Saving the Quantified Self: How we come to know ourselves now

Author(s): Yeesheen Yang

Source: Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter 2014), pp. 80-87
Published by: University of California Press
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 Each colored block represents a GPS location visited by the artist over a ninety-day period in Making Tracks.
Greater color saturation represents more frequent visits to that location. COURTESY LAURIE FRICK.

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 yeesheen yang
Saving the Quantified
Self
How we come to know ourselves now

M
y grandmother recently had a pacemaker implanted. Major surgery and its
aftermath are frightening at any age, but for a ninety-three-year-old and
her family it is a particularly scary tightrope to walk. Had her recovery been
filmed for a montage in a family drama, there would have been reassuring doctors and
smiling nurses with encouraging words as the liveliness returned to her eyes and
activity to her arms and legs—but this wasn’t a movie. This was the information age.
As we gathered around her hospital bed in the days after the procedure, I could tell that
my grandmother was worried, and I was worried, too.
Then my mother slipped a small portable pulse oximeter over my grandmother’s
finger to measure her blood pressure, resting heart rate, and blood oxygen saturation.
We all tried it. The quick readout and the ensuing conversation about my grand-
mother’s thrice-daily ritual of checking her numbers were comforting. As her recovery
progressed, a pedometer measured her daily walks, and this information was even
more fortifying: 650 steps one day, 800 steps the next. It is satisfying to imagine her
circling her tiny backyard, amid the small fruit trees and high stone walls, tracking her
own progress. And it brings a smile to my face knowing that this fragile nonagenarian
is so in sync with the zeitgeist.
In modern times, self-tracking like my grandmother is doing is how we’ve come to
satisfy the exhortation to ‘‘know thyself.’’ In this conception of the self, we are not
beings made in the image of our god, animals with intellect, or finely calibrated
machines; we are fields of data. To know ourselves is to mine, map, and analyze
that data and make adjustments where necessary. We quantify ourselves using

BOOM: The Journal of California, Vol. 4, Number 4, pps 80–87, ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X.
© 2014 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and
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 ‘‘I walk fourteen thousand steps each day;
pedometers, oximeters, stopwatches, obsessive journaling,
and increasingly sophisticated technology to track every
knowable piece of data that our bodies and our selves can
spit out. These numbers can bring comfort, and they can
bring real understanding, not just of REM cycles and caloric
intake, but of what it means to be, precisely, us.
This concept—which we might call the algorithmic body,
a body built from data—is gaining traction in Silicon Valley,
where big names are attaching themselves to ideas, pro-
ducts, and services that aim to exploit all the data we are
generating about our bodies for a range of goals. Some, like
the wearable fitness tracker Fitbit or the genomic testing
company 23andMe seek to arm users with the data they
need to improve their health, vitality, and, possibly, longev-
ity. Others, like Google cofounder Larry Page and his Cali-
fornia Life Company (Calico), have something grander in
mind: immortality. All of these ideas are rooted in the idea
of a body that can be understood and even preserved
through data—the Quantified Self.
Quantified Self—which is actually a company and
a movement—was founded in 2007 by Kevin Kelly and
Gary Wolf, two editors at Wired magazine. It promotes the
idea that gathering quantifiable data about oneself and one’s
life through practices of self-tracking allows us to know,
rather than guess, how well we are living our lives. Am
I really keeping under the caloric limits I need to meet in
order to lose weight? How much time do I actually spend on
Facebook in one day? How much time do I spend writing?
Well-framed questions, together with the increasingly pow-
erful self-monitoring tools, can transform the nebulous
experience of life into hard data, allowing us to engage in
informed and effective interventions. Self-trackers believe
in ‘‘self-knowledge through numbers’’—a phrase pro-
claimed in big type on the Quantified Self website.1 Practi-
tioners now meet in over one hundred cities around the
globe, from New York to Milan, Mexico City, Chennai, and
Helsinki, to share and reflect on the ways they are using
numbers to understand and improve themselves.
Self-trackers are a well-educated, engaged, relatively afflu-
ent, and technically inclined demographic. They are deeply
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ergo, I am a walker.’’
serious about this form of self-reflection.2 Many are hobby-
ists, who use existing apps to capture self-data. Others are
practitioners who build their own tools to share with or sell
to the larger community. One presenter at a recent Quanti-
fied Self meetup in San Francisco talked about learning to
reduce the duration of incidents when he felt upset during
the day by logging alerts from his heart-rate monitor. The
data allowed him to pinpoint his emotional triggers and
assess the effectiveness of various coping strategies. He
reported that he reduced the amount of time he spent upset
by 23 percent over the course of his self-study.3
Commercially available wearable monitors are some of
the simplest tools in the kit of the modern self-tracker, and
they epitomize the emerging relationship between data, self-
monitoring, and our sense of self. The rich data of tracking,
real-time feedback, and the minute experiences of one’s
body can blend together to generate a new, data-informed
sense of one’s own body. Anthropologist Dawn Nafus sug-
gests, in her work on self-tracking, that ‘‘one learns how to
feel one’s body through the data.’’ Sociologists including
Deborah Lupton suggest that the quantified data of self-
tracking can lead to an enriched qualitative practice of self-
reflection. Data becomes part of a process of telling oneself
stories about one’s progress in life. Lupton argues that self-
tracking is narrative and performative, a practice that pro-
duces and reflects upon who we are becoming: ‘‘I walk four-
teen thousand steps each day; ergo, I am a walker.’’4
I see something more here: an algorithmic body emerg-
ing from this ongoing project of building oneself up
through data. The algorithmic body is established as the
object of surveillance and monitoring for the purpose of
intervention and it is the object of intervention as much
as our physical bodies, and perhaps even more so someday.
It is instructive that relating to, reflecting upon, and produc-
ing oneself today is performed through data. Data is the
idiom of the biotechnological age and, increasingly, now the
language of the self.
Throughout history, scientific trends have had a profound
effect on perceptions of the self and body. In the second half
of the nineteenth century, for instance, a mechanistic rather
For over a year, Laurie Frick tracked her activities in a daily journal. To turn data into art, she looks for patterns that are at once organic and ordered.
COURTESY LAURIE FRICK.

