[masraum]

The whole "step counting" thing that took off with smart watches and fit bits is nothing new. Folks were counting steps in the 19th century.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/from-jealous-spouses-to-paranoid-bosses-pedometers-quantified-suspicion-in-the-19th-century-180985504/

Not the full article, just the first bit...

The Indiana woman seemed not to know that such devices were already available, used by land surveyors and others to measure distances. But one Boston woman managed to perform exactly the kind of surveillance she described. According to a report in the October 7, 1879, Hartford Daily Courant, “A Boston wife softly attached a pedometer to her husband when, after supper, he started to ‘go down to the office and balance the books.’ On his return, 15 miles of walking were recorded. He had been stepping around a billiard table all evening.”

Keeping track of individual activity—a kind of close certification or surveillance—was not limited to domestic relationships. Initially markers of wealth and power, pedometers adapted to serve individual accountability, especially in work settings. The Washington Evening Star ran a story in the fall of 1895 in which an admiral gave his junior watch officers what looked to them like a common pocket watch but was really a pedometer. The admiral tracked the junior officer’s night watch activities. To the admiral’s dismay, the morning reading showed just two and a half miles traversed overnight, suggesting that the ensigns had been sleeping or resting during most of their watch. The next night, those same ensigns ordered an apprentice to take the watchful pedometer and shake it while the night watchmen took their normal rest. The hack worked insofar as the pedometer registered more miles traveled and it also freed the men from the watchful device. The admiral read the 89 miles traveled in 12 hours as evidence that the device was broken; meanwhile, the news story clearly invites the reader in for a laugh at the admiral’s expense by detailing that one of the lieutenants ordered a subordinate to “take this instrument and shake it violently for four hours” as punishment for being absent without permission.

Another story in the Railway and Engineering Review included a similar hack attempt by a night watchman in Portland, Maine. Having previously been caught mechanically rigging the button-pushing work of his nightly rounds, the watchman was given a pedometer to ensure that he was manually completing his work. Although this use of quantum media—media that count, quantify or enumerate—to more closely monitor the watchman’s activities seemed to work for several nights, he was eventually found sleeping in the engine room, having attached the pedometer to a piston rod.

These 19th-century hacks presage a 21st-century example: In response to insurance companies that offer discounts for those who use fitness trackers, the satirical project Unfit Bits suggests ways to trick your step tracker, such as by attaching the device to a metronome. This form of performance hack aims at subverting corporate and insurance surveillance of human activity. As the pedometer became a vector for surveillance by those in power, people who were able quickly developed hacks designed to frustrate such efforts. Likewise, as the pedometer began to mediate lives rather than survey land, the impacts and risk shifted to the individual being measured, who might face domestic discord or the loss of a job.

Consider Hannibal Jackson, a husband being tracked by his wife because she was concerned that he was not following his doctor’s orders. According to a 1904 anecdote published in the Buffalo Enquirer, Mrs. Jackson proudly shared her husband’s pedestrian cure with friends one night, only to then hear his close friend report that each day, Hannibal had walked to the corner store, bought a cigar and shaken the pedometer until it read five miles instead of taking his daily dose of activity. When his wife expressed shock and disbelief, Hannibal confirmed his friend’s story and asserted that the joy of this ruse had in fact “cured” him of his previous ennui.

As Hannibal’s story suggests, by the turn of the 20th century, quantum media tracking of human activity not only was tied to a particular body but also remediated these largely white, male elite bodies in ways linked to health and labor activities as opposed to the territory mapping seen elsewhere. By the 1890s, we see a marked uptick in newspaper reports of activity tracking as part of health and recreation. In the last quarter of the 19th century, large outlets like Scientific American as well as more local publications such as Pennsylvania’s Elk County Advocate and Michigan’s Lake County Star all ran stories on the health benefits of walking with a pedometer. Athletic clubs and physicians appear in the papers throughout the last decade of the 19th century, each using the pedometer to track the wearer’s activities for the purposes of self-reporting fitness or health.