Datafied systems may replace bodily self-knowledge with calibrated external monitoring.

Evidence

A trucker from the same study went further and insisted that “any piece of electronics that is not directly hooked up to my body cannot tell me [when I am tired].” But other employees have been “hooked up” to devices that monitor at least their external movements for more than a decade (for example, store and distribution-center workers of the UK supermarket chain Tesco). If the second trucker’s imagining comes true, it will not be his body telling him he is tired but a calibrated data system linked up to the bodies of a whole workforce. That system will monitor working bodies through their contracted activities and much of their off-work activity, using the latter as evidence for judging the former. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 467

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: Could seed a near-future narrative: a worker whose fatigue is legally adjudicated not by how they feel but by wearables, off-work data used against them on the job.
• XREF: connects to: Apps now colonize even trivial bodily functions like thirst into trackable social data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 23; Routine bodily self-monitoring has become a competitive, profit-generating infrastructure — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 25