Biopower is inevitable – everyday technology proves

We can see an example of biopower producing life today in the Apple Watch. This apparatus constantly monitors one’s level of fitness – checking the pulse, blood oxygen saturation, calories burned, and heart arrythmias. The watch can even call for an ambulance if it detects that the wearer has fallen. People invest in it for the healthy lifestyle that it promises, but by doing so, they unwittingly participate in the logic of biopower. As a site of biopower, the Apple Watch produces a subject utterly preoccupied with its survival. The company advertises this product with the slogan: “The future of your health is on your wrist.” The Apple Watch makes live – it forces constant attention to life on us – and is thus evidence that Foucault’s nightmare has become our everyday reality. By highlighting this example of what appears as biopower, the problem with the theory already becomes apparent. The concern for healthy life – making live – in this instance doesn’t emanate from the state but from capital. While it is true that contemporary capitalism demands that subjects concern themselves with sustaining their lives, this is not necessarily a preoccupation of the state, despite the focus of biopower’s theorists on the state. This lacuna exposes just how the theory of biopower leads us astray.