than an algorithmic view of the body was on the rise. This
understanding of the body flourished alongside the rapid
proliferation of mechanical technologies in the form of
industrial machinery, transportation, and medical knowl-
edge. Notions of the body began to focus on issues of effi-
ciency, fatigue, and the cycles of a closed system. Historian
Anson Rabinbach traces the idea of the human motor—the
body as machine—in relation to the articulation of the Sec-
ond Law of Thermodynamics, which specifies the rule of
conservation of energy.
The algorithmic perspective has been influenced
by increasing interest in big data and data mining, and it
has been fueled by the rapid development in personal
surveillance technology, which has over time built up big
data about human bodies and human lives in the aggregate
and individually. But at least one branch of the roots of the
algorithmic body has a longer history, dating back to mid-
century speculative work on longevity, transhumanism, the
idea of transcending the human condition, and cryonics.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small so-called
‘‘freezing movement’’ emerged in the high-tech dream-
land of Southern California and the suburbs of Phoenix,
Arizona. Cryonics relies on an understanding of the self
based entirely on the brain. Inspired by the expanding
possibilities of space exploration and travel, cryonic pres-
ervation promised to help humans live longer by freezing

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 ‘‘The wish to escape the human condition,
I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend
man’s life span far beyond the hundred-year limit.’’
and transporting ‘‘just the brain to the future,’’ where, it
was hoped, the technology would exist to breathe life back
into a frozen brain and reanimate the person to whom it
was once attached. Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the
most successful cryonics corporation, is still in existence
today and counts famous futurist and Google’s director of
engineering Ray Kurzweil among its patrons.
Freezing for immortality has mostly fallen out of favor
now. But the idea that the essence of a person can be stored
until we have the capability to reconstitute it somehow is
back with a new twist in the era of the algorithmic self. If
a person can be understood through a field of data, can he or
she be preserved digitally, forever, if that data is saved for
the future? Kurzweil thinks so. Kurzweil is an evangelist for
what he calls the ‘‘singularity,’’ which foresees a moment
sometime in the near future when human technological
advancement and artificial intelligence will reach a level of
acceleration that will allow human beings to escape death: in
other words, achieve immortality. The idea isn’t that you
and your body will live forever, but that your being could
live on, digitally, the algorithmic self constituted, or rather,
reconstituted by data.
Kurzweil and others studying digital immortality have
the same hunger for data about the self as Quantified
Self practitioners, but their field of inquiry is the mind
and not the body. Their goal is to save enough of the
right kind of information to be able create an avatar that
would have not just their memories but be able to learn
and process new information, too. Instead of heart rates
and steps taken, digital immortality after the singularity
depends on collecting data such as every conversation
a person has, their history of connections, and interac-
tions on the social web.
Which brings us to Larry Page.
In 2013, Google cofounder Larry Page announced that
his company was launching a research and development
venture that would target health and the human lifespan.
Details about Calico are few, but its star-studded team of
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tech gurus and biotech heavyweights generated excitement,
speculation, and high expectations. Art Levinson, chairman
of Apple and Genentech, serves as CEO. Cynthia Kenyon,
a distinguished biologist known for her work on the effects
of genetic manipulation on the longevity of roundworms, is
vice president of aging research. Sensational terms such as
‘‘immortality’’ and ‘‘anti-death’’ have been frequently linked
to Calico in the media. Indeed, Page himself has stated that
he hopes to solve the problem of aging in general terms,
rather than targeting specific diseases such as particular
types of cancer. He calls the project his ‘‘moon shot.’’5
The announcement that Google would be investing
heavily in an antiaging project was greeted with surprise
and incredulity (one TechCrunch headline literally begins,
‘‘WTF’’).6 But it shouldn’t have been. Although facts about
Calico’s research are thin, it is clear that the company pro-
poses to merge data-mining strategies, for which Google is
famous, with biotech. According to The Wall Street Journal,
Google also hired molecular biologist Andrew Conrad
to head ‘‘baseline study,’’ a research project that will begin
by aggregating the genetic and molecular profiles of 175
individuals.7 Google will use its massive computational cap-
abilities to analyze this genetic information for markers and
patterns. One might compare this kind of work to a scaled-
up version of what 23andMe offered for its customers before
its run-in with the FDA: an at-home genetics profiling ser-
vice that offered information about genetic heritage and
disease factors to consumers, while selling anonymous
genetic information to scientists engaged in medical
research. 23andMe’s founder, Anne Wojcicki, is married
to another Google cofounder, Sergey Brin. Calico, too, is
likely to be working to produce insights about human aging
through data mining and algorithms.8
In the aftermath of Sputnik, the launch that sparked the
space race and massive public investment in space travel,
Hannah Arendt observed: ‘‘For some time now, a great
many scientific endeavors have been directed toward mak-
ing life also ‘artificial,’ toward cutting the last tie through
 The second-to-last in a 52-week series of collages tracking the author’s weekly walking. COURTESY LAURIE FRICK.

