Close All Tabs - Silicon Valley's Earliest Self Trackers

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Before Apple Watches, Oura Rings and Fitbits delivered mountains of health data to the masses, a group of obsessive self-tracking enthusiasts in Silicon Valley started a movement with the tagline “self-knowledge through numbers.” This was the Quantified Self. From tracking “urges to take aspirin” to using infrared cameras to keep tabs on sleeping positions while snoring, these eccentric knowledge-seekers built a community around technical expertise and an ethos of self-discovery. Reporter Gabriela Glueck traces what happened when self-tracking went mainstream — and how the data-obsessed idealists watched their movement get swallowed up by corporate tech giants with products to sell.  Further Reading/Listening: The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe — Gary Wolf, Workman Publishing Company Data Overload: Is the 'Quantified Self' Really the Future? — John Fortt, NBC News Wearable Health Tech: Helpful Tool Or Health Hype — @TalkingWithDocs, YouTube  The cutthroat wearables battle is about more than tracking your fitness — Brent Crane, The Seattle Times Wearables, Health-Tracking Apps Are Stressing Users, Causing Harm — Emily Stewart, Business Insider The New World Of Wearables: From Health Monitoring To Human Augmentation — Chuck Brooks, Forbes  Read the Transcript here Email us at [e-mail] Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ Credits: This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From KQED. On the California Report magazine, we bring you stories about Californians helping out their neighbors, like a little store in Oakland where shoppers can walk out with one item for free. I mean, opening up a shop and giving away stuff for free, my first customers thought I was insane. Still here, so it seems to be working. I'm Sasha Koka. You can hear more community connection stories on the California Report Magazine podcast. Hey, Tabbies.

we cover a lot on the show, but it's basically impossible to keep tabs on everything going on online. So if there is a specific topic or story or rabbit hole you're curious about that we haven't done a deep dive into yet, you're in luck. We just launched a listener question form so you can ask us about internet trends, tech subcultures, or other online oddities you want close all tabs to cover. Check it out at kkwad.org slash close all tabs and scroll to the bottom of the page. or click the link in our show notes. Okay, let's get to the episode. There's a good chance you're being tracked. By you.

Nearly one in three U.S. adults uses a wearable device to track their health and fitness. I'm talking Apple watches, aura rings, fitbits, even our phones and cars have trackers. We track our sleep, heart rate, steps, location, behaviors, habits, and so much more. Self-tracking has become the norm. But it wasn't always this way.

For much of history, self-tracking was the domain of eccentrics and obsessive academics. There were the freaks to the rest of polite society. Like in the 1600s, Venetian physician Santorio Santorio built the weighing chair and obsessively tracked his weight. He measured everything he ate and drank, as well as everything that came out of his body. Founding father Benjamin Franklin? Also a meticulous self-tracker. He kept detailed accounts of his daily activities. But these were more than just diary entries.

They were detailed charts, a rubric of the 13 virtues he wanted to live up to, logged every day of the week. Also known as a habit tracker. And then there's Buckminster Fuller, the architect, philosopher, inventor, and all-around futurist. From 1917, up until his death in the 80s, Buckminster Fuller kept an exhaustive archive of his life. newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, receipts, and all correspondence. As a lifelong journaler, I aspire to archive my life like that.

But again, these were outliers. Then, in the late 2000s, a group of self-tracking enthusiasts started a movement to create and share ways of obsessively collecting data on themselves. It was called the quantified self. Today, we're exploring the early days of this obscuring. tech subculture, and what changed when tracking went mainstream. And we'll try to understand whether our mountains of self-track data are actually helpful. Ready? This is close all tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives.

Let's get into it. This week, I'm passing the mouse and the mic to give. KQEDD reporter and producer Gabriela Glick. She is going to lead the steep dive. Thanks, Morgan. I'll start like you do by opening a new tab. The Quantified Self Movement. We're going back to 2007, 2008. A time, technologically speaking, that feels so far from where we are today,

you could consider christening it vintage. Apple had just released the first model of something they decided to call the iPhone. is going to reinvent the phone. Lots of people were getting online to join a thing called Facebook. That's what the Facebook is going to be about. People are going to log on because after all the cake and watermelon, there's a chance they're actually going to get laid. Meet a girl.

Yes. That is really good. And the first Kindle even made its debut. Now there's a way to put 80,000 books, newspapers, and blogs right in the palm of your hand. Complete with Blackberry-esque buttons that made it look more like a giant calculator than a book. culturally, things were also a buzz. The final installment of Harry Potter had hit bookstores, Obama was about to get elected,

and Rihanna was dropping bangers. This was the backdrop that Gary Wolfe found himself in. I was working as a journalist at that time and writing about the cultural impacts of new technologies. Gary was working for Wired Magazine, and he'd been getting interested in a new tech trend, self-tracking. More specifically, he was interested in how technology was allowing people to track their lives in novel and interesting ways.

