For Hegel, it is the reflective relation to oneself that is essential to the development of a free will. Therefore, a free life needs to be a self-sufficient life in which “nothing from outside, nothing not-me, determines my actions.” Hegel does not deny—indeed, he emphasizes—that the individual lives a life that is not free from external constraints; it is a life lived through mediations (lived “in the other,” as Hegel puts it). But at the core of freedom for Hegel (the core of autonomy, in our terms) is the notion of an inner life that remains under one’s own reflexive control. This inner life is what enjoying one’s “right of subjectivity” means. The very thing Quantified Selfers and the social quantification sector see as a benefit (that our moment-to-moment existence is understood better by external data processing systems than by us) collapses the space of subjectivity in which the self enjoys its freedom.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 520