seeing at least two words here that are causing issues. The first is “isolation” but the second, and just as important, is “technical.”

“Technical” here refers to the “technology” of the Fitbit not in the electrical engineering but in the wider sense of the super-complex social forms of interaction with an object that is coded to have a teleology. What does that mean? It means that we can all recognize that a Fitbit is meant to do something even as that purpose can be altered, subverted, debated, or dissolved; it also means that the Fitbit will tend to be reinscriptive of social practices, in the same way that Barbie reinscribes norms of feminine beauty. In other words, it’s emergence as a socially significant object is conditioned on certain normativities, which is clarifies or tweaks, then itself helps to produce within that social system.

The “technical requirement” is not saying that something about the gizmos inside the Fitbit requires isolation (I’ll get there in a second), but that it is conditioned on and reproduces isolation as a social technology.

Ok, “isolation.” This wasn’t the right word choice, but I see no real issues with the underlying meaning of her sentence. What the essay claims is that the Fitbit isolates a body as an individual rather than as part of a collectivity, and that is both a political/political-economic choice and it has political/political-economic consequences. You could substitute “isolation” for “individualization” or “individuation” if it helps clarify, but those are terms of art as well, so less comprehensible for a pop audience. The essay's broader point is that the technology is about constituting its wearer as a certain type of subject, who is responsible for its own maintenance as an individual. It does this in lieu of other possibilities that we tend to socially erase in the US/Global North more broadly.

Feminist theory has held for a while that bodies are relationally constituted, as are our subjectivities. To say that the technology individualizes ("isolates") is to make two claims at once: that it provides a material basis for how we understand our bodies, and that that understanding has material effects.* Again, this is well-founded stuff. Snarking at it re-performs some nasty power dynamics.

Remember, neither indivudalization nor collectivization are automatically liberatory. Both can be subverted by power. And Weigel's point is exactly that the Fitbit is a way of individualizing that is less-than-liberatory.


*In academic work I would say something more like "it provides a material basis for knowing and experiencing corporeality" so as not to perpetuate the mind-body dualism. Just covering bases down here.

[on preview, cortex, I hope this qualifies?]
posted by migrantology at 10:17 AM on July 29, 2015 [14 favorites]

Cortex: This feels like it's sort of wandered down some random culdesac and is going in tight circles at this point

The FitBit'll get angry if we don't!
posted by dr_dank at 10:21 AM on July 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

Thanks to migrantology's useful explanation, even if I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it, I'll dip my toe back in again a bit.

migrantology The essay's broader point is that the technology is about constituting its wearer as a certain type of subject, who is responsible for its own maintenance as an individual. It does this in lieu of other possibilities that we tend to socially erase in the US/Global North more broadly.

What I don't get is the mutual exclusivity of it. If I choose to exercise on my own, with a little gizmo on my wrist to motivate me, this does, I suppose individualize and isolate me from other people within this context. But, it's a free choice I make (for certain values of free, including my own natural, innate introversion). The other possibilities still exist, and can co-exist with the technological motivation, can't they? You can run in a group, cheer each other on, support each other, and do all the group activities around exercise with the device that you can do without it.

And I also don't see why, if a person makes a free choice to isolate themselves from a potential social/group/non-individual thing, this is necessarily bad.

Or, am I missing the point, after all?
posted by SansPoint at 10:31 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

deatmaven How do you use a fitbit?

In all seriousness... you kinda don't. It's largely a passive device. You slap it on your wrist/clip it to your pocket, and it tracks the steps you take. You can either see that number on your smartphone, or (on some of the models) look at the device itself to see the step count.
posted by SansPoint at 10:34 AM on July 29, 2015

In a practical sense, the relative ease of something determines how often it is done. If I have a trash can close to my desk, it stays a whole lot cleaner than if I have to go to the kitchen to throw stuff away, even with the same effort.

In that same vein, if I commit to using a fitbit to improve my health, then I will be more likely to be taking steps alone, since that is the path of least resistance. It takes extra effort and commitment to not only use the fitbit socially, with other people. But if I decide to improve health by playing soccer in the park, then that is certain to be a collective activity, even if it reduces the chances of getting started in the first place due to the logistics of finding a group of people to play with that works for me.