Suddenly, you could do things like input everything you ate into an online calculator to track calories, or clock every single restaurant, coffee shop, and store you went to. The very first popular geolocation systems were just coming out. So 4Square, which is ancient now, so people were tracking where they had been. And courtesy of 23 and me, you could even spit into a test tube mail it back to a lab, and log online to find out more about your own DNA.

People had begun thinking about themselves and their behaviors as data. It was all enough to make Gary wonder. How are we going to use those tools? And what effect were they going to have on how they thought about ourselves? That question fascinated Gary. It brought together both his love of new technology with his penchant for philosophizing. So he brought the idea to his editor at Wired Magazine, a guy named Kevin Kelly, basically saying, hey, this seems really interesting, nobody is talking about it that much. I feel like we should report on it.

Then they came up with a name for the new beat. We put up some things on a whiteboard, and I put the name quantified self on it. Quantified South. The self is the topic, and the quantified is, okay, what is the effect on the self of having access to dig? access to new reasoning capacity, access to new observational capacity through sensing. When Gary told me this story about how it all went down, the quantified self, or QS, sounded interesting, but still kind of abstract and theoretical. And maybe the wired duo were dealing with that same feeling, because their next step was all about grounding their questions in the real world. Finding people who were doing early self-tracking projects and trying to understand why,

We didn't know that we would be encountering an already existing DIY culture of knowledge-making, but it was there. So where did it come from? How did it get there? They decided the best way to get answers would be to bring the stories to them. So they organized a meetup. It was going to be at Kevin's House in Pacifica, a coastal Bay Area town right next to Tech's epicenter. And although they didn't know what to expect, the time. Turnout was pretty good. About 20 or so people.

Being basically right on top of Silicon Valley probably helped them draw a crowd. Anyways, they were all crowded into the space, sitting in an assortment of chairs, all pointed towards the front of the room. And we were sitting around, talking about what we were doing very informally, and introducing ourselves, and somebody walked in late. And Kevin turned to him, his name was Kapping-Y, and said, okay, you came in last, you go first. What are you doing?

Instead of offering up a standard introduction, Coppeng Yi opened his computer. And showed this detailed time diary of everything he'd done in the last year while he was working on his dissertation in 15-minute increments. And it was so fascinating. After Copping, other people presented their projects. There was Berkeley Psychology Professor Seth Roberts. I think he presented something about improving his balance. He was measuring it by,

standing on one foot. And so he would just start a timer and he would stand on one foot, and he would see how long he could stand on one foot for. When I talked to engineer and businessman Rajiv Mehta, who was at that first meeting, he said the common reaction from people who showed up was shock. Shocked that there were enough people, nerdy enough, to care about this sort of thing at all. It was just fantastic that there were other people interested in, just as importantly, to discover the huge range of interests in that tiny little group, which gave us all the sense of this is much richer than any of us actually had thought. And among the attendees were people who'd later go on to become famous,

like Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week. He'd been a wrestler in high school and college and so forth. And he talked about how he had these detailed records of what he ate and his exercise and so forth. And he made the claim that even today, if he wanted to hit a certain weight, that he would be able to reproduce it by going to his old notes and following them. Even though everyone's project was different, a kind of unifying undercurrent ran through the group. They were all the type of people who would spend their free time doing a QS project. People were sort of attracted to this kind of self-tracking practice

because they had two interests at the same time. On the one hand, they had a personal question that they were really interested in, And they were scientific and technical professionals. When they had a personal question, it made sense to use the science techie tools they were already familiar with. As Gary tells it, without us really even doing anything, this genre was born. The Pacifica meetup became the first of many, something called the quantified self show and tell. Like looking back to second grade. And it was really nice and interesting because it wasn't about pitching anything.

It wasn't about convincing anybody. that you had some magic solution, which was very common in the tech world. It was really just about saying what you personally had learned from doing something that you hadn't necessarily been able to do even a year or two ago with the tools that were available then. Though they didn't fully know it at the time, the Pacifica meeting was the start of something. Something that was about to get big, or at least bigger. To get into that, let's open a new tab. Quantified Self goes mainstream.

