In Bed With Surveillance Capitalists
The other day I was in medical ward at my hospital and heard a nurse report that her patient’s heart rate was 35 beats per minute, but that he was comfortably eating his breakfast. This prompted a colleague I was with to inform me that his own heart rate drops into the 30’s when he is sleeping.
“How do you know that?” I asked. He pulled a ring off from his right hand and showed me its inner lining. I’d thought it to be his wedding band, but the side not visible to me when worn, the one that touched his skin, had several sensors that continuously monitored not only his beats per minute, but also his temperature and movement, the latter via an accelerometer and gyroscope.
Oura tracks you 24/7 so you can build an accurate, insightful baseline of information about yourself from which you can grow and improve. Sleep better. Improve your performance. Be Ready. It’s all possible with Oura.
That’s the pitch from the website of Oura, the makers of the ring and the latest in the growing field of companies that want to monitor your most personal data. The device claims to help you “quantify yourself” by tracking sleep trends, predicting illness, and assessing heart rate variability to evaluate your response to exercise and stress. The rings sell for $299-$999.
Has the company vigorously proven the validity of their claims or are they feeding into modern anxieties about health? I confess that I haven’t done a deep dive to see if their claims are supported by hard data (but it wouldn’t be terribly unheard of for a company built on the acquisition and repackaging of our data to be less than truthful about its own data, or lack thereof). What’s different about the health and fitness market today compared to the aerobics VHS tapes of years past is that these contemporary devices require constant input from you. More specifically, from your biology, the part of you that even you don’t know.
I never caught on to the first wave of fitness trackers mostly because I know that observing how many steps I should have taken on a given day might reinforce negative attitudes about my own health. If I was to see I hadn’t reached my daily step count goal, I’m the sort of person who is more prone to brooding than to using that deficiency to motivate more walking. Has the fitness industry studied if fitness trackers are actually improving health, or have these monitors just become another device that helps us feel miserable about ourselves (see Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)? The unintended psychological consequences of these technologies has only recently come to the fore.
How much are we willing to cede to the surveillance capitalists? These are the companies that want you to provide them with every bit of data about your life so that they can turn a profit. The first thing we were willing to freely give such companies was our interior lives: our feelings and memories and experiences. The Facebook feed is filled with pictures and birthday greetings and commemorations. Facebook claims it is offering us a free service, but in reality, it is we that are giving them something for free when we willingly provide them information about our personal lives. Then they use the platform to sell us stuff. Certainly the technology didn’t intend for us to feel miserable upon viewing photo after photo about someone else’s fantasy vacation to the Bahamas. Or to be manipulated to think that our neighbors are our true enemies. But the aftereffects of technologies are rarely apparent in the labs and office buildings where they are conceived.
The new generation of what I’ll call bio-observant (or biobservant) devices asks us to go even further into our interiors. We are offering information about our biologies that we only used to discover on a visit to the doctor. But what are we really getting out of these companies that hope to commodify information that just ten years ago we didn’t know we could capture? The surveillance capitalists claim that every aspect of our lives needs to be monitored and optimized, from exercise to sleep to recovery and rest. But will we really benefit, or is this just the start of a deeper surveillance of our most intimate physiologies?
Nanobots will one day be disseminated throughout our bodies to monitor glucose, hormone levels, and subtle variations in organ environments that may anticipate disease. But what if variations in mood itself are rebranded as diseases, inconveniences that have a technological solution? Imagine you wake up one morning and your device informs you that based on your temperature variation overnight, a trend toward increased glucose delivery to your amygdala, and lower than normal levels of oxytocin, that your chance of getting angry at some point today has risen from a baseline of 5% to 50%, a measurement instantly sent to your smartphone. Then imagine that some of these nanobots are not only monitoring you, but have implanted in your carotid arteries and are able to deliver a dose of lithium directly to your cerebrum on such a day. Perhaps all these feedback loops are under automatic control so that you won’t even get a ping on your device to know you’re getting a dose of a mood stabilizer. Is it so far fetched, or are health monitoring applications the first step toward this future in which technology will constantly help you “find your perfect balance?”