Wearable Wellness, Biohacking, and the Quest for Immortality

Dr. Susannah Crockford: A Twitter thread starts with the bold statement, "Bryan Johnson spends 2 million a year to be 18 years old again." The thread continues to explain the steps taken to achieve this feat, which include the obvious: exercise, avoid self-harming behavior and get enough sleep. The subjective: "eat clean." And the intensive: using an algorithm to run his body, along with a team of 30 doctors and regular testing of all his organs. The result? Being 18 again... at least in terms of epigenetic age, which is the measurement of how much your body has aged according to a biochemical test.

Media Clip (Bryan Johnson): Normally, I would take 60 some odd pills.

Media Clip (Interviewer): Is it better to get intravenously or subcutaneously? Or is it--

Media Clip (Bryan Johnson): Pills.

Media Clip (Interviewer): Pills are better?

Media Clip (Bryan Johnson): Yeah, because you can only do the intravenous stuff every so often.

Media Clip (Interviewer): Yeah, and I was doing it in the belly...

Media Clip (Bryan Johnson): Yeah, this protocol I have with the pills-- and again, it is slightly modified towards me-- but others as well. I mean, I think you could start with this protocol, and I've achieved near perfect biomarkers [Yeah] on almost everything. [Wow] Which I didn't think was possible before. I thought chasing this or that but this is just...

Dr. Crockford: In calendar terms, Johnson is still in his 40s, but biologically, he is much younger, thanks to a complex, expensive, and time-consuming combination of wellness techniques. And it's not just the $2 million per year price tag that makes what he does unavailable to most of us. "Eating clean" means eating three small vegan meals within a six- to eight-hour time frame each day, and taking over 100 pills for nutritional supplementation. Getting enough sleep means sleeping alone and monitored by various devices. According to an interview with Time Magazine, Johnson sleeps with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections.

Media Clip (Bryan Johnson): The question is: can a 46-year-old male regenerate his penis to have the performance characteristics of an 18-year-old? And so we're taking on this endeavor, looking at the penis as just as important as the heart, or the liver, or the lungs. Even though it's a bit taboo in society, it's just as important, if not more so, because it's not talked about. Grind culture kills penises every day. If you're not sleeping well, your night-time erections are probably pretty bad. And if you're not erect at night, your biological age for your sexual function is very low. People think they can thrive on little sleep, a lot of coffee, no exercise, and just grind their way, but that has a tremendous cost to all the systems of the body.

Dr. Crockford: Oh, and he also receives blood infusions from his teenage son.

Media Clip (Interviewer): What is it and what does it do?

Media Clip (Bryan Johnson): So there's several studies now going on for cognitive decline. Some are treating Alzheimer's, some for Parkinson's. It's not known, yet, whether it's powerful enough and if the effects are long lasting enough.

Media Clip (Interviewer): Okay...Do you feel a difference or no?

Media Clip (Bryan Johnson): Uh, not really. One hypothesis we have is that the plasma may, in fact, be effective. But given that my markers are indistinguishable from my 17-year-old right now, I may not be the most obvious person [yeah, yeah, right] to do the exchange. Someone like my dad, it could have an effect.

Dr. Crockford: Johnson calls his longevity system, "The Blueprint," which has a website with the title, "Build Your Autonomous Self." Self-production is a goal of wellness practices. Yet to build a self that is autonomous in the style of "The Blueprint" takes lots of money and very specific measurements of personal health indicators. It also means consuming lots of pills, and not much actual food. Bryan Johnson has become something of a main character of late on Twitter (officially called X). A post with his interview with TIME in which he calls himself an "explorer" of the "future of being human" was responded to with comments such as, "Bro looks dead inside and isn't enjoying a second of his life... but okay," "Know who else did everything possible to live forever? Voldemort." "All that work...then he is eaten by a lion..." Another post uses images of the ThunderCats villain, Mumm-Ra, before and after his magical transformation to a muscled superman to joke, "Bryan Johnson before and after a blood transfusion from his own son." So is he a fool? A cartoon supervillain or a human algorithm? Johnson calls himself a martyr for technological progress, and claims that algorithms can run our bodies better than we can ourselves, as long as we sacrifice our free will.

Media Clip (Bryan Johnson): I'm a human operating in a story-based world. I want to transition the management of 'me' to a technology-based system where it's automatically doing this. And that's what I called my 'autonomous self.' There were versions of 'me' who were panicking. They were like, "We're not going to give up control. This is a dystopic situation. This is terrifying." And this is a very common reaction I hear to people who look at this and they respond and say, "If I can't decide what I'm going to eat and drink and when I'm going to do those things, I don't know why I'm going to exist." And they feel like it's an assault on their free will. To me, it was the most liberating thing I've ever done in my entire life.

