ILPC 2027

 This paper will focus on the use of self-tracking (ST) technologies to investigate the ways in which value is generated in a contemporary digital, attention economy. ST has become a mainstream leisure activity and method of managing health behaviour. This has been discussed variously as a form of narcissistic self-involvement, an advanced expression of panoptical self-surveillance and a potential new dawn for e-health. Simultaneously, employers are increasingly using ST in corporate wellness (CW) programmes. These usually involve workers voluntarily tracking their activity through accelerometer-enabled devices and engaging in self-analysis and team-based competitions. A broad theoretical and analytical discussion of contemporary discourse around the use of specific commercial ST technologies will be combined with analysis of interviews and focus groups with managers and employees involved with ST CW programmes and related literature. Both contexts will be analysed for their role in the generation of value in “semiocapitalism” (Berardi, 2009) through transforming generalized “activity” into a productive force. Processes of capital accumulation have spread to all areas of life and productivity now depends on creative, affective and libidinal energy (Lazzarato, 2014). ST provides means of stimulating, quantifying and harnessing these flows of energy by forming a route of intervention into the subjectivity of the worker. They thus function as “psychotechnologies” (Stiegler, 2010) which apply modulating controls to people who are now unwilling to be subject to hierarchical management and discipline. Instead mangers seek to “engage” workers and devices attract and channel attention to construct particular types of consciousnesses which fit neatly with the productive machinery of digital capitalism (Guery and Deleule, 2014). “Nudge”, “gamification” and principles borrowed from neuroscience and positive psychology are used in devices and platforms which seek to maximize levels of productivity, positivity and happiness. It will be proposed that a thermodynamic model of the exploitation of potential energy underlies the interest that corporations have shown in ST and that tactics of behaviour management and the promotion of an entrepreneurial selfhood frame the strategies through which labour value is extracted. The spread of ST technologies and systems contributes to a reorientation of health and wellness in terms of “activity” and “productivity” by presenting the same methods of management as ideal for both. They also help to produce bodies which are productive for contemporary forms of capital accumulation through the retentional structures of ST devices which encourage “reactive subjects” whose consciousness is smoothly integrated with technical and symbolic systems. By transforming exercise activity into a quantified and standardised form it also becomes directly productive of valuable data.