The freedom of the individual to aim high is a deeply rooted part of the American ethos but we rarely acknowledge its flip side: failure. If people are responsible for their individual successes, is the same true of their failures? The Failed Individual brings together a variety of disciplinary approaches to explore how people fail in the United States and the West at large, whether economically, politically, socially, culturally, or physically. 

To this volume I contribute a chapter on the failure of popular self-quantification practices in context to emergent concepts of selfhood and individualism (namely: posthumanism). Design is used as an optic to re-perceive everyday quantifying practices and creatively embrace living with not knowing at a moment when the   data economy is booming.