Dr. Crockford: Hmm...sacrificing free will for immortality...that may sound familiar to people acquainted with Christian piety. But there's a lot more to unpack than just the spiritual claims about agency and longevity. Most of what Johnson does falls under the remit of 'wellness.' A range of practices for optimizing, measuring, and inducing peak states of physical and mental functioning. So, when we talk about 'wellness,' what are we talking about? What does it really do? Can it help people live forever? And if so, which people? Does this highly technologized, datafied system provide immortality only for rich people? Welcome to Miss Information, a limited podcast series by me, Dr. Susannah Crockford, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media and Civic Engagement and Axis Mundi Media. Miss information was produced by Dr. Bradley Onishi and engineered by Scott Okamoto. Kari Onishi provided production assistance. Miss Information was made possible through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation. Today's episode is about wellness: what it is, what it does, who uses it and why. We'll talk about specific wellness products, such as wearables. And also the claims made in the wellness industry and why they are so often held up as examples of misinformation. We are also going to talk about the notion of 'the self' at work in claims such as 'Build your Autonomous Self.' Now, some of you may already be calling 'misinformation' on the claim that a protocol that requires a team of doctors, algorithms, and measuring devices could produce 'a self' that is autonomous. Johnson is clearly dependent on a range of technological practices and equipment. But what his claim is playing on is what's known as the 'Quantified Self' movement. In her book, "The Quantified Self," Deborah Lupton discusses how digital technologies have increasingly been used to monitor, measure, and record every element of life. And while this isn't exactly new, we've been counting calories for a long time now, what is new is the use of the data produced by these techniques to improve your life and also yourself.

Media Clip: In the old days, keeping track of your health was kind of a subjective task. If someone asked, 'How are you doing?' you might say, 'I feel fine,' or 'I feel kind of sick,' or 'My head hurts and I need a coffee.' Sure, you might weigh yourself on the bathroom scale every now and then, or take your temperature if you felt a fever coming on, but the amount of actual health data you could collect about yourself and what you could do with that data was pretty limited. Recently, that's been changing. Thanks to smartphones, smart watches, and personal activity trackers, you can now create a far more detailed and objective portrait of your own health. There are all kinds of things you can now track. Pedometers and GPS trackers let you see how active you are and how far you walk or run each day. Heart rate monitors track your heart's activity changes in response to things like stress. There are devices to measure glucose levels in your blood, body fat composition, or even the complete 3D shape of your body. But that's just the start. Devices and sensors are becoming cheaper and more sensitive every year. It won't be long until you can track things like proteins and bits of RNA in your blood that can reveal how your individual organs are doing. Or bits of DNA from tumor cells that might indicate the presence of cancer before it causes symptoms. Being able to access and understand your data portrait can help you make better lifestyle decisions, both to prevent illness and to improve treatment when you do get sick. But perhaps most importantly, data portraits shift medicine from being primarily about treating disease to maintaining health. Because let's face it, most of us don't seek medical help until we feel something's wrong.

Dr. Crockford: 'Better living through numbers,' is the slogan of the Quantified Self movement, a promise of not only self improvement, but transcendence, even of death itself. That's the claim Bryan Johnson makes with his Blueprint, that it provides a routine, a protocol for maintaining youth and therefore extending life. Using technology and data to optimize life, is at the core of what we call wellness. Bryan Johnson and his longevity protocol tell us two things: wellness is about optimizing health, not alleviating sickness, and also that wellness is expensive. Given the price tag and the reliance on technology and data. It may be no surprise that 'tech bros' are really into wellness. Biohacking and consciousness hacking are trendy in Silicon Valley, and in today's episode, we're going to dig deeper into what these practices are. What we're going to find out is how wellness exacerbates socioeconomic inequalities in healthcare and produces a system in which life extension practices available to the super rich are based on subjective and sketchy evidence, all the while basic healthcare is consistently denied to everyone else. Those of you without internet-poisoned brains may have never heard of Bryan Johnson. More likely you have heard of the most well-known purveyor of wellness, Gwyneth Paltrow. Back in the dark ages of 2008 the actor and nepo-baby started a business called Goop, which brands itself as a "modern lifestyle brand."

Media Clip (Gwyneth Paltrow): When we started Goop, from the content perspective, we really wanted to challenge social norms that existed around silencing women, encouraging women not to ask difficult questions, and things that really kept shame over people. And so we go there, like, we like to talk about things, we like to open it up, and we really want to eliminate shame. We really believe that women are the most powerful, beautiful creatures on earth, and the closer that we are to ourselves, the better off we all are.

