Wired Up! Ready to Go!
Festooned with digital accessories that track everything from his heart rate to his footsteps to his sleep patterns, the author has plugged into the Quantified Self movement. Farewell to gut instinct, and hello to the “data-driven” life: a new path to personal and social enlightenment.
Or is it just another false dawn with niftier doodads? Skeptics worry that data harvesters will induce passivity and wan alienation, cocooning compulsive self-trackers inside their feedback loops and subtracting emotion and serendipity from the human equation—the poetry, the ambiguity, the moonbeams in a jar. Thereby reducing life to one long flowchart or, if you’re a more journalistic type, charticle, with death setting the margin tab. Such low-burning fires don’t excite the imagination. Epic myth and pop culture favor the bold gesture and rash gamble over marbled reason.
Or is it just another false dawn with niftier doodads? Skeptics worry that data harvesters will induce passivity and wan alienation, cocooning compulsive self-trackers inside their feedback loops and subtracting emotion and serendipity from the human equation—the poetry, the ambiguity, the moonbeams in a jar. Thereby reducing life to one long flowchart or, if you’re a more journalistic type, charticle, with death setting the margin tab. Such low-burning fires don’t excite the imagination. Epic myth and pop culture favor the bold gesture and rash gamble over marbled reason.
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