The Quantified Self in Precarity

Work, Technology and What Counts

Phoebe V. Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317201601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics?

The Quantified Self in Precarity highlights how, whether it be in insecure 'gig' work or office work, such digitalisation is not an inevitable process – nor is it one that necessarily improves working conditions. Indeed, through unique research and empirical data, Moore demonstrates how workplace quantification leads to high turnover rates, workplace rationalisation and worker stress and anxiety, with these issues linked to increased rates of subjective and objective precarity.

Scientific management asked us to be efficient. Now, we are asked to be agile. But what does this mean for the everyday lives we lead?

With a fresh perspective on how technology and the use of technology for management and self-management changes the 'quantified', precarious workplace today, The Quantified Self in Precarity will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Science and Technology, Organisation Management, Sociology and Politics.

1 Getting to Know the Autonomic Self

Diarising, quantification of activities and self-experimentation are not unprecedented obsessions. King Charles II had a penchant for weighing himself at specific times in the day. A report from the Royal Society’s archives from 9 March 1664 written by Sir Robert Moray indicates that Charles II, aged 34 at the time of this report,

had the Curiosity of weighing himself, very frequently, to observe the severall Emanations of his Body, before and after sleep, Tennis, Riding abroad, Dinners and Suppers: and that he had found he weighed lesse after Tennis, by two pounds three ounces (but the King drinking two draughts of Liquor after play, made up his weight;) after Dinner, by four pounds and an halfe.

(Corden, 2013)

Sanctorious of Padua, noted for introducing quantitative approaches to medicine in the 16th and early 17th century, weighed himself before and after meals, weighed his meals and then weighed his excrement (Neuringer, 1981: 79). Dali is also said to have meticulously measured his excrement.

While the King, the physician and the artist tracked physical expressions, other historical figures measured the less tangible. Benjamin Franklin kept his moral compass in track quite explicitly through daily self-examination and keeping track of his actions in a little book which contained a ‘page for each of the virtues’, one of which was temperance, where the subheading stated ‘eat not to dullness: drink not to elevation’. A grid beneath listed the various types of violations one might commit in relation to the virtue along a timeline of days. Franklin would make a ‘little black spot’ for ‘every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day’. Buckminster Fuller was an avid self-tracker and gave himself the nickname ‘guinea pig b’; he kept a scrapbook diary about his day-to-day life and his ideas.

Humans have, in the 21st century, moved into a new series of fascinations of body tracking. We are interested in knowing about our autonomic systems or an autonomic ‘self’ that was seen to be largely out-of-bounds for the layman and woman’s knowledge and understanding. Autonomic refers to the nervous system of a physiological self where the mind, sentiment and body are less separable than mainstream Cartesian modernism dictates. Autonomic means self-governing and comes from the Greek, ‘auto’ or ‘self’ + ‘nomos’, or ‘law’. Through intensive and long-term data collection advocated by the Quantified Self movement discussed below, individuals have begun to pursue autonomic self-knowledge to improve ourselves. To gain this knowledge and set out self-improvement plans, we track movement, activity, emotions and attitudes in a quest to gain more intimate knowledge about the self. We wish to control, modify, regulate and understand our ‘selves’ more precisely in order to control, improve and develop this ‘self’, as though this ‘self’ is an identity proxy or a data double such as is discussed by Ruckenstein (2014); a self that requires constant, uncritical self-improvement. We track patterns in exercise, sleeping, running and walking as provided by FitBit; eating habits with dashboards provided by most fitness trackers; body temperatures provided by Microsoft Band 2; exposure to the elements like sunshine, provided by a wearable device called Netatmo’s June; and pollution detected by the Tzao; and a range of other personalised pursuits. So, knowledge about the autonomic self is attainable through a mixture of physical, psychological, biometric, quantifiable, and sometimes topographical attributes in ways Franklin and Dali could only have imagined.

‘Think about all the times you need to use your identity’ says Andrew D’Souza, President of Bionym, a company that has invented a wristband that tracks users’ movements and offers biometric authentication (Hennigan, 2014). Start-ups began to look at unprecedented methods to profile consumers. The Bionym is designed to capture a customer’s gaze upon entering a shop or restaurant, so wait staff can immediately serve the customer based on previous orders or requests, ‘from booking tickets to check in, security, room access, boarding passes and purchases… knowing your name and dietary preferences’ (Hennigan, 2014). Consumer tracking has allowed other-tracking and consumer profiling for years, with such things as Tesco Club Cards. Technologies now allow personalised pilgrimages for self-knowledge, allowing people to define the ‘self’ in ways even more aligned around consumerism.

