‘Extimate’ Technologies: Empowerment, Intrusiveness, Surveillance: The fate of the human subject in the age of intimate technologies and Big Data

A new chapter in the history of technology seems to be unleashed. Until recently, man-made technologies basically functioned as prostheses, as external prosthetic extensions of human bodies, directed towards the outside world, allowing us to interact with and manipulate objects more effectively, eventually transforming humans into ‘prosthesis-gods’ (Freud 1930). Currently, technological devices have begun to move inwards: entering our bodies and brains, functioning as implants rather than as extensions. Self-monitoring is an important objective of this trend. Due to recent developments in technosciences, such as synthetic biology, tissue engineering and nanomedicine, our sway over the human ‘condition’ (in its literal, biomedical sense) is increasing, down to the molecular level, and up to the point of becoming uncanny. New options for drug delivery and bio-implants are entering (pervading) human bodies and brains. On the one hand, this may be seen as strengthening human autonomy and agency. On the other hand, we must consider the possibility that we are the targets rather than the agents of this process. Rather than being in control, we may become increasingly dependent on these new technologies, emerging in the boundary zone between therapy and enhancement. On the one hand, intimate technologies allegedly open up new practices of the Self, enabling individuals to become the ‘managers’ of their own life and health. On the other hand, human beings are controlled by the gaze of the Other, which invokes a sense of unease. An exemplification is the Snyderome project. A prominent geneticist was closely monitored over the course of 14 months, measuring everything, resulting in the integrative Personal Omics Profile, a comprehensive omics portrait (“extremely high coverage”), combining “deep sequencing” with more than 3 billion measurements of molecules. This portrait is highly personal, but at the same time highly impersonal: opening up individuals to a digital panopticon: a molecularised version of the ‘voice of conscience’ in the form of a computer monitor, informing us that we must change their life on a daily basis: the superego of intimate technologies in the terabyte age. What is the fate of the human subject in the era of Big Data and intimate technologies?