Dr. Crockford: Goop was modeled explicitly on Silicon Valley startups, with Paltrow claiming that branding executive Peter Arnell joked to her that all successful internet companies have a double O in their name, like Google and Facebook, so she put a double O between her own initials, and came up with 'Goop.' The company sells expensive wellness products as well as fashion and beauty products. On the Goop Wellness Website, you can find a range of products to help you optimize yourself. From a $4,299 pilates machine to a 'detoxifying super powder' to a gemstone heat therapy mat to a necklace that doubles as a vibrator. These products promise to cleanse your life of toxicity and titillate your senses.

Media Clip (Goop London Pop Up): Hello, ladies. Do you have any questions? Can I help you with anything? [I have quite oily skin.] You do? Okay, this Problem Solver Mask. May Lindstrom. Have you heard of May Lindstrom? And also this Hyaluronic Serum by Barbara Strum is really good. So what do I use regularly? I use the Goop products. This is amazing. I don't know if you ever tried it. It's actually good for oily skin too. It's Exfoliating Instant Facial. I leave it onto it really, really tingles. And then there's a manual exfoliant too, and it just leaves your skin like baby-soft. And it's amazing. My pleasure. You're intrigued. Okay, what questions can I answer for you here? Smile Makers. Vibrators. This one is called The Fireman. [Is he gonna come to my rescue?] He's gonna come to your rescue in more ways than one, girl. Oh, this is very cool. So it's a necklace that's also a vibrator. So yeah, this is our sexual health section. I'm here all day. So thank you so much for visiting us today.

Dr. Crockford: But do they work? Let's take the Detoxifying Superpowder. For a $60 box, this nutritional supplement contains selenium, zinc, magnesium, glycine, and pantothenic acid. Its marketing blurb claims to support the liver detoxification process and neutralize dietary and environmental toxins to give you healthy, vibrant skin. Underneath comes the disclaimer, "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. And that's the trick with wellness products. They aren't medicines. They don't need to be proven through clinical trials to do what they claim to do. And their claims tend to be subjective. What does healthy and vibrant skin really look like? This isn't something that can be verified, but it sounds good. In 2017 Goop courted controversy for one of its wellness products- a jade egg. The egg was also available in rose quartz, and it was marketed as a "yoni egg." One of Goop's "featured experts," Shiva Rose, called the jade eggs, "the strictly guarded secret of Chinese royalty in antiquity," used by queens and concubines to help their relationships with emperors.

Media Clip (Jimmy Kimmel): That is true. That's actually all there. And I want to put this one up on the wall, because this is an item that is for sale on Goop and this is a jade egg. This is fascinating. Tell us what this does.

Media Clip (Gwyneth Paltrow): So the Jade Egg is an ancient Chinese practice where women insert the Jade Egg in their lady parts. To help tone the pelvic floor.

Media Clip (Jimmy Kimmel): How does it help do that?

Media Clip (Gwyneth Paltrow): I don't know. I need to start my jade egg practice.

Media Clip (Jimmy Kimmel): You've never been on this website before. Have you?!

Dr. Crockford: Through harnessing the power of energy work and crystal healing and through insertion in the vagina, the egg would clear the energy of the wearer, providing a spiritual cleanse. It would also strengthen the muscles and increase the sensitivity of the vagina, cultivating sexual energy, intensifying femininity, invigorating life force and clearing qi pathways. The specific type of crystal used was nephrite jade to which Rose attributed the ability to take away negative energy. It was a substance with great spiritual power in "many traditions." Shiva Rose offered an "incredible secret practice that benefited everybody," and that was used in Chinese temples, but kept secret for "eons" by the Chinese royal family. Wellness claims can be based on secret ancient wisdom as well as high-tech wearables. In either case, the basis of the claim is just outside the realm of everyday experience, either too far in the past or too futuristic to fully understand, and that mystique is a big part of the sales pitch. Unsurprisingly, the egg was criticized in the media. Vox called it "goopshit," and gynecologist Jen Gunter called the eggs a "bad idea" in her blog, because they could introduce bacteria into the vagina, risking bacterial vaginosis or even the potentially deadly toxic shock syndrome. Gunter also cast doubt on the claim that carrying an egg could tighten pelvic floor muscles. She called believing in the efficacy of jade a form of believing in magic. Gunter also searched online archives of Chinese antiquities and found no evidence of jade eggs used by the Royal Family. As a result, Goop withdrew the eggs, but not before defending themselves as standing up for marginalized women and those with chronic illness by providing information without judgment. Goop was fined $145,000 for its claims about jade eggs. The message of Goop is that there is a way to perfect oneself. By using the right products, it is possible to curate the perfect neoliberal self: energized, tight, fashionable, radiant, glowing. It does, however, require plenty of money to access this route to perfection. As Goop sells primarily luxury fashion and accessories. The jade eggs were sold for $66 a piece. Goop has grown from a free email newsletter to a $250 million business part of the $4.2 trillion global wellness industry. Goop is not alone in offering a series of products, opaque in purpose and complexity, invoking grand visions of personal enhancement. The wellness industry both fuels and profits from the idea that physical beauty is proof of inner righteousness as well as health. Those perfect on the outside are assumed to be equally perfect inside. In a capitalist society, those that are able to afford this level of purchasable perfection are the wealthiest. There is a strong vein of classism and elitism running through not only Goop, but the ideology of wellness that informs the industry. To find out more about the meanings, ideology and practices involved in wellness, I talked to Dr. Aleena Chia, a media studies scholar from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Dr. Aleena Chia: My name is Aleena Chia, and I'm a lecturer in Media Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. And I'm interested in creative cultures. Mostly I look at game development and computational wellness. So this is, you know, covers a range of texts and artifacts and practices. On one hand, I look at things like digital wellness within the disconnection of social media kind of space, but on the other hand, I also look at lucid dreaming practices. So this includes lucid dreaming supplements, but also different apps to enhance your dreaming towards creative sort of outputs. And most recently, I have co-authored work with Joshua Neves on a media theoretical piece on neuro-wearables. And these neuro-wearables, they attempt to automate different ways of feeling and being that go beyond what we understand as the 'quantified self.'