A fitbit and a soccerball are going to end up used in different ways, just by their nature, and result in different patterns of behavior.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:49 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

The isolation, if I understand it correctly, refers to the body of data that the FitBit collects, and given the status the FitBit presumably has with the wearer, the weight that data is then given. It measures you and you alone and focuses you on that data, essentially isolating you from your peers. If the FitBit offered to aggregate the data of a group and show how far you collectively traveled - vs each individual in comparison/competition - it would be a different story.

To really buy into that worldview, though, requires some sort of external force pressuring you to be measured and submit to judgement. Given what migrantology said above it appears this is a highly gendered issue which would explain why it isn't resonating with a lot of the men here.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:52 AM on July 29, 2015

Feminist theory has held for a while that bodies are relationally constituted, as are our subjectivities. To say that the technology individualizes ("isolates") is to make two claims at once: that it provides a material basis for how we understand our bodies, and that that understanding has material effects.*

Is this true of all feminist theory, or only Marxist feminist theory? How does one have "A Room of One's Own" (trying to get back to familiar territory here) without understanding bodies and subjectivities as at least partly non-relational and without seeing self-isolation as at least sometimes a good thing? I'm not meaning to snark, believe me, but to learn. I'm probably not even correctly understanding the concepts being used here.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:54 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

She lost me near the beginning:

FitBit recommends walking at least 10,000 steps a day. I aim for 15,000, because what kind of person does only the minimum?

Ha ha ha oh you. Seriously, though, the article seems suffused with this weird sort of compulsion and competitiveness which is somehow the fault of a customizable gadget; there are some interesting bits of information about Fitbit (which has been taken over in my life by the Apple Watch), but also slightly squicky things such as logging sex for activity points, which is all sorts of WTF.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:00 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

People need to be shamed and shunned for hooking themselves up to monitoring devices, because once they are seen as socially acceptable, it's inevitable that they become mandatory.

Extracting this as a specific thing, this seems very dangerous as a tactic. (It might be effective, but dangerous) Once you set up that sort of extreme polarization, it shoves people (without any manner of say/consent in the matter) into taking up rhetorical arms against you. It goes from "Hey, this is just a thing I'm using for myself, no big deal" to "Hey, this person's being a jerk. Back off, jerk!"

And yes, I'd categorically say that intentionally seeking to shame/shun people for X individual thing for fear of social acceptance of X is jerkish behavior.
posted by CrystalDave at 11:03 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

I don't have a problem with Fitbit in and of itself. Some people find it useful, some find it creepy, everyone has their reaction to it. That's okay. I don't use it, but I don't care if others do. Different strokes for different folks and all that.

I do have a problem with the lack of restrictions put on how large companies can use our data and the lack of protection of our privacy in the digital age. Fitbit is a really obvious example of that, but it's only an example. There's all kinds of ways in which data is shared about us by powerful companies that do not have our best interests at heart, but their bottom line. And that's what I have a problem with.

But the average person has no control over that situation, and we all find various forms of modern technology useful, so in a sense we're all forced to participate in a system that's not protecting our privacy the way it should.
posted by eternalstranger at 11:12 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Just echoing that Apple legitimately is really good about not tracking users' private information. Not out of the kindness of their hearts - It's partly a cover-your-ass procedure. They don't even want to keep the info on their servers in most cases, because they don't want to expose themselves to any sort of liability.
posted by naju at 11:20 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

naju They don't even want to keep the info on their servers in most cases, because they don't want to expose themselves to any sort of liability.

Hey, I'll take it.

I admit my fitness data doesn't live entirely in Apple's secure ecosystem. I pipe my steps and and sleep tracking data into Jawbone UP, and I track food with MyFitnessPal. I figure I'm okay with those companies having access, as they're not doing anything terrible with them. Yet. It'll be a cold day in Hell, before I put Moves back on my phone. Very, very cold. Absolute Zero.
posted by SansPoint at 11:27 AM on July 29, 2015

Can you imagine reasons why this thing that you are currently doing to yourself might become mandatory in the near future? If so, that's why you should get worked up about it.

I can imagine a lot of things. If I got worked up over everything I can imagine, then I'd be pretty worked up, I imagine.

