Quantifying yourself allows you to disaggregate yourself, this is necessary because the whole self is just too integrated.

Some fascinating activity at this year’s QS conference.

The good old days of exploitation, where the boss was interested in the worker only to the extent that they produced a commodity which could be sold at a profit, are long gone. Work then meant the annihilation of subjectivity, your reduction to an impersonal machine-part; it was the price that you paid for time away from work. Now, there is no time away from work, and work is not opposed to subjectivity. All time is entrepreneurial time because we are the commodities, so that any time not spent selling ourselves is wasted time.

The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures. To return to my discussion of literary metaphors, the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.

Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.
Above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t matter.
Aging liberals have more sex.
Happiness is love. Full stop.

If Terrence Malick were given a lobotomy, forced to smoke seven joints in rapid succession, and ordered to make the worst TV advertisement the world has ever seen, this is the ad he would have produced.

Nicholas Carr on Facebook’s recent adverts.

The ultimate effect of neuroscientific thinking could be to dissolve the cult of the individual. Rose and Abi-Rached point to recent research that strongly suggests the brain is wired for sociality—that is, to facilitate living in groups. Indeed, the idea that we are independent, fully autonomous beings is belied by the realization that our brains are fine-tuned to understand how others are thinking and feeling, the better to fit in and forge a functioning society. To the Neuro authors, this discovery “disproves the idea that the nature of humans is to seek to maximize self-interest.”

Virality matters only among atomized, anxious self-absorbed competitors who must continually struggle to purchase each other’s attention. We must “harness people’s desire to look good to others” or else they may simply relate to one another in ways from which no one will profit, and what good is that? Really, why should anyone pay attention to anyone other than themselves voluntarily?

Rob Horning reviews Jonah Berger’s new book.

If you’re going to go in for self-quantification, you may as well – like Buster – do it properly.