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This chapter addresses the implications of self-quantification in its relation to clinical quantification. By self-quantification, I mean those practices of keeping track of aspects of ones life, activity, or body. I explore these trends in conversation with more traditional biomedical modes of accounting and quantification, and then turn to the n of 1, a central and practice of Quantified Self (QS). Borrowing from scientific discourse, the n of 1 suggests that knowledge can be gained at the scale of the individual. The n of 1 does different things for different people. Exploring the heterogeneity of n of 1, we can begin to understand how self-quantification entails a complex relationship to biomedical representation, from one that mimics and extends medicine’s gaze to another that undermines. I take the n of 1 as an experimental systemwhere new possibilities for the experience of health and illness ramify in surprising ways-- a paraclinical practice where clinical tools are redefined through their domestication. I consider the poly-vocal nature of the n of 1 and what we might learn from it, as a space to rethink care and the clinical.

This chapter draws on Benjamin’s discussion of accelerating mechanisms of image capture and distribution in the early 20^th Century as a lens through which to view the contemporary acceleration of data and self-quantification. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the Quantified Self community, it suggests that self-tracking data constructs and fixes experience through the selection and recording of what is and is not counted. It argues that the commensurability of data works at a conceptual level to move beyond the individual person and the idiosyncrasies of both the data projects and the data collection streams, becoming stories in which we both render and recognize ourselves in new ways. Finally, it questions whether these new modes of self-rendering in which commensurability moves from epistemology into ontology signifies a domain shift analogous to, and as significant as, the movement of art into politics and economics documented by Benjamin.

The Quantified Self (QS) is loosely organized affiliation of self-trackers and toolmakers who meet regularly to discuss what we are learning from our own data. In this essay reflecting on scholarly participation in and criticism of the Quantified Self movement, I argue that the outward similarity between QS projects and the administrative and managerial techniques of population control should not be taken at face value. What seems like naive adoption of biosensing surveillance technologies can instead be seen as a kind of critical mimicry that responds to threats against the self. QS projects are deeply personal, connecting past and future with data that tends to be illegible at a distance.

Chapter 8 explores the ethical challenges presented by today’s emerging technologies for digital surveillance and self-tracking. Keeping technomoral virtues such as honesty, self-control, flexibility, justice, and perspective in view, this chapter examines ideals of transparency and control in contemporary discourse on the new world of dataveillance that enables a sousveillance society, one in which even the watchers are watched. Moreover, our lives are increasingly shaped by self-surveillance, self-tracking, and nudging, practices borne of wearable digital monitors and other ‘smart’ devices that let us analyze virtually every aspect of our bodies, our habits, and our days. These new modes of seeking the good life, crystallized in the emerging “Quantified Self” movement, are contrasted with traditional methods of self-examination and cultivation. The former are shown to promote a dangerously impoverished view of self-care and improvement, one that bypasses the genuine potential of surveillance technologies to promote human flourishing.

This chapter discusses the sixth and top layer in The Stack, the User layer. It describes how Users initiate chains of interaction up and down layers, from Interface to Earth and back again. It sees the “user” as a contemporary mediated image of the self, one that is often reduced to narrow and utilitarian frames, but also open to a diverse variety of possible human and non-human agencies. The user position can both over-individuate that agent’s sense of self and also radically multiply it. For example, data generated by Users and producing traces and shadows of their worldly transactions, initially creates a high-resolution portrait of a single user (for example as seen in the Quantified Self movement) but as overlapping external data streams are introduced, the coherency the user’s subjectivity is dissolved by the overdetermination by external relations and forces. Any durable politics of the User must understand this dynamic of platform sovereignty.