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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how the procedures, logics and values of biometric surveillance are now expressed in everyday discourses and habits of digital well-being, and will critically explore the political implications of this arrangement.

Paper long abstract

Against the well-publicised psychological risks of technological over-use, practices of datafied self-measurement are frequently presented as the key to the digital good life. In this work-in-progress paper, the habits these practices encompass - e.g. measuring screen time, quantifying social interactions on platforms, and periods of digital disconnection - will all be presented as instances of self-surveillance that extend medicalised procedures of biometric surveillance into the everyday. Specifically, engaging with our ongoing findings from the UKRI AHRC funded project ‘Control Shift Escape: New Possibilities for Digital Well-being’, we will draw attention to what Seb Franklin (2015) calls the logics of control made visible through discourses and designs of the encoded body. We will argue that attempts to measure and condition human life through regimes of biometric data surveillance render its complexities “legible through processes of capture, digitization, modelling, and prediction” (Franklin, 2015: 43), in a way characteristic of the cybernetic ‘closed’ socio-technological systems examined by Paul Edwards (1996). Our paper’s original contribution will show how these logics have now extended to everyday domains of technological self-control, whereby the individual is enjoined to manage their digital well-being through disciplined engagements with technology. Because of this, our paper will show how the ideas and practices of the encoded body now function as part of the contemporary valences and habits of a digital life well lived. By establishing who is responsible for its fruition, moreover, such a nexus contains significant normative, political implications that we will fully explore in the final paper.