Sometimes I read a discussion here and I ask myself "How much more metafilter could this be?" And then I think "None. None more metafilter."
posted by octobersurprise at 11:44 AM on July 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

I looked at getting a FitBit once, but I was honestly looking for something more invasive and tracking of my every move. I had expected it to track your actual movement with GPS rather than simply steps. Something that's precisely calibrated for walking is useless if you're going to paddle or bike or whatever, plus I'd like to be able to see the data on a map.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:55 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Bulgaroktonos: I don't think there's one device for you that does all that. Even the Apple Watch (which doesn't have GPS, but connects with your phone that does) requires you to set it into an Exercise Mode to track stuff like paddling, or biking.

I wouldn't mind having a map of where I go every day again, but there's no always-on mapping app I can use that isn't Moves, and therefore Facebook. If you don't mind Facebook having your location, 24/7, then Moves is for you.
posted by SansPoint at 11:59 AM on July 29, 2015

Actually, a quick Google suggested an app called Chronos as a Moves alternative, but it requires a login through either Facebook or Google, and, basically, fuck that.
posted by SansPoint at 12:05 PM on July 29, 2015

What I don't get is the mutual exclusivity of it. If I choose to exercise on my own, with a little gizmo on my wrist to motivate me, this does, I suppose individualize and isolate me from other people within this context. But, it's a free choice I make (for certain values of free, including my own natural, innate introversion). The other possibilities still exist, and can co-exist with the technological motivation, can't they? You can run in a group, cheer each other on, support each other, and do all the group activities around exercise with the device that you can do without it.

And I also don't see why, if a person makes a free choice to isolate themselves from a potential social/group/non-individual thing, this is necessarily bad.

This is a good question, and more than a bit complicated. Weigel’s piece, as I read it, is making a point about my and your continual constitution as “subjects,” that is, our experience of being ourselves in the world. This is a different cut at that neuroscience work about how we experience ourselves as distinct and as selves—that “I” understand “myself” to have continuity over time. (And I do, personally!) Compare with this thread from the other day. Work in the cultural-studies tradition tends to say that this subjective constitution is a social accomplishment rather than say that it’s an illusion or an epiphenomenal “subroutine” of the brain. So contextualized to the article, the political work is already done (or maybe reinforced) by the time the individual me decides to use a Fitbit.

The ethics of the constitution of the subject/subjects (in general) is really important, but I don’t have enough grounding in it to make strong claims or even to intelligently discuss different positions. It’s a hard problem. Foucault only took it up at the end of his life, for instance.



Is this true of all feminist theory, or only Marxist feminist theory? How does one have "A Room of One's Own" (trying to get back to familiar territory here) without understanding bodies and subjectivities as at least partly non-relational and without seeing self-isolation as at least sometimes a good thing?

It’s *also* a good question. It’s that Woolf and Weigel are looking on different ontological “registers.” I should say that I last read Woolf a decade ago, so anything I’d say about that work is going to be under-nuanced. But I understand Weigel as saying that this particular form of individualization articulates really well to contemporary capitalism; indeed, that it is reinscribing the type of subject that contemporary capitalism depends upon.

But yeah, the general claim is pretty widely held across the works that I read in journals like Signs. The question you raise is that we only experience our subjectivities as constituted subjectivities—the politics of what they are constituted “alongside” is one of the central questions in affect theory, where folks like (queer theorist) Lauren Berlant are now going.

Again, the politics of the register of individual experience are not unimportant here; rather, it’s that subjective politics are caught up in all sorts of currents of subjectivity. We tend to be taught to think of our subjectivities as intrinsic—I certainly have been. In other words, that our experience of ourselves as ourselves is "natural" rather than nurtured.** Weigel is attempting a synthesis between our constitution as subjects and the very-representational social formation of capitalist political economy. I have different theoretical commitments from hers, but I still find lots of interesting nuggets in her approach.