Dr. Crockford: So, Dr Chia knows a lot about different forms of wellness. So I asked her, when we talk about wellness, what are we really talking about?

Dr. Chia: So wellness, you know, there's a global market. McKinsey and Company have valued it at over 1.5 trillion, and this was like when 2021. But other estimates put it at 4.2 trillion US dollars. And overall, you know, there's a sense that they encompass both experiences. So we'll all be familiar with wellness retreats, mindfulness or meditation experiences, also meditation apps. But it also goes along the lines of, for example, flotation therapy, which I've worked on in other articles. As well as digital wellness apps. So when Google, for example, or Apple wants you to think about screen time, these all fall within the remit, broadly, of wellness. Herbal remedies as well, nootropics, supplements, including those that try and improve your creativity, that use dreaming, but also, you know, other kinds of optimization practices that are related to supplements. These are all part of the umbrella of wellness. One important thing, I think, you know, you've written about this as well, is that wellness is not the same as well being. So, well being, you know, it's a general principle of living a healthy lifestyle that encompasses both body and mind. However, it is very much linked to population statistics. It's linked to things that can be measured, such as, for example, you know, income. So for example, like sociological method measures, such as, kind of connectedness with the community, your family, and your workplace, sort of conditions,. These kinds of socio-economic conditions, health markers, social security, all that is part of well being. Whereas wellness tries to focus on the subjective feeling of living a healthy life. And it's a very slippery kind of definition. Whereas well being, as I mentioned before, has a more expansive definition that goes beyond the empowerment of the individual and the individual's ability to what is, in essence, modulating their own internal states through what are mostly commercial solutions. And, increasingly, technological and digital solutions. So one kind of example that I like to use in my teaching, but also that I've written about, is screen time. So you know, when you think about screen time and you think about it, think about it through the lens of wellness, then it becomes a very individualized choice; to opt in or opt out. But we know that this is a very unrealistic sort of way of looking at it. In addition to the difficulty of opting out of the kind of technological and digital environments that we are embedded in in our day to day lives, whether it's for work, for school, or for our social lives. COVID made this even more clear, right? There is a sense that if you don't look at the kind of socio-economic stratifications and instead, you just looked at what the individual can do, then you are in the realm of wellness. And you are in the realm in which technological solutions are there to help you navigate what is an increasingly difficult and stratified environment for both individuals, for communities and for society ,more broadly.

Dr. Crockford: Wellness is a subjective feeling of health. So, as an industry, claims are often vague and non-quantifiable.

Dr. Chia: So, I first got into this space through what I call 'brain spas.' So I was in Vancouver at the time, went to this brain spa, and they used this device. So this device ended up being something that I studied. It's called BrainTap. What it does is that it uses... it is kind of light and sound machine. So it's, essentially, a bluetooth headset. And it combines guided meditation with binaural beats, and what they call 10-cycle holographic music, isochronic tones, pulsing light through the retina and ear meridians. And you know, you'll be familiar with it, because it's a kind of brainwave entrainment, and they have categorized, for example, alpha, beta, gamma, delta and theta frequencies to different kinds of states. So relaxed state, but also, like creative state, also lucid dreaming state, so it becomes quite granular in that sense. You're supposed to use this with your eyes closed. And at this brain spa, I was lying on this crystal mat. A crystal mat, you know, had a kind of infrared heat that was emanating off it. And I had to measure my HRV, you know my heart rate variability, before and after the session. And what happened was that my heart rate variability did not change. It did not become better at all. [Susannah laughing: Your brain did not have a spa!] No! It did not. Like on a physiological level, there was really not much change.