After that first meeting in 2008, QS started to generate some buzz. Gary and his wired editor, Kevin, made a blog for the quantified self as a way to catalog their discoveries and possibly showcase their incredible tagline, self-knowledge through numbers. There was also a QS forum, and it gained traction as people shared their idiosyncratic projects and experiences online. Gary says this kind of knowledge sharing was a big part of the early community's ethos. very much in line with the budding DIY culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s. So people were sharing information on the internet about how to do things that were part really of a professional research repertoire,

but had started to become available to somewhat technical people to do at home. QSers began spreading the show and tell format nationally and then internationally. One 2014 report points to over 100 QS meetup groups in 30 countries. with about 20,000 overall participants. Clearly, they'd hit upon something that resonated. It was just a great way to just connect with a community of people, all like-minded folks, and really just learning from each other. Bob Troia attended one of the early QS meetings in New York City.

After hearing about some Bay Area folks who'd started some kind of self-research movement, he was already interested in tracking himself, and the association with Tim Ferriss didn't hurt either. And I showed up one day and watched people give the, like 10, 12-minute talks about their own self-experiments. Very informal, very casual, but it was very inspirational. And then I was like, wow, there's actually a lot of people out there just like me. Bob quickly got deep into QS.

He even visited the Bay Area for a QS conference. After that, I set up a blog that night, like, well, I was in a hotel room, and I just started writing, I think my first post, and I went and got a domain name, quantifiedbob.com. If you talk to more people in the early QS movement, you'll hear a similar. story. They were outcasts, nerds, the weird ones, tracking their every move. Here's Gary again. I think people who have really intense scientific and technical interests, many of them are used to being outliers in some way. He says this outsider identity became something like a point of pride and made the meetups that much more important. When you're doing something that's so

far from the mainstream, community really matters. It's kind of hard to imagine today, since Apple watches and self-tracking devices like aura rings, a wearable smart ring, are so popular. But back in the 2010s, this was really niche stuff. And there was another piece of it. Because the technology was less advanced, with way more friction, you had to put in a lot of effort to get data on yourself. Instead of just strapping on an Apple Watch and checking your phone, it was more like, Okay, I set up an infrared camera and I recorded myself as I slept and tried to figure out if my snoring was connected to my posture. To understand just how intensive or well-thought-out early QS projects were,

Gary likes to point to examples, and there are many to choose from. But for the sake of time, we'll look at one. The story of Jacob E. Larson. He's one of Gary's friends and co-founder of quantified self, Copenhagen. His problem? Headaches. He took regular medication for those headaches, painkillers, and he decided that he wanted to really understand whether there was some pattern to his headaches and whether there were some things he could do besides take painkillers that would help him.

Step one for Jacob, figure out how to measure a headache. And he found it surprisingly difficult. There are so many apps for recording headaches, but they require you to make a lot of subtle judgments. Like, okay, my headaches started and now I think it's gone and now it's back again. Does that count as one headache or two headaches? Gary calls these moments of evaluation little frictions. They're just demoralizing and they become a bother. Jacob needed to come up with a better metric, narrow his focus,

figure out what data he could get that could help him understand his problem. So he decided to track each time he took an aspirin. That'd mean the headache had reached a certain threshold worth noting. So he just focused on observing, he didn't focus on intervening, and already he started to learn a lot. He learned he was taking aspirins more than he thought, and more than was recommended. One side effect of too much aspirin consumption, more headaches. By tracking the aspirins, he sort of adjusted his willingness to sit with the headache a little bit longer before taking the aspirin.

And eventually his headaches got better and his aspirin consumption went to zero. But Jacob wanted to keep up his tracking. So we refined his data metric. This time, to the urge to take aspirin. So this was an wonderful example of being able to get really useful empirical data from your daily life, even though you're not really following any kind of pre-established or vetted protocol that comes to us from biomedicine. This project is a classic example of many early self-tracking efforts. It took a lot of thinking, refining, and all in all, a lot of mental work.

Also, it didn't necessarily take fancy technology, just a little persistence. And for many people who were, for lack of a better word, desperate to learn something about themselves, that effort was worth it. Take Swedish engineer Sarah Magare. She's quite famous in the QS world and has done many self-experiments, including one to help her understand how medication for her Parkinson's was actually impacting her. Here she is in a short video from Salzburg Global. Patients can do a lot for themselves in that I have actually optimized my own medication effect by learning about my individual responses over time. As she likes to point out, many patients see their neurologist or doctor once or twice a year,

maybe for an hour or less. The rest of the year is self-care. If you have a good medical practitioner, they are going to use a lot of trial and error with you. They're going to ask you, how did that work? and you're getting a better answer about how that worked is very helpful. Projects like Sarah's and Jacobs helped reveal the potential of self-investigation. So there was this feeling that there were new possibilities. They hadn't been turned into products yet.