I’d have to reread the Woolf to think through how Weigel would likely read it. But “a room of one’s own,” as a literal or metaphorical location, can pertain to the subject in several different ways, such as saying that it’s a place apart from patriarchal capitalism (bell hooks makes this point about black homes in Yearning). Or it could be that Woolf was only afforded her own space because she was already a privileged subject. Or ideas #3, #4, #5…

Finally, your use of “bodies” made me realize that I was a little sloppy with that term. I’ve been making some generalizations to try to be comprehensible with some stuff that (I find) gets abstruse rather quickly. In the underlying corpus of theory there are multiple meanings for “bodies.” Depending on who you’re reading (Spinoza, Deleuze, Sylvan Tomkins, Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, etc), a “body” can be anything from a “differential” to a constituted relation of power to a human/biological body to the corporeal subject itself. Because one of the central questions of this lineage is how things like habits and seemingly automatic reactions are social, the ontology of a body tends to follow in practice from one’s understanding of the social world. So which “body” you assume/presume/theorize with has to do with how you think habituations work and travel.

**(I’m glossing over a lot here, admittedly)
posted by migrantology at 12:13 PM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

migrantology Uh... No snark intended, but I read your response a couple times, and I swear it's not you, it's me, but I don't think I'm getting it. By putting on a Fitbit, I am somehow not being myself in the world, or something like that?

I've got a BA in English. This is all way above my pay grade, but I am curious and want to learn.
posted by SansPoint at 12:20 PM on July 29, 2015

Heh, yeah, I could use an ELI5. It's kind of in that area where it's too complex for me to determine if it is really smart and I don't have the necessary education to see what it is built on or if it is just BS. :P
posted by Drinky Die at 12:25 PM on July 29, 2015

SansPoint, did you see this paragraph?
"In 2011, many FitBit users discovered that the profiles that they had created on the FitBit website turned up in Google searches—exposing a ton of private information, including sexual activity they had logged ('15 min passive, light effort'; '3 min active and vigorous'). Since then, the company has taken steps to prove it cares.

In December 2014, FitBit released a pledge stating that it 'is deeply committed to protecting the security of your data.'"

It sounds like people who got obsessed the way this thing is designed to make you obsessed (which is why I would love one because I know it would work on me the way it works on David Sedaris and I would be ripped out of my mind in about three weeks) and like people in this thread they wanted to record all their calorie-burning activities, not just the steps, so they used the private profiles on the company website to do that. And then...

And, huzzah, now """""""the company has taken steps to prove it cares."""""" (I hope that's enough quotation marks to convey the jaded attitude I have toward companies taking steps to prove they care. Facebook is always taking steps to prove it cares.)

The above is to me not distinguishable from the thing that bugs you about Chronos and Moves. You don't want to keep what you did and when you did it private? All you care about keeping private is where you did it?
posted by Don Pepino at 12:31 PM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Don Pepino Yeah, I missed that paragraph. On the one hand, when I got my FitBit, it was well after that privacy breach. I don't have a FitBit any more, for reasons completely unrelated to privacy. (The clip-on ones are super-easy to lose, and after losing $200 in FitBit devices inside of three months... do the math.) And I never tracked "sexual activity." I don't even recall that being a feature when I had one.

I wouldn't use a FitBit again, for multiple reasons. They want to silo your data in their proprietary database, and make it very hard to get it out. I don't want a stand-alone tracking device anymore, now that I have a smart watch. I think their gear is overpriced for what you get. And, yeah, that particular company is pretty scummy.

Now, the other issue is that FitBit is short of a shorthand for any fitness tracker, much like iPod became the shorthand for any MP3 player. You can talk about a FitBit or fitness tracker in the abstract, which is what I've tried to do all thread, or FitBit in the specific product line by the company. The individual FitBits made by FitBit may have issues, but I still don't see a problem with individual fitness tracking in the abstract.
posted by SansPoint at 12:43 PM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I just dipped my toes into fitness tracking - though a corporate wellness program where the device cost is subsidized (free) - and the whole thing is slimy.

The first thing they ask is that you connect your tracker data to their shoddy wellness program. But you can earn points to redeem for gift cards! On the order of ten cents per day if you do 10,000 steps which is a joke ($36 for the year).

But, they say, if you send us a lab test that shows your glucose level is low / cholesterol is low / etc you can earn even more points. This feels like an end-run to get around HIPAA because if you voluntarily submit the data it's no longer private.

