The Case for Precise Outrage

Earlier this week, the story broke that Oral Roberts University will require incoming freshmen to monitor their physical activity via Fitbit — and to grant the school access to the data. What’s more, the data will be used to inform students’ grades, as the Fitbits “send the data, which includes detail on exercise food, sleep, and body weight, into Oral Roberts’ learning management system.” The news was met with widespread outrage and exasperation by privacy advocates and tech critics (a community to which I proudly belong). The program was derided as disturbing, creepy, terrible, dystopian, the beginning of end times.

But an important facet of the Oral Roberts case is that the university was already requiring students to track their activity and was already making their academic performance contingent on the results. It has done so, in one form or another, for fifty years. Oral Roberts, a private Christian school, evaluates students using a “whole person” assessment that includes indicators of students’ intellectual, physical, and spiritual development.

What’s new here is not that students are tracking their physical activity, but that they’re tracking it digitally, rather than in paper journals that need to be transcribed later by the school’s physical education faculty.

So what, exactly, is the beef with the Oral Roberts Fitbits? Is it that (as David Berreby suggested to me) it’s an instance of “new technology throwing an old abuse into relief?” Or is there something uniquely objectionable about tracking this information digitally, some qualitatively new wrong that warrants our indignation?

I’m not disputing that there are many legitimate reasons to be resistant to or creeped out by developments like these. Those generalized feelings can be an important clue that something is normatively amiss, but we shouldn’t be content to let our outrage paint over the details with a broad brush.

We ought to push ourselves to pay more attention to mechanisms and reasons and specifics.

Tech criticism often stands in for more generalized complaints about the state of the world. When we get anxious about data collection or electronic surveillance or algorithmic decision-making, we may be less worried by the technology per se than by what it signifies. It’s about impersonality and bureaucracy; it’s about quantification and the flattening of social experience; it’s about neoliberalism and the intensifying concentration of capital. To be sure, new technologies might illuminate the scope and reach of these dynamics into our daily lives, or represent their intrusion into formerly sacred spheres. And in doing so, tech might exacerbate the inequities and injustices that these systems wreak on our world. So technology is not a straw man here — far from it. But we should be clear about which quality of a specific tech it is, precisely, that raises our hackles.

Or perhaps digital monitoring regimes represent a different kind of problem that has to do specifically with the tech at issue. Is the Oral Roberts objection about the intrusion of market actors into the educational realm? Is it about the unanticipated consequences stemming from retention and reuse of students’ data sometime in the future (whether by Oral Roberts’ intention or by breach)? Is it because we don’t think we can adequately protect students’ privacy when these types of information are tracked digitally? Perhaps it’s that digital monitoring seems to foreclose the opportunity for the “fudging” and “sporting chance” that analog systems allow (although, in practice, there are still avenues of resistance). Or maybe our concern is that these regimes create a slippery slope: if we have the tools to monitor students’ health behavior in a granular way, perhaps it will become more acceptable to track ever more intrusively, and to connect more and more systems together in ways that are normatively objectionable.

In the Oral Roberts case, my hunch is that our outrage bubbles up as an amalgamation of these valid anxieties, but, in reality, it has more to do with the school’s underlying policy than with the Fitbit per se. The idea that a school would evaluate its students based on physical fitness seems biopolitically problematic and Big Brotherish. But again, the program itself is not new. We might just be noticing it for the first time, and we shouldn’t conflate our indignation about Fitbits with the existence of tracking more generally.

Being precise about our objections matters, because we can’t devise solutions without understanding the nature of a problem. And we’ll engage more effectively with the people making these systems — both the technologies themselves and the policies that integrate them into our lives — if we come to the table with carefully defined concerns.

Points: “The Case for Precise Outrage,” a meta hot take by Karen Levy, is a Points original. Karen exhorts critics of technology inside and outside the institute to greater fidelity to the particulars of new tech deployments and news. Roger that