“I’ve Got to Close My Rings”

Value Capture on the Apple Watch, Substack, and More

It’s not hard to quantify your interests these days.

Like to exercise? There are so many ways to count your steps or log your miles, no matter how you exercise, and if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, like I am, it’s hard to avoid tracking your “Stand,” “Exercise,” and “Move” goals on your Apple Watch. Those three colorful rings ... ah, how they beckon.

Keeping an eye on your eating? Whether you’re tracking your macros or your calories or whatever, there are multiple apps that help you track how you’re doing. 

Wonder what your friends and followers thought about that last thing you posted to Instagram (or Twitter or TikTok or, god forbid I give myself away as an oldie, Facebook)? Social media is happy to tally your views and likes ... and to tantalize you with more if you must keep scrolling.

And then there’s the little platform that we’re using here, Substack, which tells me that my essay about “Not Going Paid” went to umpty subscribers, half-umpty of whom opened it, and it got umpty likes and umpty comments. Big numbers for little old me ... but what do they tell me about what matters?

Not everything that can be counted counts

Quantification is everywhere ... and with it some judgments about what is valuable, what counts. That should make us wary. As Billy Bragg says (or was it Albert Einstein?), not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted counts.

If you’re like me, you started using systems¹ like these because they promised to make something you wanted to do easier, often a lot easier. It’s a hell of a lot easier to let my iPhone track my activities than it is to write it all down in a spreadsheet or, god forbid, on paper. And so on.²

These systems entice us with their ease, their magic. But we risk overlooking how easy it is to fall captive to these systems, to adopt their perspective, even when it doesn’t serve you. You become enthralled by the numbers. You start to accept the system’s values and metrics as your own—numbers don’t lie, you reason—and perhaps you reshape your behavior to align with those values. If you’re not careful, you forget why you were exercising, eating, sharing, or writing in the first place ... 

This is the larger concern I voiced in my recent piece, “Why I’m Not Going Paid on Substack.” I worried that going paid would turn me into an asshole, but it’s more complicated than that. I wondered if going paid and chasing growth on Substack would draw me (back) into a system of assigning value to my experiences that no longer reflected the way that I wanted to live. Would it lead me back into the bullshit machine? But let’s not go there quite yet. First I want to unpack how easy it is to fall under the spell of the systems we use.

Value Capture

There’s a name for the way systems draw you into reshaping your values to mirror the terms of the system.³ The term is “Value Capture,” as I learned thanks to

Ian Leslie

, whose essay, “Seduced by the Machine” came out just a few days after my piece.

Seduced By The Machine

Part of what Leslie offers is a nice summing up the much denser and more detailed work of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s, whose paper “Value Capture” is available in pre-print as I write this (January 2024). Basically, value capture happens when a person adopts the expressions of value offered by a system or social environment, expressions of value that are usually simplified and quantified, and allows those expressions to dominate their reasoning and motivations. It’s a fascinating concept, because it broadens out—oh hell, it theorizes—our understanding of the feeling we get when we adopt the measures offered by a watch, an app, or a publishing tools, and asks us to consider the ways that we get captured by much larger systems, perhaps systems as large and diffuse as corporate capitalism itself.

My first conscious realization of value capture came with my Apple Watch, specifically the Fitness app, which I once allowed to lead me around by the wrist. It started when my watch congratulated me for hitting my daily exercise or stand goal; it got worse when I started to wait for the sparkly “light show” on my wrist every time I closed all three rings in a day (exercise, move, stand—these are the rings, for non-Apple Watch users); and it captured me completely when I got a reminder saying something like “All you need is 10 more minutes of exercise to close your move ring,” and I dutifully got up from the couch to run up and down the stairs for ten minutes so I could hit my Move goal. I’d have felt (more) like a damned fool if Sara hadn’t been going up and down the stairs with me.

It was at that moment that I realized I was no longer making my own decisions about exercise, no longer expressing my unique personal pursuit of health through exercise. All I was doing was trying to close my damned rings. Was that really the way I wanted to be exercising, the way I wanted to be living? 

I could see similar dangers elsewhere: with Strava (an exercise app), I noticed that I was regularly running on a stretch of trail that was a Strava “segment,” which meant that I could compare my times on the segment with every other person that ran there. Same with MyFitnessPal; same with Noom. The dangers are everywhere in the world of quantifying apps.

