Fitbit Ecology, Part II: Post-Apocalyptic Design
Partially shared values mean partially useful technologies.
While using the Fitbit was certainly effective for its intended purposes, it came with a side-effect: counting my steps. I don't know why I was surprised by this. This is what the device is made to do, after all.
What I was more surprised about was how prominently that step count featured in my mind. The first day I wore it to work, I was checking in on whether I was going to hit that recommendation of 10,000 steps in a day. Why? I can’t think of any reason save for that it was simply there to notice. The device as a whole was designed as a personal fitness tracker, which meant that the interactions that are made easy - like the steps on the home screen, the fact you can press the button to cycle between heart rate and a couple other numbers, the vibration notifying you of your step goal - were all distractions.
The day after, I had the radical idea to take it off when I was walking so that the step count would be wrong and therefore a lot less tempting. I was about to mow the lawn while listening to a baseball game, so I didn’t need to have the phone away from me.
The silly romantic thought I had was that breaking apart the Fitbit into this smattering of usages felt like a post-apocalyptic scavenger mission. Somehow, leaving this Fitbit on the table as I mowed the lawn had the same quality as tearing apart a gas pump in an overgrown suburb to find the right size rubber O-ring.
Is this really that strange? Post-apocalyptic stories have the appeal of a very clear goal for the characters. In such a world, there is a very real, tangible sense of the good. The technological approach - often tearing things apart to find the one good thing - makes sense because the world the things were made for was not the world that the character currently lives within.
Isn’t this true of our own world, in certain ways? As Christians, we have been buried with Him through baptism into death - our own ‘apocalypse’ in the secular sense. We often have a different end in mind than the one that was built. Sometimes, we’ll need to reject technologies as useless or harmful. Sometimes, we’ll keep using them as necessary. Oftentimes, because we need to be building a different world, we’ll have to take old things apart.