4 - Hustling with a Passion

Summary

The participation of tech executives in collectives such as the Quantified Self (QS) belies their desire to occupy the position of a professional participant observer who is simply looking in on an emerging social scene as though from afar. Chapter 4 looks at the way technologists have leveraged QS to cultivate a professional identity of a digital devotee. In particular, it analyzes how the popular staging of QS as a space for private explorations of self-tracking makes it possible for technologists to recoup their business-driven engagements with the forum as hallmarks of personal – as well as of more general – passion for self-quantification, a display of which has become increasingly necessary for success in the tech sector. Innovation is often enough framed as a product of masculinized heroics and individual acts of daring. Examining QS as an instrument of professional development refocuses attention on the feminized modes of free and affective labor that continue to move the tech industry forward. As these chapters explore the forum both as a mechanism and as a mirror of these professional imperatives, they highlight the knottier role desire plays in the digital economy.