What happened to Quantified Self?
The "Quantified Self" movement, once a significant part of tech and tech-adjacent culture, has largely fizzled out, at least under that name. Here are some candidate explanations:
- It succeeded: it got institutionalized and lives on under brand names. Smart watches are keeping good, useful health data; email providers make it easy to query decades of email; time-tracking software has come a long way.
- It succeeded, but pluralistically: people count their steps, and they look at heatmaps of where they've taken their thousands upon thousands of photos, but they see those as separate domains, not aspects of a larger self-quantification project.
- It failed: it's not easy to collect relevant data about yourself, and it's vastly harder to make real use of it. The surge of attention came as people got excited about the idea, but this can't last if they aren't getting real value from it.
- The cultural energy behind Quantified Self as a movement wound up in EA, "rationalism," and other adjacent movements.
- It stopped being cool: we collectively had a vastly more optimistic cost-benefit calculation about building vast data profiles of yourself. (Note that the 2016 election and the run-up to GDPR correspond to a sharp downward slope in the Google Trends graph.)
I think all of these explanations are part of what's going on.