which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is
the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth
that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test
tube. . . . And the wish to escape the human condition, I sus-
pect, also underlies the hope to extend man’s life span far
9
beyond the hundred-year limit.’’ Arendt feared a time
when the seduction and sheer power of what we can accom-
plish with innovation, computation, and technological abil-
ity overtakes our ability to truly question, understand, and
communicate with each other about our power and its poten-
tially horrifying consequences. In a world where ‘‘speech,’’
by which Arendt meant the language of politics and ethics,
‘‘has lost its power’’ to the unstoppable momentum of
technological progress, Arendt feared we will have lost that
which actually makes us human.10 The algorithmic concep-
tion of the human body and the transhumanist project of
transforming that body into immortal form seem to verge
on that possibility. Arendt’s skepticism is shared by a majority
of Americans: a recent Pew Research Study on radical life
extension found that most people would not want medical
treatments that would extend their lives up to 120 years.11
As Silicon Valley pioneers forge ahead constructing
the algorithmic body, with help from all of our own
self-monitoring, many questions remain: about access, pri-
vacy, the significance of viewing our bodies as data, and the
implications of potentially living forever in some form or

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another. But the power of data to help us understand our-
selves is real and seductive. It’s hard to resist. I’ve started
tracking my own exercise and writing habits. I have always
had trouble sleeping, so I’m tracking my restfulness and
productivity. I’m also considering performing an experi-
ment with bimodal sleeping—that is, sleeping for two
shorter periods during the course of each twenty-four hours
rather than one long period at night. I’ll monitor and ana-
lyze the results and, who knows, maybe this will change my
life. I don’t know if I want to live to 120 or beyond, and
I certainly don’t know if I’m ready for the singularity. But
the algorithmic body is a compelling way to relate to myself.
As I gain comfort with myself as a quantifiable and quanti-
fied being, I may yet become comfortable with saving that
data for some different future than the one I imagine
now. B
Notes
1
The Quantified Self website can be found here: http://quanti
fiedself.com.
2 11
Self trackers have their own history and legacy. Many note that
before smartphones, there were pens and paper, which Benja-
min Franklin used in his obsessive daily self-chronicling.
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3
Paul LaFontaine’s writing on his self-study can be found here:
http://quantselflafont.com/2014/07/13/improvement-results-
in-upset-recovery/.
4
Deborah Lupton, ‘‘Beyond the Quantified Self: the Reflexive
Self-Monitoring Self,’’ This Sociological Life, http://simply
sociology.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/beyond-the-quantified-
self-the-reflexive-monitoring-self/.
5
Larry Page, ‘‘Calico Announcement,’’ 18 September 2013,
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2013/09/calico-announce
ment.html.
6
Gregory Ferenstein and Rip Empson, ‘‘WTF is Calico, and Why
Does Google Think Its Mysterious New Company Can Defy
Aging?’’ TechCrunch, 19 September 2013, http://techcrunch.
com/2013/09/19/wtf-is-calico-and-why-does-google-think-its-
mysterious-new-company-can-defy-aging/.
7
Alistair Barr, ‘‘Google’s New Moonshot Project,’’ The Wall Street
Journal, 27 July 2014.
8
Dominic Basuto, ‘‘Google Wants to Make You Immortal and
ObamaCare Will Pay For It,’’ Washington Post, 8 October 2013.
9
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958), 2.
10
Ibid., 3.
PEW Research, ‘‘Living to 120 and Beyond: Americans’ Views
on Aging, Medical Advances, and Radical Life Extension,’’ 6
August 2013.
 A month of sleep. COURTESY LAURIE FRICK.

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