Technology has made it possible for everyone to see everything as an opportunity for productivity. You can measure your sleep, sex and steps with a Fitbit, your attractiveness with Tinder, your wittiness with Twitter, your popularity with Facebook. You can transform your personality into a dashboard of data streams that can be monitored, analyzed and optimized with the precision of an industrial process. You can turn your life into a factory – and not just metaphorically. In producing yourself, you produce economic value for others. The hours you spend on these platforms may be unwaged, but they generate real revenue for the companies that own them.

This is the genius of conspicuous production. It not only promotes a culture of overwork, it makes our dwindling amount of leisure time economically productive. There is no escape: either we’re working for the company or we’re working on ourselves, but we’re always working. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours of what we will” was the anthem of the workers who first demanded the eight-hour-day more than a century ago. Those distinctions don’t make sense any more. Even our sleep is factored into our productivity score – the entrepreneur of the self never gets to clock out.

Today, the old slogan of the labor movement sounds like utopian science fiction. Imagine a society that claimed so little of our labor. Imagine a world where the poor didn’t have to work so hard to exist, and the rich didn’t have to work so hard to appear worthy of their wealth, because rich and poor didn’t exist.

"The data on the “self” has immediately moved from a hidden, withdrawn state to a shared, commoditised representation of the functions of the body that can be used to shape behaviour, understanding and self-appreciation. The “self” itself is problematised, and the mobility and subjective spatiality of the self in the data-infused environment becomes an issue. What kind of “self” is being presented through these technologies? Should I be wearing a shiny new iWatch with my health and fitness information continually measured and available at a flick of the wrist, what does this mean to the sense of space that I have when I move through the world? It is tempting to offer a view of the subjective experience of world as a solipsistic, self-enclosed bubble where the measuring of self goes with an angst engendered by continual surveillance of the once hidden internal states of the body. Research into the subjective, phenomenological experience of the world when using this technology is needed, and needed now to understand the existential effects of living to “know thyself”."

"Much of the promise of the Quantified Self movement is in the discovery and adoption of near-perfect, near-universal metrics. If we can develop the perfect measurement for an object and its functions, nothing can be out of order, and we all can achieve a sort of equal footing. This is a dangerous line of thinking, and one that’s been problematized since Rousseau.

The Quantified Self movement searches for universal points and scores and payoffs, but doesn’t acknowledge the systems behind how those are valued, who chooses them, what they mean, and who they leave out -- often the already overlooked and marginalized, like caregivers and other low-wage workers.

Imagine, workers doing all sorts of labor engaging with their data traces in ways that make their work safer and their efforts better recognized. Rather than seeking to perfect measures and standards of that work through statistical working-over, can we envision workers taking their own data to management to improve working conditions? I want Quantified Self to be a messy space, one where users willingly choose the aspects of their lives they are proudest of, and most troubled by, and allow them to track, and engage with their narratives over time on their own terms.

I wonder if we can ever reach a point where sensor technology and data-mining can be accessible and successful, flexible enough to be genuinely empowering, allowing users to control their own narratives. Is it improbable to dream of a feminist data future?"

There's an odd kind of solace in the idea that even when we seem most alone, our digital companions are constantly watching over us, keeping track of our whereabouts, glowing softly in the dark while we sleep.

"Put simply, a quantrepreneur is someone who turns up somewhere in the Quantified Self milieu because he or she is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in self-tracking, frequently (though certainly not always) via a startup that’s making an app or a device. Although there are plenty of folks within the Quantified Self community who started out as self-trackers, and who later formed companies to market self-tracking tools they’d initially designed for themselves, my sense is that—especially when used pejoratively—the term “quantrepreneur” more often applies to people who attend Quantified Self events solely as company representatives or venture capitalists, or who are marketing tools they did not themselves create (and may not even use). When people were saying that Quantified Self Europe 2013 felt “a lot less startup-y” than the Quantified Self Global conferences, a big part of what they meant was, “I’ve met fewer quantrepreneurs here.”

So why is the individualism of Quantified Self tricky for quantrepreneurs? After all, technoutopian neoliberal individualism brings us both Bay Area startup culture and Quantified Self; both the action of striking out alone to pursue self-knowledge (with some gadgets and some shared knowledge and a community of like-minded others) and the action of striking out alone to start your own company (with some cofounders and some venture capitalists and maybe some employees) are pretty Autonomous Individual™ things to do. So entrepreneurialism and Quantified Self should go hand in hand (or hand in gadget), right? Yet as a quantrepreneur, there’s only so much marketing you can do before your (self-)marketing becomes telling someone else what to do, casting yourself as some kind of authority, or in some other way running afoul of someone else’s individual autonomy. Share your own success story, and QSers will listen; offer an app or a device, and QSers who think it might be useful will probably go out and try it (and, especially if they’re happy with it, tell all their friends). But if you come on too strong in your sales pitch (especially during a Show & Tell session), some QSers will be turned off; try to force anything down anyone else’s throat—especially if you haven’t so much as sampled that Kool-Aid yourself—and you’ll probably just be ignored. People may attend Quantified Self events to share ideas, to problem-solve, to learn from peers, to network, or even to make friends, but no one attends a Quantified Self event to be told what to do. Quantified Self and Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism may be products of similar social forces, but poorly-played quantrepreneurialism is the ‘double negative’ of individualism; it cancels itself out."

Insanity