Cybersentics Book Club

Your Muse headband "knows" everything about your performance in bed. So does the market.

Over the last two decades, EEG technology moved from neuroscience labs into our living rooms - and, for those who trust it with their sleep, our beds. Sleek headsets promise to visualize your focus and calm, to harness your potential and optimize you to the max. That imagery draws on transhumanist narratives, reductive science storytelling, and the myth that self-tracking is an unambiguous good.

These days, wellness culture, biohacking grinders, and the neurotech industry run on a shared slogan: biometric self-surveillance is productive, even responsible, behavior. That slogan has hardened into something like common sense. Nowhere more so than among Bay Area tech workers who pitch on weekdays and optimize on weekends.

...are you one of them? Are you intrigued by the idea of a quantified self? If so, join us.

Reading:

Gardner, P., & Wray, B. (2013). From lab to living room: Transhumanist imaginaries of consumer brain wave monitors. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 3.