However, this book examines how self-knowledge involves knowledge of the working self, rather than the consuming self, examining how technological developments affect the employment relationship in unprecedented ways. The digitally quantified worker is precarious, and the insecurity of quantified workplaces are symptoms of the routes of productivity capture in unstable times. As the machine becomes increasingly central for human resource decisions and appears in more ways in the employment relationship, it is the use of the data made available from technologies that seals an emerging metaphorical social pact that has not yet been agreed by all parties, those parties being workers as self-experimenters and precarious subjects; an ever-invisible management¹ that is sometimes entirely machinic; and the specialists and inventors who develop and implement new technologies to measure our labour. While these new relationships do not arise simply because new technologies have emerged, data allows the seeming neutralisation of the employment relationship in ways that this book reveals. In fact, new technology often accelerates already existing hierarchies whether seen in mental (knowledge economy, professional, cultural, educational work) or manual (warehouse, factory, construction, transport) labour relations.

Digitalised workplaces are located along a continuum from a virtual platform where algorithms determine what work you have and what work will be removed from you in virtual factory and office floors, in competition with other workers and dictated by what journalist Sarah O’Connor (2016) called an algorithmic boss as seen in ‘crowd’ or ‘gig’ work made available by such platforms as Uber and Mechanical Turks; to the individual worker in an office whose activities are tracked, monitored, surveilled, and whose work is intensified by the automation dimensions of such technologies, or automated altogether. Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, where the tool is seemingly ever more precise calculations about human labour, through the use of big data and people analytics? Data is treated as a neutral arbiter and judge, and is being prioritised over qualitative judgements in key performance indicator management systems and digitalised client-based relationships.

People pursue self-improvement and regulation when they set out to self-track for physical and mental health and other methods of self-improvement, as are celebrated in the Quantified Self movement and community. The flip side of this is when management asks workers to self-track for performance, whether it is reaching the right level of health or working more efficiently and productively; or when the client or employer ‘other tracks’ workers through electronic performance monitoring and other workplace surveillance methods; and views data either openly or surreptitiously. In digitally quantified workplaces such as those outlined in this book, the employment relationship is ambivalent and often, our work is intensified. Indeed, ‘computers, which are meant to help [workers to] do the work more efficiently are also extremely merciless monitoring tools’ leading to conditions where ‘work rates are close to the maximum that workers can manage’ (Peaucelle, 2000: 461). Digitalisation, I claim, is not an inevitable process nor one that necessarily improves working conditions. Indeed, it has already been demonstrated to lead to high turnover rates, workplace rationalisation and worker stress and anxiety, which I link to increased rates of both objective and subjective precarity in Chapter 3.

The five years of research informing this book contributes to the literature on the political economy of self-tracking where exercise and casual games become labour (Greenhill and Fletcher, 2013; Till, 2014); to the wealth of research on the growing power of machines and tools over labour via deterritorialisation (Hardt and Negri, 2000); symbolic impacts on society and sociality (Leon, 2015), automation (Frey and Osborne, 2013); the algorithmic boss in crowdwork platforms (Berg, 2016; Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft, 2014; Cheney-Lippold, 2011; Gandini, Pais and Beraldo, 2016) and electronic performance management (Bhave, 2014; Jeske and Santuzzi, 2015); digital reproductive labour (Jarrett, 2016); digitalised precarity (Dyer-Witheford, 2015; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Huws, 2014); virtual work (Holts, 2013; Huws, 2014); digital labour (Fuchs, 2014) and work in the social factory (Terranova, 2000); questions of the intensifying relationship between bodies and the machine (Guéry and Deleule, 2014; Haraway, 1991) and machinic and socio-technical assemblages (DeLanda 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1983; Lupton, 2012). By highlighting the political and ideological moments of production, where politics emerge from data captured from hidden labour in the employment relationship and where idealised health and wellbeing become an ideology, I address Burawoy’s call to politicise production (1985: 122). New forms of work quantification that involve electronic tracking of what I call ‘unseen’ labour (involving affective and emotional labour) are capital’s latest method to capture surplus value in unstable conditions of agility. So, through emphasising power relations where machines intervene at unprecedented levels of intensity and intimacy, I speak to Massumi’s critique of affect theories that begin with stasis rather than process (2002), by identifying systems where workers’ reproductive labour symbolically serves machines.

The following sections introduce this book by first looking at evidence of the rise of self-and other-tracking in workplaces and ways it has been conducted, in ‘Ways and Means to Quantify the Self at Work’; dealing conceptually with the idea of the ‘self’ as a way of introducing the theoretical contributions of the text in ‘The Self and Science of Quantification’ and then, the ‘Legal landscape for quantification of workers’ just before the ‘Introducing possible conclusions’ where I present key arguments and outline the subsequent chapters.

