By offloading the responsibility for problem solving from governments to citizens, self-tracking can get us to optimize our behavior within the constraints of an existing system. What we need is a chance to reform the system itself — perhaps by dismantling those constraints. Ambitious reforms like regulating the food industry and building the infrastructure needed to get good food to hungry people shouldn’t lose their relevance in the era of universal self-tracking.

That we now have the means to make the most miserable experiences more tolerable should not be an excuse not to reduce the misery of those experiences.

Take Chromaroma, a game that uses London’s smart public transportation card to make commutes more fun by awarding points for “checking in” at stations. According to The Guardian, the game is “the makeover London commuting has been waiting for.” But is it, really? As the writer Steven Poole put it, “Actually, the makeover London commuting has been waiting for is a more reliable service, with Tube lines that don’t close every weekend and trains that can hold more than 17 people.”

Many trendy technologies can not only hinder needed reforms but actually also entrench social iniquities. Consider the current enthusiasm for Big Data, with its ability to yield powerful insights based on correlations alone. According to one recent tome on the subject, once we fully embrace Big Data, “society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what.”

But a problem tackled through correlations alone lends itself to a very different set of solutions than a problem mapped out in all its causal complexity.

It may help to know that most crimes in a given neighborhood are committed by people who share certain “likes” on Facebook. But to stop there and become suspicious of everyone else who shares the same “likes” would be irresponsible, especially when those “likes” are themselves just proxies for class, race or gender. If criminal behavior does stem from economic inequality or racial discrimination, we need to fix those root causes, not just prevent the damage likely to be caused by people who fit a profile.

Smart technology, thanks to its ubiquity and affordability, offers us the cheapest — and trendiest — fix. But the gleaming aura of disruption-talk that often accompanies such fixes masks their underlying conservatism. Technological innovation does not guarantee political innovation; at times, it might even impede it. The task ahead is to prevent our imagination from being incarcerated by smart technologies. Or should we settle for gamifying ourselves to death?