Quantified-self data systems collapse the reflexive space in which freedom operates

Evidence

For Hegel, it is the reflective relation to oneself that is essential to the development of a free will. Therefore, a free life needs to be a self-sufficient life in which “nothing from outside, nothing not-me, determines my actions.” Hegel does not deny—indeed, he emphasizes—that the individual lives a life that is not free from external constraints; it is a life lived through mediations (lived “in the other,” as Hegel puts it). But at the core of freedom for Hegel (the core of autonomy, in our terms) is the notion of an inner life that remains under one’s own reflexive control. This inner life is what enjoying one’s “right of subjectivity” means. The very thing Quantified Selfers and the social quantification sector see as a benefit (that our moment-to-moment existence is understood better by external data processing systems than by us) collapses the space of subjectivity in which the self enjoys its freedom. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 520

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines autonomy as the inner life remaining under one’s own reflexive control, per Hegel.
• XREF: Connects to the surveillance books: self-surveillance via quantified self is a form of Foucault’s disciplinary power turned inward. — connects to: Data appropriation threatens the minimal space of the self — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 75; Continuous surveillance violates the bounded self-space whose absence destroys selfhood — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 508; The Quantified Self movement concedes individual property rights in data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 519 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Data extraction infrastructures deform the self that autonomy and freedom depend on #corroborates (0.92) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 148
• Datafication may disrupt autonomy at the level of self-boundedness itself #expands (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 500
• Large-scale systems enable rather than merely threaten individual self-actualisation #contradicts (0.80) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 371
• Data colonialism constitutes an antiecology that disrupts the self’s home space #qualifies (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 606