At those very early meetings, you know, we were just meeting the people who would go on to start aura ring and the Fitbit and, you know, other tools that were just a few years down the road. But of course, if an impulse can be had, it can be sold. That's next after this break. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star One, you keep more of your money. Star One Credit Union in your best interest. A dark night, a quiet house, but inside, danger was lurking.

Oh, not really. We have Exfinity Shield, so we're not worried. What if protecting your home and devices could be drama-free? X-Finity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply, not available in all areas. In 2014, Tim Cook walked onto the Apple stage wearing an Apple Watch. The ad for Apple's first watch iteration playing on the screen.

Apple Watch is the most personal device we've ever created. Because you wear it, he says, they invented new, intimate ways to connect and communicate directly from your wrist. And it's also a comprehensive health and fitness device. By 2014, the Fitbit had already been out for a fat minute, and the aura ring was just around the corner. And as the 2010s climbed to their peak, Gary says something about the QS movement started to shift too. There's a way in which those ideas have become very mainstream. And when that happens, you don't necessarily need a special place to work them through. Like, okay, I'm the only one.

doing this, I'm using these DIY tools, I need to meet some other people so I don't feel like I'm crazy to apply scientific methods to my own questions. That stopped really being the case. A blog from the time declared the quantified self-movement dead, but many QS enthusiasts online begged to differ. One commentator on the QS forum wrote, it's a bit dystopian to think that big companies can, should, will, replace the basic agency of, I want to understand something in my life by handing answers to people. But of course, in some ways, that's what happened. And the questions that first drew Geryn,

how people would use the technology, and how it would shape their lives, were no longer being answered by a careful group of self-experimenters, but by everyone else. Which brings us to a new tab. Is all this tracking actually helping us? These days, wearable tracking devices are everywhere, and they collect health data seamlessly.

So what's the impact of all this automated number crunching? Are we any healthier or happier? Have we all finally achieved self-understanding? And what, if anything, have we lost? To help answer these questions, I'm fast-forwarding. From where we left off around 2017-2018 to present day. The term obsessive tracker has now taken on a different meaning. It's for people obsessed with their Fitbits,

not their infrared camera setup that helps them track their posture in relation to snoring. I figured I needed to talk to someone who had at one point been a bit of an obsessive tracker. So I called up the host of this very show, Morgan Sung. She got into the whole thing a couple years back when she switched her ADHD men and realized they weren't really working. And I was having like these really weird reactions and like I was so sweaty and my heart rate was like kind of kind of all over the place, and I just, like, felt kind of sick all the time. As one does, Morgan got on Reddit and came across a post from a user recounting a similar experience. That user was wearing an aura ring when it all happened and was able to collect

some data validating their symptoms. So, Morgan got a ring. I was like, for the next two weeks, I'm going to be a little bit miserable, but I can probably at least see if, like, what I'm feeling is real. Or maybe I'm just making it up, because I think I was like, oh, maybe this is purely psychosomatic. Turns out it was real. Her heart rate and body temperature were spiking dramatically throughout the day. And Morgan says it was kind of reassuring to have what she thought she was feeling confirmed by data. Especially if, you know, you're a marginalized person in any way who is maybe not often listened to by doctors. The aura ring was also giving her insight into things she hadn't necessarily asked for and offered up mountains of sleep data. Over time,

her relationship with the device began to change. So at first it started as a novelty, and then I think, yeah, it did kind of become a little bit of a compulsion. I don't think it was, like, obsessive, but, you know, I would like wake up in the morning, turn off my alarm, open the app, and check how I slept. Instead of just thinking, hmm, I slept this way, you know. If the app said she slept badly, it had put a damper on her day, even if she herself disagreed. If she went out drinking with friends the night before, her ring would clock that. If she pushed herself harder at the gym, she'd find herself wondering what her ring would say, if it would notice, if it would tell her she did well.

After a while, it all started to get into her head. I think, like, trying to optimize my body in that way made me feel like I was having less fun in my life. Then something happened that forced her to cut ties with the ring for good. She lost the charger. I was visiting my parents on the other side of the country and I left it at their house. I was like, I'm not going to buy a new charger. I'm just going to go visit my parents and pick up my charger then. And it was funny because I went back home and my charger wasn't there.

And at that point, I think I just, I don't know, it fizzled out. The novelty wore off and I guess I was like, wow, I don't know if this has added to my life significantly. I felt like I wasn't missing anything. Morgan likens her experience before, during, and after wearing her aura ring to this meme that's popular online. It has three characters in it, all at different stages of enlightenment about wearable trackers. On the far left of the spectrum is this guy who's a total beginner. He's never touched a wearable. He thinks the whole idea is stupid.

