In the Republic of FitBit we are fundamentally alone.
“In the future, all products will be made for a market of one,” the Economist wrote in 2009. In New York and San Francisco, the two cities where I spend the most time, the fulfillment of this prophecy seems well under way. It is not unusual to see three or four boutique fitness studios within a city block. As a device designed to cajole and harass you personally, FitBit capitalizes on this trend of winnowing fitness markets down into narrower and narrower niches. It takes the just-for-you ethos of a place like Crossfit and scales it.
Isolation is literally a technical requirement of the FitBit. From the point of view of the tracker, all activity is inherently solitary and accrues to you alone. The device produces a complete archive of our lives by abstracting them from any and every context. This includes geospatial coordinates. The accelerometer measures only changes in speed relative to the stable external frame provided by your body. Taking an escalator will not increase your daily stair count. Taking a plane from New York to New Zealand, you travel no farther than the length of the aisle you walk to the bathroom. We travel best on treadmills rather than from armchairs.
In the process, FitBit affects not only to how we experience our bodies but how we experience space. FitBit’s television ads start with a shot of a man setting out for a jog before dawn, headlamp on, and then goes into a rapid fire montage of dozens of other people doing dozens of other workouts. A male voice sings an upbeat song at a sprint, à la the verses of REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It”: Early fit, late fit, rise fit, ball fit, wall fit, ping fit, pong fit, ping fit, pong fit, row fit, slow fit, ollie fit, oops fit, otis fit, this fit, that fit… It finishes with the tagline: “FIND YOUR FIT.”