Dr. Crockford: In the absence of physiological markers that can provide evidence of change, wellness products like the brain spa often leverage how the user feels. And it's that emphasis on feeling that makes wellness such a slippery concept that slides very easily into misinformation. Wellness as an industry, relies on subjective claims based on ancient wisdom or high tech advances, on the marketing of experiences as pleasurable and also beneficial for your health. But the health claims are not the kind of health claims that can be verified easily, as they are dependent on this subjective notion of feeling good. What makes one person feel good may not make the next person feel good. A brain spa may not change your heart rate at all. Wellness practices are about helping people feel better, which is important for those who are experiencing chronic or terminal illness and who are desperate for some form of relief. And I'm not suggesting that those in need of something that relieves pain or anxiety should not be allowed to explore their options. But it's important to understand what's on offer. I undertook ethnographic field work in Sedona, Arizona, for just over two years to write my first book. Sedona is a well known site for spirituality, and it also draws a lot of people interested in alternative health and wellness. As part of my field work, I participated in a lot of wellness practices and retreats. Some did feel good, but others made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Something I could never get used to was reiki and energy healing, in which a reiki master holds their hands over your body- without touching- and moves your energy which is supposed to heal you somehow. Maybe I'm just too British for it, but having a stranger hold their hands near me made me feel very uncomfortable, not healed. But that's the crux of practices like reiki as well as wearable devices that induce altered states of consciousness. You know it when you feel it, but some people won't feel it. The claim that you have to feel something is really central in contemporary spirituality. Sure, the health claims of wellness are unverifiable, but people feel all kinds of things in their subjective human experience. I once got told to stand in someone's garage in Sedona and asked if I could "feel" the special energy of the vortex under the floor. The concept of energy is key to understanding wellness and how its claims are spiritually rather than scientifically based. The quantified self movement promised self-knowledge through numbers. This self-knowledge is a spiritual claim. Here's Dr. Chia again:

Dr. Chia: Because it is unverifiable, it's an interior state that is, in a way, beyond interpretation, beyond verification, even beyond deliberation. Of course, you know there are social practices that try to capture it in different ways. And for me, this was very interesting as a media scholar, because there was this sense that we were going beyond self-tracking. This was a state that was really not about, you know, if you think about quantified self, that was about knowledge through numbers. What we see here is that the numbers go into the back end. You no longer have those same kinds of interfaces that help you to see, you know, like how your heart rate variability, for example, or how you know your brainwave patterns have been changing, and that really changes the kind of biofeedback loop. And let me just give you, perhaps, a more concrete example. So the Muse headset, what it does is that it is a biofeedback device, right? It measures your brainwave patterns, and it feeds back to you, whether or not you're moving further away or closer to your desired state. And that's biofeedback. When we are initiating that, we're training ourselves to, you know, on some level, use our whatever personal and bodily agency to go towards our targeted brain state. With these neuro-devices, and the industry calls it third generation wellness wearables, the feedback loop is sort of shifted. Instead of the person trying to change, trying to make that change, getting closer towards their desired state. It is marketed in ways in which you don't need to do anything. You just, you know, turn your brain off. You know, they are speaking directly in a way to your body. Instead, you push a button, it's like a menu, and boom, you know you'll feel it. And you'll know it when you feel it. So on a very concrete level, again, these third generation wellness wearables, they actually do not have sensing capabilities at this stage. So isn't that interesting? They stimulate, but they have no sensing capabilities.

Dr. Crockford: How do you know what state you want to move towards? What's it supposed to do? Right? Like, when I have this headset on...what's it supposed to do to me?

Dr. Chia: It's not measuring. It does not have measurement capabilities, at least, you know, during the time, you know, like the time of publication, I'm sure that they'll, they would perhaps incorporate that at a later date. But it doesn't measure so it doesn't try and figure out where you are and get you to where you're going. It's just you choose- do you want an awakened active state? Do you want a peak concentration and cognition state? Do you want a healing and super learning state? You push that button and it's like a menu, and you will have the program, you know, that acts on you. Another device is called Apollo. So it's a...it's kind of...it looks like a Fitbit, but it has no watch face. The interface is on your smartphone, and all it does, all you do is that you pick a kind of state that you want to be in. It uses low frequency sound waves, and it targets your touch receptors on your skin, and it sends this sort of signal of safety. According to its marketing and promotional material it feels like a hug. That's what it says. It feels like a hug for your nervous system. And you choose the sort of mode you want to be in.