Of course I knew about the ways that social media lures you into its value system, enticing you to busk for likes on your Instagram/X/Threads/TikTok/Facebook posts, but also, more quietly, by luring you into feeding the algorithm with your views, telling advertisers where you are most vulnerable to buying. These systems aren’t built for you—they’re built for companies to advertise to you.

These “simple” systems entice you with the value you’ll get from their data (they call it “your data,” you’ll note), but they also coerce you to reshape your values to mirror the values of the system. That’s what I saw happening with the Apple Watch, and it led me to turn off my notifications on the Fitness app and use it just for those few things that actually reflect my own interests, like tracking my heart rate in a V02 Max workout of my own design. I love my Apple Watch ... but now I use it, it doesn’t use me.

Value Capture on Substack

Same with Substack. I love the platform, but I’ve elected not to use or dwell on certain highly-promoted features, most notably the ability to collect payment, but also the Twitter clone, Notes. Using those features simply doesn’t serve me well. 

I act like it’s trivial to just “turn off” or turn away from the elements of these systems that don’t serve me, but the truth is it can often be quite hard. Not physically hard, not hard to figure out. Emotionally hard. You get a little hooked on your “Move Streak,” on your stats, your likes, your growing number of subscribers, etc. Substack writers are constantly presented with data about the “performance” of their writing, bombarded with the message that the right way to use the platform involves growth. 

These systems are built to suck us in and to turn us to their ends—understandably, it’s how they make money off us—but that does not mean that we have to capitulate, at least not fully, nor does it mean that we can’t use these systems for our own purposes. Instead, we could increase our consciousness of the differences between our interests and the system’s interests, and then use these systems with full self-awareness.

Sometimes using a system for your own purposes is easy (Apple Watch), sometimes it’s tricky (Substack payments), and sometimes it’s really bloody hard (try telling a board that wants to hear about ARR⁴ or pipeline that you don’t subscribe to the use of those metrics).

It’s easy to confuse ourselves that we owe it to the system to comply with its values. If we value Substack, then don’t we owe it to them to go paid? Isn’t that how we show Substack we value it? But the system is not a person—we won’t hurt their feelings if we don’t do things the way they want. After all, the moment Substack doesn’t want people to publish “free” Substacks anymore, they’ll turn that feature off.

You may think I’m saying “you shouldn’t go paid.” I’m not. I think for many people, paid subscriptions are perfectly consistent with their goals and their values. They should go paid.

What I’m suggesting is that before you adopt paid subscriptions—hell, before you adopt the default values of any system—you might head off frustration and anxiety if you think carefully about whether those default values will serve you well. You might think about whether you wish to be captured by these values. The decision is really up to you.

I wanted to explore this idea of “value capture” in these limited, low-stakes systems, but the value capture that haunts me the most is the one I struggled with in the last years of my corporate career. That’s a story I’ll hold for next time.

Your thoughts

I trust that it’s apparent that I’m trying to figure this whole “value capture” thing out, which makes me especially curious to hear stories about your experiences.

Background reading/listening:

Questions about the values of this system we’re using—I’m talking about Substack—have been front and center of late, and they’re worth considering. Some of the pieces I’ve found most intriguing are the following:

What Is Substack For?

Anatomy of a Hatchet Job

How to Quit Substack

The Asshole Question

If you prefer a podcast, do go out and listen to this Ezra Klein Show podcast conversation between C. Thi Nguyen and Ezra Klein: “Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways.”

1. I’m calling them systems to draw attention to the way the tool (the watch, the app) is embedded within a sea of data and judgments.

2. When I drove my car on race tracks, I spent some time obsessively tracking and trying to improve my lap times (though eventually I learned that I enjoyed myself a lot more when I didn’t worry about it).

3. Before discovering “value capture” I think I would have used the terms “co-opted” or “sold out,” neither of which would have quite captured the nuance allowed for my “value capture.” In this way, the term reminds of the idea of “cultural hegemony” that offered such explanatory value in the early days of cultural history (when I was doing my graduate work).

4. That’s “Annual Recurring Revenue,” in case you don’t speak SaaS product investor.