Fitness-tracked exercise is a contested test case for whether data generation counts as labor

Evidence

One respected analyst of people’s use of fitness trackers seems to recognize the problem with orthodox Marxism but draws the wrong conclusion, claiming that, while not intuitively labor, such activities must nonetheless be understood as really labor. He says, “Regardless of how we might like to conceptualize exercise activities that are tracked, they are labor, because the corporations are treating them as such. Surplus value will be extracted from these activities by corporations, as if they were work” (Till, “Exercise as Labour,” 452). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 778

Categorization

• QUESTION: The passage presents two rival readings of tracked exercise as labor, but the chapter rejects both. Worth chasing: what exactly is the third position the authors are gesturing at, and how does it avoid the commodity fetishism trap of the ‘it is labor’ stance?
• XREF: Connects to the Milgrom chapter on how framing economic activity changes its institutional character, and to Marxist labor-value debates in Callinicos’s Against Postmodernism. — connects to: Normal human activities that feel unproductive become exploited as data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 675; Data extraction annexes life processes beyond productive labor — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 143; Privacy and data-ownership debates miss why experience becomes behavioral data at all — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 731 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Normal human activities that feel unproductive become exploited as data #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 675
• Data extraction annexes life processes beyond productive labor #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 143
• Privacy and data-ownership debates miss why experience becomes behavioral data at all #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 731