Dr. Crockford: A device you wear on your wrist, and with the touch of a button on your smartphone, it can induce a state that feels like a hug. But why not just actually hug another human being? That such a device would be necessary speaks to the atomization of isolated individuals, alone with their devices and separate from other humans and mutualistic communities. But wearables do more than simply replace the need for contact with other humans. They can also be used for surveillance. We are all familiar by now with the movement of social media platforms from spaces to make communities to 'connect people,' as Facebook claims, to spaces in which our data is monitored and harvested and then sold to the highest bidder. That data can then be used against us to target personalized ads, which can be used to market specific products that our data suggests we may want to buy, to more sinister aims, such as influencing who we vote for in an election, or whether we vote at all.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): The average user spends almost an hour a day on Facebook scrolling, liking, and commenting. Each move you make is a data point. Facebook is scooping up more than just your age, location, and relationship status. Working with retail brands and political campaigns to gather more than 50 personal things about you, including how long you've lived in your home, how many credit lines you have, which groceries you buy, even what kind of medication you're using.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): I was a bit freaked out by it, for sure.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Tyler Woods has been on Facebook for eight years. Lately, he feels like political ads are following him around.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): If you feel like your information is being sold or spread to parties or entities that you have no idea, it loses that sense of trust that you feel in the medium.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): The data like Tyler's is especially useful as political campaigns spend an estimated $1.2 billion on digital ads this election cycle.

Media Clip (Speaker 3): [Voiceover: I'm Donald Trump, and I approve this message.] I can look at a zip code. I could tailor specific interests within that zip code. You can address those people directly with the message that will resonate. [Speaker 1: Who did you target here?] So this ad group might be people who are interested in coal issues...

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Will Ritter runs a Republican digital ad firm, and he says targeted Facebook ads alone have helped his candidates move up in the polls, and they're much cheaper than TV commercials.

Dr. Crockford: Wearables form part of the surveillance of everyday life, which includes social media, smart home tech like Amazon Echo and the virtual assistants such as Alexa, home security like Ring cameras, fitness tracking apps and wearables, and begins to capture data from before children are even born. Media scholar Veronica Baranassi calls this "algorithmic profiling." Who are you when reduced to specific data points? According to Baranassi's research, people experience algorithmic profiling as belittling and objectifying, even as a "form of violence." It is also experienced by people from different groups differently, especially whether they are privileged or marginalized. The business logic behind algorithmic profiling is that by collecting and analyzing data about our preferences and purchases, companies can predict desires and future needs and recommend similar items. But they extend further, and profiling begins earlier than purchasing. Children are surveilled through school online platforms. Their data is gathered at the doctor's office, as well as through parents' social media use, or 'sharenting,' which they are too young to consent to.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): I'm Lucy. I'm seven years old, and my mom posted pictures of me online.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): I'm Elmer. I'm 18 years old. My mom shares too much about me online.

Media Clip (Speaker 3): I'm Zoya. I'm 16 years old, and my mom shares my whole life. [Zoya's mom: If you're going to be so worked up about it, then I'll take it down. But I don't agree with you, just for the record.]

Media Clip (Speaker 4): ...but since the beginning of posting, some parents have been over-sharing. Uploading photos of their children online, coupled with intimate details, and in many cases, the kids don't have a say in what's being shared and who it's being shared with. In the next installment of ours...

Dr. Crockford: While parents can choose not to post information or pictures about their children on social media other sites of data surveillance, such as schools and the doctors are not voluntary, and many feel like there is no other choice. Giving up data or consenting to data sharing is often a requirement for using a service. Data harvesting in this way creates a problem of human reductionism. People feel judged and gossiped about through algorithmic profiling. For example, being advertised dating apps if single and over 50, or plus size clothing and dieting apps if overweight. The data used is assumed to be objective and also that people's practices, beliefs, and desires can be reliably inferred from this data. So, if you're a woman who is over 50 and single, it's assumed that you are most likely to want to find a new relationship. While this may not be the case, variation is often written off as errant data or outliers. Data about people is taken out of context and large amounts of data is not necessarily useful for understanding people. Profiling is also used at borders, for example, to refuse entry to people with lots of family members in the country because they are thought to be more likely to overstay. Baranassi finds that people from marginalized groups were more likely to find algorithmic profiling invasive and harmful, because of experiences with state systems of control like immigration or criminal justice. And people from privileged backgrounds were more likely to see it as less significant, to minimize the importance of data surveillance because they were 'not very interesting' or they were 'too smart' to buy things just because they were advertised. It shows how different social groups are subjected to data surveillance in different ways. The poor are more likely to be subject to privacy intrusions by governments and corporations. Another disturbing recent example of this is period-tracking apps that sell data to states that limit abortion to prove that women went out of state to get an abortion or used abortion pills. Tracking and monitoring are not neutral activities and can be used against people by oppressive governance. So when people advocate for the quantified self and better living through numbers, we have to ask: better for whom? Time and time again, what starts as niche products for self-monitoring for the super rich turns into a digital panopticon for the poor.

