This paper examines the relationship between interactive life insurance companies and their policyholders and the way in which wearable fitness devices are deployed by these companies as data-generating surveillance technologies instead of personal health and fitness devices. Working within an expanded framework of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2015), I argue that while the notion of self-care generally associated with wearable fitness devices is underpinned by neoliberal constructs, the incentivization of interactive life insurance programs works to obscure the immense value placed on information capital. This paper briefly considers the legal loopholes involved in the harvesting of sensitive health and fitness information from consumer wearables and suggests that the push toward fitness trackers has little to do with any real concerns for the health and fitness of consumers and policyholders. Lastly, I consider different forms of unwaged labour in the relationship between policyholders and interactive life insurance programs. I contend that policyholders do not recognise the free and immaterial labour that goes into sustaining the data-based business model that interactive life insurance companies and social media platforms use and rely on for profit. In so doing, they relinquish power and control over the data they work to produce, only so that the information can be commodified and used against them.

This article examines Canada’s immigration and detention system through its newly established alternatives to detention (ATD) program. As a program that relies rather extensively on mobile carceral technologies such as electronic monitoring and voice reporting, I argue that we should consider these alternatives not only as extensions of carceral apparatuses and the detention system but as pervasive, far-reaching, and more abstract manifestations of control and confinement. I introduce the term “techno-carcerality” to theorize how we might understand the shift from traditional modes of confinement to less traditional ones, grounded in mobile, electronic, and digital technologies. I contend that the use of mobile carceral technologies in the context of immigration and detention imposes physical, psychological, spatial, and data-driven modes of control and confinement in private, public, and digital space, which are veiled behind notions and misconceptions of increased freedom, mobility, and autonomy. While the ATD program may offer some better options than those available within detention centers or other carceral institutions, it is a program that involves immense surveillance dataveillance techniques that lead to profound carceral effects and anxieties, affecting everyday life in ways that experientially mimic and transcend conventional confinement.

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This article situates the digital self-care industry within a neoliberal framework in which I critically analyze the effects of modern postural yoga through platforms and apps. In specific, I argue that the neoliberalization of digitally mediated self-care through Instagram, YouTube, Calm and Yoga-Go not only place the onus of health and wellbeing on individuals, they also endanger the physical health, mental health and digital privacy of their users. In turn, the consequences of economic and political systems that have created many of the social conditions that push people to seek ways in which they themselves can alleviate the pressures and stresses of everyday life continue to be ignored.