Be your own historian

Don't let your data dement you

"If you don't tell your story, someone else will select your version of it." — Haruki Murakami (… or something?)

Good morning everyone, I’m sitting on two longer polished drafts for Grand Technologies on technology’s influence: one looks at algorithms and the other compares our digital life in small towns versus big cities… Can’t wait to share those, but it has been a while. If this newsletter is a pressure valve for creative analytical writing, then my lack of bothering your inbox suggests that my compulsions are flowing into other outlets. They are.

Amidst work that looks at Big Tech’s imprints on the world, journaling about the political economy of my own life, and spam- texting through daily mundanity, I’ve maintained the pursuit of daily writing. Much like someone resolves to get, and stay fit, I left this brain gym of a newsletter and now sweat out the words elsewhere.

Well baby, we’re back in this lab for a few hours this morning. Screw AI. Don’t critique me. Change the training plan. Rather than toil with another essay for weeks, I’d like to publish more, shorter vignettes that lean more into the personal data in front of me, my daily life.

So let’s talk about our personal digital data.

I think there’s a problem with how much digital data we have access to. It takes strong will today to not let it warp our perception of ourselves: who we were in the past, today, and can be in the future. Most of us don’t know how to handle how much personal information our devices record about us.

Life’s good, but it hasn’t always been. Relying on any one digital data metric can mislead how I perceive life. I’m going to consider a few digital data points —its historical, current, and future— and where that could shape my personal identity, were I to let it.

This Newsletter: I’ve been asked “When’s the next Grand Technologies post?” That’s just an indefensible digital data point = “There have been zero words in my inbox for 6 weeks” Flattering in that you pretend to care, but also annoying because it is me dropping a commitment. But did I? Letting these essays rest online here require a difficult confidence today I know many lack. I need it in the future.

Fitness, Health, and Competition: My love for movement has evolved in the past decade: soccer, rowing, triathlon, lifting, and now open-water swimming. Fitness watches feed my Strava to convert specific metrics— e.g., GPS, time, heart rate— creating a virtual twin of digital performance that challenges me as an entire athlete in this true reality. This digital data steers the correct conversation away from “Am I healthy?”, “Am I competitive?”, and “Am I a good teammate?”. Instead, the data detours me, distilling my pursuits into answering wrong questions at the whims of the data itself.

For me, it’s “Am I fit?”— religiously chasing faster pace risks all types of injury. Torn labrums and bouts of depression later, I tell you it’s easy to make faster numbers; it’s harder to let those numbers work truly for you.

Camera Roll: My digital life is over a decade old now. Messages aside, my photos have condensed into iCloud. Thousands of pictures capture memories in the pixels and metadata behind then: when, where, how, and with who was the picture taken with. The software can collate this into some brutal reminders of better and worse times.

Apple be like: “Good morning Max, here’s a lovely photo album to make you crash out for the rest of the day.” How we frame those visceral memories in the present require the same mental fortitude with every other datapoint. In moments of trudging the valleys of despair today, being haunted by happier past memories can also be reminders of better times to come. Hopefully.

So I’ve been fat and happy. Fit and miserable. Single and satisfied. Dating and depressed. Writing a lot and whatever— you get it. On any one of these axes we need to write our own history first. Digital data underly the technologies that guide our history— but don’t write it. Keep pushing.

Thanks for reading,

Max

What digital data do you track and value?

I didn’t even talk about the two most popular ones. 1) Money: We get paid, pay rent, and spend our way through the world almost entirely digitally. 2) Weight: is it just a digital number on a scale? what is it really a proxy for?

What’s outside today’s discussion: comparison with others and companies. Social technologies on digital platforms rely on data to foster a sense of competitiveness for engagement, for better or worse. And then it’s also worth discussing how the companies themselves wield data to surveil and sell what we “volunteer” on these platforms we seemingly can’t live without.