Media Clip: Among the issues that are raising privacy concerns in the aftermath of the Dobbs ruling, in overturning Roe versus Wade, are the data that's collected by period-tracking apps, which are used by 100 million girls and women around the world. The apps are used by people who want to understand their periods, when their next period is going to come, for people who are trying to conceive, for athletes, there are special apps for teenagers. There's almost an app for everyone. And the issue, or the concern, is that these apps collect an extraordinary amount of personal data about when somebody had their last period, potentially about when somebody conceived. People can put in all kinds of information about what they eat, what they drink. The data that's collected by period-tracking apps is not protected by HIPAA, so there is not the same privacy agreement between you and your period-tracking app as there is between you and your physician. In our post-Roe society where abortion and even pregnancy outcomes like miscarriage or stillbirth can and already are being criminalized, that kind of information can be sought and used by law enforcement, by prosecutors. And the apps don't provide much protection, at least the way it's all currently set up. So if the police or prosecutors wanted to subpoena information in your app, store that information on the cloud, they're able to do so. Even if the information is stored on your own phone, it can be subject to a search warrant. And beyond law enforcement, there are other privacy concerns, too. Many of these apps, part of their business model is to sell aggregate data and to share that data with advertisers and with analytics companies. There's just the old-fashioned hackers. And with laws like that in Texas that basically create bounty hunter provisions where everyday citizens can seek rewards for turning in people they suspect of having aided or abetted an abortion, that information is potentially available to them if they're able to hack into those systems.

Dr. Crockford: Given the concerns for how data is aggregated and sold on, who is the audience for these products, who is wearing wearables?

Dr. Chia: Okay, so in terms of who is wearing wearables, I think a really useful way to look at this is through hacking. So biohacking, consciousness hacking, you know. Here we're thinking about a very small subset of mostly wealthy, mostly white, mostly male consumers who want to optimize their lives, they want to hack their lives, but they want to do so in every possible slice. So, life-hacking, for example, you know, it derives from this sense of hacking, really, which is about decoding the underlying rules of systems. You want to find shortcuts. You want to move from, you know, systems...engineering systems, to your own life. You apply that same paradigm, from machines to your own life. And sometimes not even to your own life, but also to the way that you look at relationships. If you could decode the underlying rules of, for example, relationships, you could, in a way, what is it? Win friends and influence people! Things like that. So fitness, dating, nutrition, and even the quest for meanings. The idea that life hacking or self optimization is, in a way, the practice of the creative class. So the creative class, even beyond Silicon Valley, they don't have the same kind of temporal and affective structures in professional settings. So there's a lot of flexible work, for example, you know. There's a lot of team based work in which you don't have to go to work every day, you don't have to report to a boss every day. And what different scholars have found who look at productivity apps, but also productivity and creativity practices, more generally, is that there is a desire for the creative class to want these guardrails in place. And they do so...they look for these structures in self optimization and life hacking practices.

Dr. Crockford: So you have to have quite a lot of money to buy into these practices. It's an elite practice.

Dr. Chia: So these wearables, they are, they range in price and subscription to, I think about maybe, like 500, on average, US dollars per device. And the subscription for, for example, BrainTap is, you know, more, more or the same as, for example, your Netflix subscription. So that all adds up. So wellness, it may be a kind of empowerment for people who are privileged. But for those who are marginalized, it in fact, what it ends up doing is that it undermines, you know, your people's agency, because it circumvents their decision making, and in a way, even their bodily autonomy. So if you have a menu in which, you know, you can push, push to relax, you know, push to feel good, and you don't have what the quantified selves, quote, unquote, self-knowledge through numbers. Then essentially what's happening is that it moves into a state in which, instead of self-surveillance, this is other surveillance. This is a kind of workplace surveillance in which institutions then take over that sense- you feel good now! You know, you become productive right now! So, we have to remember that while wellness as technologies, they may evolve, or they may get funding within the sort of commercial, consumer, privileged realm where people have money. These technologies, inevitably, I don't want to be a technological determinist, but they oftentimes migrate into the workplace in which the end user doesn't really have a choice. Or governments, you know, when they start to use these sorts of apps to replace, for example, health services.