Then in the middle, there's a guy who's become obsessed with them, kind of like Morgan at the height of her aura ring obsession. And he's like, oh, I wear the wearables. I know I like can't sleep without my aura ring. I need use my whoop or like I need my Apple watch to tell me if I slept well. And then on the far right is this guy who's reached full enlightenment. Like very sage looking like hooded figure who's like, you don't need a wearable to be happy. These days, Morgan says she feels more like him. I think wearables can be really helpful.

But I do kind of feel like that meme sometimes. I'm like, oh, you know, I can trust my body. I can be intuitive. You know, I can kind of trust myself to tell when something is feeling off. Of course, this is just Morgan's story. But take a look at the Oro Ring Forum and you'll find similar tales. Still, I was curious if at a large scale these tracking devices are helpful for most people. So I gave Australian sociologist Deborah Lepton a call.

She studied health tracking for quite a long time and she gave me a very good scientist answer. Kind of maybe, sometimes. I've done research where people have said, look, I'm bored with self-tracking, I've had enough of it. I'm just, you know, it hasn't helped me, so I'm stopping. I've had research findings where people have said, say, with chronic health conditions that on the one hand,

yes, it gives me control over my condition, it makes me feel as I have more control, but on the other hand, I'm just sick of it. It's turning my home into a clinic. It's complicated. Take some of the recent research on sleep trackers, for instance. One survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that more than half of adults who use sleep trackers

say they've changed their sleep habits based on what they've learned. So on one hand, tracking can encourage healthy habits. But this effort at sleep maxing, like so many optimization dreams, can also hurt. In fact, in some ways it can make things worse. because we know from sleep studies and studies with people with insomnia that the more you fret and worry about your sleep, the more it can then have this vicious circle where you can't sleep. For Gary's part, these tracking devices have kind of lost the plot

of what the original quantified self-movement was all about, an approach to self-discovery, not a technology or a product. The idea is like I'm just going to get the tool, and something great is going to happen. But what did you care about? That question was never answered. The early days, at first meeting in Pacifica, the thousands of personalized science projects,

they all took so much effort, thinking, adjustment, and reflection. Just strapping on an Apple Watch, he'd argue, can't be a replacement for all that. I think thinking about what's going on and learning about what's going on with yourself It requires active processing, right? Being told what's happening is not the same thing as learning what's happening from observation.

The effort, it turns out, was part of the quest for self-knowledge, too. That whole process led to a kind of deeper insight, which is commercial self-tracking tools, their products. And products are designed to serve people who have needs, specific needs. they're fantastic if that's your goal. What if your goal lies outside that area where all the attention has been focused? Nobody's going to make a product for you. These days, the movement, if it should be called that, is in a limbo state. One QS member told me that COVID basically killed the last of the meetups,

although apparently there are some people trying to pick them back up. Gary says that for anyone wanting to carry on the spirit of quantified self, he has one piece of advice. Don't start with the data. That's often a big mistake. Start with the question and work backwards. Ask yourself what it is about yourself you want to learn. Then become your own personal scientist, figuring out how you might answer it, going back to the drawing board again and again and again. Like scientific practice and a scientific mindset, it belongs to absolutely everybody. And if we want to solve problems, it helps to think about them. It feels like an obvious takeaway.

But maybe these days it's not. That story was brought to us by KQED reporter and producer Gabriela Glick. If you enjoyed learning about the quantified self-movement, you're in luck. Gary Wolf is coming out with a book all about it in October. called the quantified self, learning to observe. That's it for today's deep dive. If you need to open more tabs in the quantified self movement and the mass adoption of wearable trackers,

check out the show notes for some further reading. And if that's not enough, stick around after the credits for some bonus content. And if you need to close your rings or whatever, well, that's not my problem. I'm finally free from the wearables. Okay, let's close all these tabs. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung.

This episode was reported by Gabriela Glick. It was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Agusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hamburg and audio engineer Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Mahasanaad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Tovin-Lin-Linzie is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, local.

This episode's keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Applemaker high 75 keyboard with Fogredin Red Samurai keycaps and Gator on Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches. Thanks for listening. I thought Apple watches, and I still do when I maintain this, I'm sorry if you get offended, anyone else. I think Apple watches are very ugly. sorry to anyone who wears an Apple Watch, but I will not get that tan line. Like, I have yet to see a wearable tracker that isn't a little bit heinous.