Egometry, so we are continuously measured (in purchases, in physique, in emotions)

This article was published in number 3 of Vanity Fair, on newsstands until January 17, 2023

Welcome to the era ofegometry, in which each of us is measured and measurable: in physique, in intentions, in emotions, in consumption. If you live in 2023, it is likely that you have a smartphone and/or a computer, that you use apps to monitor your sports performance, that you consult Google, that you like them on social networks: you will do it your way, different from anyone else. The time it takes you to read an article on a site, how long you leave an item in the cart of an e-commerce before completing the purchase, how many steps you take every day, what you watch on Netflix, whether with or without interruptions, here, all this is recorded and becomes a datum, a characteristic to be taken into account in order to then ensure that the market (but also schools, hospitals, politics) has a tailor-made answer, for each single “I”.

This is how we entered this time obsessed with measuring the self and it’s Dominic Fucignafounder of the predictive research company TEA, Trends Explorer Associated, to have proposed the neologism “egometry” as a guide for the new year that has just arrived: “The so-called dataism it is now a religion that demands that we submit to the law of calculation and that all our vital functions are constantly monitored and recorded». It is no longer just the physical parameters (heartbeat or fat mass), now the obsession with monitoring also involves the cognitive and psychological aspects of the person: «And unfortunately we seem to be fascinated by it, as if all this readability could lead us to going beyond our limits, without hesitation any more, without those hesitations up to now all too human».

We proceed safely: we are «data-driven», that is, guided by numbers to make informed decisions, based on presumably objective facts and not on personal sensations which could be fallacious. The answer to our every desire (mostly induced) is already there: unfortunately we are all much more predictable than you think. We don’t wonder about anything, because large companies know how to anticipate what we need (or think we need), saving us the trouble of searching. If they (and they are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page…) know that I buy this thing every certain time (and it is known from loyalty cards, credit card purchases, web searches …) I will receive publicity for exactly that thing, at a price that is acceptable to me: «We forgot the Cambridge Analytica scandal too quickly», remarks Domenico Fucigna, «the data was combined with psychometric studies and the psychological profile of users to identify a specific personality and package precise messages that were going to hit people’s weaknesses. Facebook was also involved in the data collection, which is said to have sold our profiles. Companies are constantly looking for this information, which is precious for getting to the heart of the buyer».

Emotions and feelings that were thought to be made only of magic and enchantment are scientifically investigated. A giant in the field is Antonio Damasio, Portuguese neurologist and neuroscientist who has carried out important studies on the neuronal basis of behavior. «Emotions and feelings are two different things: feelings happen in our mind, they are personal and subjective, while emotions are public and others can observe them too. Both, however, are scientifically studied, including feelings, even if they seem more unfathomable: if an investigator asked me specific questions, I could report what happened to me. My answers would become recordable data, information that can then be shared. However, I don’t think that investigating anything about our minds, bodies and brains reduces the magic and wonder of our being. On the contrary, as we unravel the mysteries of human biology, so does respect for the incredible powers of nature.”

On the one hand, progress for science, on the other, an opportunity for the market which wasted no time and put the successes of neurophysiology at its service: «Today, with functional magnetic resonance and electroencephalogram, it is possible to detect activations and reactions of the brain when we choose one food on the supermarket shelf rather than another, we can understand if we like it and how much we like it regardless of what we declare», he explains Mario Rosanova, Associate Professor of Human Physiology at the Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences of the University of Milan. «They are scientific tools that contribute to neuromarketing, a discipline born precisely from the synergy between neuroscience and marketing to provide general indications on how to design a new product, decide its price or update the brand’s aesthetics to leverage the cognitive mechanisms of consumers and encourage them the choices. Although very useful, these techniques require expensive equipment and specific skills for data acquisition and analysis and in the end, in any case, they return information on the brain of a hypothetical average buyer and not on the individual person. For this reason, companies today prefer to rely on less demanding measures from an economic point of view which, perhaps indirect and approximate, are however capable of capturing the individual behavior of that specific customer, with his tastes and preferences. Think of Amazon: it begins to profile our behavior from the first access to the site and, in the following times, it gives us back a panorama of products to buy tailored right on us. It’s hard to go wrong.”

But how much and how can our subjectivity really be transformed into objective data, which can surely be guessed? “In the last twenty years, neuroscience has made great strides,” explains Professor Rosanova. Tycoon Elon Musk implanted a Neuralink microchip in the brain of a monkey that allowed the animal to play the video game caused a sensation pong without the use of any joystick, but only by decoding the nerve signals coming from his brain and then sent to the computer. Recently it has been possible, by analyzing only the nervous activity of the visual cortex, to reconstruct with a good degree of approximation the scenes of the film that a person was watching, understanding, for example, if on the screen there was an individual speaking or a image of a landscape. If with subjectivity we instead indicate the set of sensory perceptions, emotional states, memories and dream activity, in fact that subjectivity is inaccessible to the tools we have today. However, some scientists such as Giulio Tononi have had the courage to tackle the problem starting from the assumption that basically the only thing we know directly is our subjective experience, our conscience, and suggesting that this can somehow be measured ».

At this point one wonders, what about the longed-for privacy? “Privacy is a false problem,” concludes Domenico Fucigna. «The concept itself belongs to our era and to the culture of this short period of time. Today, Generation Z kids, those used to handling TikTok, express themselves with great personal openness, with much more transparency than previous generations. Privacy no longer exists, it has given way to egometry».