Dr. Crockford: An example of how wellness migrates from an elite practice into the workplace can be found in the Amazon wellness chamber for stressed staff, the "Ama-zen."

Media Clip: With Ama-zen, I wanted to provide a place that's quiet, that people could go and focus on their mental and emotional well-being. The Zen booth is an interactive kiosk where you can navigate through a library of mental health and mindful practices to recharge that internal battery.

Dr. Crockford: This video was deleted from social media shortly after the company uploaded it. Facebook comments on the video included, "Well, it's cheaper than proper pay and conditions. Ahhh, capitalism." "Probably where the pee bottles will be stored." "How about they pay them more, give them health insurance and give them pee breaks instead." "Willing to bet, if you use this, even once, company would fire you." Motherboard called it a "coffin-sized booth in the middle of an Amazon warehouse where workers can use a computer to view 'mental health and mindful' practices." What use is wellness when basic material conditions: take home pay, rent levels, the ability to go to the bathroom when you want, the ability to form a union- are absent? Wellness can be an insidious way for corporations and governments to avoid maintaining basic material conditions for people. And what's worse, wellness practices and devices do not have the same regulatory mechanisms to ensure quality standards. Consumer electronics do not have to be regulated like medical devices. Supplements do not have to be tested in clinical trials like pharmaceutical medicines do. Wellness claims are a way to avoid having products tested. So, instead of providing for basic material needs, instead workers and citizens are fobbed off with practices and devices that may not even work. Wellness practices offer shortcuts to substantial improvements in well being or long term development of practice. Take meditation headsets or apps, for example. Apps can be used to time meditation or provide soundtracks for guided meditation, but headsets claim to be able to induce meditative states by stimulating brainwaves. Isn't the point of doing 15 years of meditation to actually do 15 years of meditation? The shortcut undermines the practice. The process is the point and the brain state is the outcome of that process. Skipping the process is like taking pills for nutrition, missing out on the process of actually eating. Automated nutrition, meal replacement packs. There's a pill for that, there's an app for that. These solutions are easily purchasable and don't require you to maintain long-term relationships with other humans and communities. These neoliberal practices individualize health and social problems and offer push button technological solutions, bypassing socio economic structures, workplace practices and the human subject. More importantly, thinking that health is an individual pursuit, that optimizing your personal health through wellness practices gives, for example, higher levels of immunity is deeply problematic. If wellness works, it is only available for those with the resources, time and effort to put into maintaining these expensive practices. Like Bryan Johnson's $2 million per year to halt the aging process. But it's not at all clear whether aging can be halted. If wellness doesn't work, then what it can do is reassure the wealthy that their personal health is fine and that they don't need to follow public health measures. So because they follow wellness practices, they don't need to mask, for example, or get vaccinated, because they personally are fine. They are healthy. We saw the limitations of this way of thinking in the COVID-19 pandemic, where the most at risk were the elderly, people with pre-existing conditions, people with weakened immune conditions, people with public facing jobs who couldn't isolate or socially distance. And these groups are those who cannot afford expensive wellness practices and are then put at more risk when they interact with people who think that they don't have to follow public health measures because they do wellness instead. Optimizing health offered by wellness is expensive and often based on sketchy, or at least subjective, evidence,. Your time and money are better spent accepting that aging and dying are part of life. We will all grow old and we will all die. What matters is the process, the progression, the beautiful everyday drama of life unfolding, growing, peaking and then declining and ending. The reason why people comment that Bryan Johnson looks dead inside is because he denies himself some of the most basic pleasurable activities of life, like eating a cookie once in a while, or sharing your bed with someone you love. He may claim that he can live forever, but for many of us, what he's doing isn't really living at all. You might think you need expensive wellness practices to feel better, but many are targeted at people who don't have the time or inclination to actually learn practices like meditation that require discipline and long term study. Focusing on wellness rather than basic healthcare services leads to an erosion of public health in favor of individualized health practices, which then don't help when we encounter public health emergencies such as pandemics. Everyone boosting their own personal immunity through diet, exercise and wellness supplements is not as effective as masking, air filtration, vaccination. And wellness practices are often unaffordable for many. They also have the disturbing potential to be used as digital surveillance. Wearables and other wellness technologies that harvest data mean that yet more aspects of our lives can be sold to the highest bidder, and as we have seen, it's then not necessarily used to improve our welfare. Do we really want governments and corporations to be able to track every single bodily function and movement? And what about the self that we are cultivating with all this wellness? Do we really need better living through numbers, or do we just need better living? That's all for Miss Information. Thank you so much for listening. Next time we will talk about a well-known wellness practice: yoga. And how yoga communities have become associated with conspiracy theories. For now, thank you so much for listening. I've been Susannah Crockford. And remember, misinformation matters!