Ways to Quantify the Self at Work

With the use of radio frequency identification (RFID), Bluetooth, triangulation algorithms and infrared sensors, a variety of wearable devices entered the market in the early 2000s including Nike Fuelband, Fitbit One, and Bodymedia Armband, which would help people to find their autonomic selves. Noticing the uptake in use of these devices, Kevin Kelly, Executive and Founding Editor of Wired Magazine; Gary Wolf, writer for Wired; and others in the Silicon Valley area, began to meet to discuss their own experiences in quantifying themselves for self-optimisation. It became clear that a new social movement and community was on the horizon where ‘self-knowledge through numbers’ would become the driving mantra.

The steering group launched the first Quantified Self Conference in San Francisco in 2007, and Kelly’s event publicity linked quantifying the self to ‘real change [that] will happen in individuals as they work through self-knowledge… of one’s body, mind and spirit… a rational [path]: unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved’. For the first Quantified Self conference, Kelly called for projects that, for example, might discuss personal genome sequencing, life logging, measuring chemical body load counts, self-experimentation, location tracking, digitising body info, sharing health records, psychological self-assessments and medical self-diagnostics. The 2014 Quantified Self Conference in San Francisco included ‘Quantifying motivation with a smartwatch’, ‘Photo lifelogging’, ‘Grief and Mood Tracking’, ‘My Weight and Sleep’ and ‘Deciphering my brain fog’. The San Francisco Quantified Self Meetup Group describes itself on its website as ‘a regular show and tell for people taking advantage of various kinds of personal tracking – geo-tracking, life-logging, DNA sequencing, etc., to gain more knowledge about themselves’ and ‘invites topics around but not limited to’

• Chemical Body Load Counts
• Personal Genome Sequencing
• Lifelogging
• Self Experimentation
• Risks/Legal Rights/Duties
• Behavior monitoring
• Location tracking
• Non-invasive Probes
• Digitizing Body Info
• Sharing Health Records
• Psychological Self-Assesments
• Medical Self-Diagnostics (Quantified Self Bay Area Meetup Group, 2017)

The 2015 conference programme included talks such as:

• Know Thy Cycle, Know Thyself
• Three Years of Logging my Inbox Count
• Breaking the TV Habit
• How I Measured my Talk
• Thinking Through Data Access and Privacy
• Mindful Devices – Living Non-Judgementally in a Connected World
• Lifelogging – Quantitating Aspects for Health
• The Digital Health Coach
• Is Your Nervous System Hungry?
• Extreme Productivity: Maniac Week and Other Productivity Hacks

I attended the 2015 Expo and led a breakaway session I called ‘The Quantified Self at Work’ along with Joost Plattel, who was the data analyst for the Quantified Workplace experiment run by the company in the Netherlands I outline in Chapter 4. We had a very good turnout for our breakaway session and several people asked questions afterwards about what we had identified as patterns in employee usage of wearables and other tracking technologies in the experiment. One notable experience during this session was that while I was giving my talk, Joost looked down at his watch several times. I kept thinking that he was keeping track of how long I had spoken for and so sped up my talk as I was not keeping track of the time myself. Only later did Joost tell me he had just bought the new Apple Watch that had been launched that day and was looking at notifications! Physical movements may represent new significance as technology takes on new functions!

Quantified Self international events and the proliferating use of many new popular tracking devices mark a movement where people in this emerging community seek self-improvement and self-empowerment through capturing data from sensory and logging devices. Lupton notes that interest in more modern types of self-quantification probably started in the 1970s, but the term ‘quantified self’ advanced in our cultural lexicon in 2008 (Lupton, 2013: 26). Use of the term became increasingly widespread throughout the media in 2012 and 2013 and Quantified Self events have allowed the concept to flourish. Quantified self-improvement started in the extra-curricular realms but has become accepted into workplaces, which is the focus of the current book.

Workplace quantified self projects are often part of corporate wellness offerings, and self-tracking initiatives are focused on other purposes such as productivity, movement, stress and wellbeing. Accelerometers, Bluetooth, triangulation algorithms and infrared sensors allow managers to monitor workers far beyond traditional hours logged by swipecards. Increasingly, ‘many wellness programs now address things like emotional well-being, mental health and financial wellness’ (Kohll, 2016) and the benefits of improved productivity and employee wellness are continuously trumpeted (Campbell, 2015; Rackspace, 2014; Verma, 2014). Wearables and other tracking devices are manifest in the form of a range of body-worn devices including pins, rings, badges and smartwatches. The technologies used in workplaces measure and track mental and physical performance, via accelerometers, Bluetooth, triangulation algorithms and infrared sensors...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• 1 Getting to Know the Autonomic Self
• 2 Labour Processes from Industrial Betterment to Agility: Mind, Body, Machine
• 3 Precarity 4.0: A Political Economy of New Materialism and the Quantified Worker
• 4 Unseen Labour and All-of-Life Surveillance
• 5 Meet Some Self-Trackers
• 6 Robot Army of Redressers?
• Index