This is on a website obviously run by the lowest bidder - who knows what they're doing with the data or how hard they're trying to secure it.
posted by meowzilla at 1:25 PM on July 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

There is not a snowball's chance in hell that I would link my Fitbit to a corporate wellness program. But I use it for my own purposes, and I have found it useful. Specifically, it has alerted me to the fact that I'm not getting enough sleep, which I'm now trying to remedy. A lot of days I don't hit 10,000 steps, and I've decided that 10,000 is an arbitrary goal and I'm going to be ok with not achieving it every day. If I start to feel like I'm obsessing about my FitBit, then I'll take it off, but I don't feel like I'm there now. I get that it's easy to theorize FitBits in a way that make them seem sinister, but they don't feel sinister to me right now. My FitBit feels useful, and I think that on this one, I'm going to go with my experience, rather than the theory.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:34 PM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

TYPING, FURIOUS - 32 MINUTES
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:31 PM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Adornian principle that the way to truth in philosophical thinking is through exaggeration.

I don't quite feel the same way about this but I'm really glad somebody said it because it captures a certain approach to critical writing very, very well.
posted by atoxyl at 4:19 PM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Wait do people actually wear a FitBit during sex? Or do you have to input that data yourself?
posted by atoxyl at 4:25 PM on July 29, 2015

People need to be shamed and shunned for hooking themselves up to monitoring devices, because once they are seen as socially acceptable, it's inevitable that they become mandatory.

This reminds me of the kind of people who lament the invention of clocks because they inevitably led to us having to be places on time. It's an absurdly reductionist argument.
posted by vanar sena at 4:38 PM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

People need to be shamed and shunned for hooking themselves up to monitoring devices, because once they are seen as socially acceptable, it's inevitable that they become mandatory.

This reminds me of the kind of people who lament the invention of clocks because they inevitably led to us having to be places on time. It's an absurdly reductionist argument.

More to the point, a lot of the most obvious abuses of this sort of technology are in the workplace and employers can already make you wear silly-ass uniforms or sing for tips or whatever the hell they want. Broader social acceptance not required.

Though I guess Can't Tip maybe meant more like smartphone-level "mandatory." Though, uh, I still don't have a smartphone (probably will at some point to be fair).
posted by atoxyl at 5:02 PM on July 29, 2015

Can't I just want to get healthier for myself without enabling the subjugation of humanity under the cruel yoke of technological capitalism?

Likely, no. That's why I drink.
posted by dis_integration at 7:22 PM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wait do people actually wear a FitBit during sex?

sexbit.
posted by telstar at 10:08 PM on July 29, 2015

Wait do people actually wear a FitBit during sex?

sexbit.

NaughtyBits
posted by kokaku at 2:38 AM on July 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Did you know that FitBit is an anagram for "it 't FBI"?
Wake up sheeple.
posted by chavenet at 4:29 AM on July 30, 2015

Wait do people actually wear a FitBit during sex?

I suppose that would be more comfortable with a bracelet like this. The standard ones tend to get caught in hair.
posted by asperity at 8:23 AM on July 30, 2015

I haven't had sex while wearing the Apple Watch yet, and probably won't. It does have a cool feature where you can send your heartbeat to someone else with an Apple Watch, which could be really awesome during intercourse, but my partner is on Android.

And, seriously, Quantified Sex is just icky. Unless you're trying to get pregnant or something.
posted by SansPoint at 9:16 AM on July 30, 2015

> The Catholic Church says the essential data point is the age 33. We will be resurrected as we were, or would have been, at 33

Noooo I'll be breastfeeding for all eternity noooooo
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:18 PM on July 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

It does have a cool feature where you can send your heartbeat to someone else with an Apple Watch, which could be really awesome during intercourse

It actually just sends a simulated heartbeat based on the most recent readings, rather than your actual current heartbeat. : \
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:01 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Not that I am suggesting that I have tried your idea or anything
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:02 PM on August 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

It does have a cool feature where you can send your heartbeat to someone else with an Apple Watch, which could be really awesome during intercourse, but my partner is on Android.

Time to get my vision checked again I guess, and a maybe new keyboard. I totally read "an Android" on the first pass.
posted by mcrandello at 2:20 AM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

wearable (n.): A trendy dog collar.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:07 AM on August 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Fitbit Wants To Help Corporations Track Employee Health.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 12:41 PM on August 12, 2015