I suspect that people buy fitness bands because they hope wearing one will hold them accountable in a way that simply buying a pair of running shoes will not. We want to be fit, just like we want to own a house, work a creatively fulfilling job, and think of ourselves as “middle class” no matter what our bank balance says. On the other hand, I’m convinced that the reason there’s a $16 billion market for fitness trackers in North America is not because we’re all psychotically fit athletes who need to understand every single facet of our physical performance in order to succeed-though those people do exist, and they should consider buying a Whoop strap, which Amazon seems to have ripped off for the look and better features of the Halo-but instead because we live in an aspirational society. This is basically what the internet does to us every day, and it’s sort of thrilling that Amazon somehow thought it was a good idea to make a device that put all of this on a billboard. Its entire point is to observe us and tell us that we’re fatter and angrier and lazier than we actually are, to score us on metrics determined by others, and to use the quietly brutal rhetorical tool of “just offering suggestions” to shame us into becoming skinnier, cheerier, and more engaged. In a way, the Amazon Halo is perhaps best understood not as a device to improve your health and well-being and instead as a great work of unintentional performance art that takes the quiet parts of what’s horrible about our networked present and screams them through a megaphone. But just because this doesn’t usually happen doesn’t mean that ceding custody over what was once closely held personal information isn’t a bad idea. It’s convenient for me that a host of random websites and apps have direct access to my credit card information or my bank details I only care when one of them gets hacked and I suddenly get a call from my bank asking if I just bought five chainsaws from a Home Depot in Albany. It only matters when we’re reminded that giving up so much can have strange and sometimes dire consequences. At this point, we as a society have given up on any meaningful sense of privacy and for the most part, we think this is totally okay. 104 minutes and 66 points later (I walked nine holes of golf for 18 points of intense activity, 46 points of moderate activity, and two points of light 7,607 steps, 672 calories burned one instance of “dismissive, uncomfortable, or stubborn” vocal tone which I expressed after shanking my first tee shot, plus an “affectionate, satisfied, or appreciative” vocal tone from after I saved par on the fifth hole), I’m back, and I can now talk more about the Amazon Halo without a film of guilt coating the entire surface of my body. I know that it doesn’t know, but somehow, it definitely knows. Because I’ve spent all day writing this, I have earned zero fitness points and-as if my Amazon Halo has sent electrical signals down into my wrist and up the nerve endings directly into my brain-I feel an overwhelming urge to pause my writing and get moving. The overall experience of wearing this thing, in fact, has been one of creeping anxiety. What I’m saying is, maybe machine learning is not a perfect technology for assessing how you sound to other people. When, as an experiment, I read my Halo a local news report in the fake-happy cadence of a TV anchor, it was happy and told me I sounded energetic and authoritative. Probably the most distinctive feature of the Halo is that, unless you press a button to pause it, it uses machine learning to assess every word you speak in order to, as the company puts it, “analyze energy and positivity in a customer’s voice so they can better understand how they may sound to others, helping improve their communication and relationships.” In practice, this meant that when I lost $12 in a Zoom poker hand and reflexively dropped an f-bomb in front of a handful of longtime friends, Amazon Halo’s voice analyzer told me I sounded “angry, astonished, or disgusted.” When I lazed in bed all morning and at one point sang along to Roxy Music’s “Mother of Pearl,” Amazon Halo took back some of my precious points and then informed me that I was coming across as “opinionated” (though that might be more of a commentary on Bryan Ferry). What I didn’t realize initially, though, was that in addition to agreeing to let Amazon anonymize and store my data, I was also giving up my right not to be judged harshly in my lowest moments. When I first strapped this thing on, I knew that in a very real way I was abdicating some sense of privacy.
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