I wrote this essay on biological fitness and ecology for the Sydney Review of Books. Here’s the intro:
When health insurance companies in the United States startoffering discounts to customers who logged a certain number of steps on their personal activity tracker, artists Tega Brain and Surya Mattu decided people should be given an alternative to doing actual exercise. The solution was Unfit Bits, a series of simple hacks — like strapping a Fitbit to a metronome or a dog — that allow users to log physical activity without actually having to do it. Unfit Bits promised a free lunch to those seeking a discount on their health insurance.
Discounts for activity tracking data is an extreme example of efforts to quantify the fitness of an individual and translate it into dollars. The relationship between such devices and insurance companies is part of a larger logic of monitoring and surveillance in which the idea of individual responsibility meets a coercive technical and social apparatus. The broader set of social and interspecies relations that have been shown to contribute to human wellbeing is ignored in favor of a single measure of fitness which becomes a commodity for both the individual who uses their data for an insurance discount, and for the corporation that mines that data for commercial purposes.
Unfit Bits can help us to think about how quantifying biological fitness more generally is not simply a case of gathering the data. It always has an ideological bent. Conceptions of fitness, how we measure them, and why we focus on particular species all reflect broader ideological and ethical questions regarding our relationship with one another and the organisms that surround us and make us what we are.
This is true partly because there are so many agents operating in complex ecosystems, each in a set of complex relations that produce the many different forms of fitness that we find in the biological world. We can only ever tell a small part of this story. The bits of the story we choose to tell inevitably reveal something about how we see the world and our place in it. Ever since Darwin’s time evolutionary theory has found its way into social and political discourse. The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was coined by Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer to draw parallels between Darwin’s work and his economic theories. Contemporary economists continue this dubious tradition of aligning their theories with evolutionary thought.
To say that fitness is a matter of life and death is both a simple statement of fact and an invitation to think through the many social and ethical problems posed by really interrogating our biological relations.
What makes an organism fit? How can we measure its fitness? What are the unfit bits?