#quantification

We measure our successes and failures in units of practical value that we call wealth or status or fame. We sometimes even see everything in terms of its practical value, to the point that we see value itself as having a practical foundation.

Anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist. Not satisfied with this, however, reification spreads to its own opposite, the life that cannot be directly actualized; anything that lives on merely as thought and recollection.

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me? you are completely screwed, because the next question is How Much? and then it is hundreds of hours later, and you are still hunched over your flowcharts and abacus, trying to decide if you have gotten enough. This is the loneliest job in the world: to be an accountant of the heart. It is late at night. You are by yourself, and all around you, you can hear the sounds of people moving in and out of love, pushing the turnstiles, putting their coins in the slots, paying the price which is asked, which constantly changes. No one knows why.

Beyond identifiability, the more insistent question is one of authentic identity: who are you, really? The ordinateurs want to know. To help us unlock this information, they have transformed it into a matter of public record, to be shared proudly and widely. Social media companies skilfully exploit our thirst for sociability and our romantic ideals of self-realisation. They relentlessly encourage individuals (and organisations, too) to publicly express their core commitments and enrol allies to validate them. The compulsion to authenticity frequently backfires. Being exposed as inauthentic can be devastating to reputations and livelihoods. The sociologist Angèle Christin has described savage online battles between vegan influencers who push the envelope of vegan purity or expose their rivals as secret meat-eaters. Other authenticity traps are more ominous, as when organisations use social media feeds as public proof of who we truly are – an agitator, a gangster, a covert terrorist. In his book Ballad of the Bullet (2020), the ethnographer Forrest Stuart found big gaps between the performances that drill musicians put up for social media consumption and the more banal reality of their lives. Young people making themselves look tough to sell music on YouTube may learn the hard way that law enforcement officers and judges tend to interpret these signs literally, rather than seeing them as the status games and identity play that they most likely are. Similarly, the Trump administration’s reliance on tattoos as one easily harvested, measurable piece of evidence of gang membership takes an often superficial marker and turns it into a datapoint in a deportation scoring system. And in a country where the government has taken it upon itself to use people’s professed views against it in immigration proceedings, the effect is chilling. Self-disclosures and social connections that until recently were sources of pride and support suddenly become potential liabilities. Authenticity traps multiply in other ways, too. Generative AI increasingly blurs the boundaries between real and synthetic texts, images and sounds. Traditional concerns about inauthentic or misinterpreted performances have given way to more fundamental questions about truth. Hopeful startups raise millions of dollars to develop ‘cheat on everything’ AI tools, and jobseekers can artificially generate their application materials and even fake their job interviews. All of this has the effect of shifting emphasis from authenticity to authentication, from demonstrating the truth of one’s identity to proving the reality of one’s testimony. The question is no longer whether an identity is genuine (‘Is that really you?’) or even authentic (‘Who is the real you?’) but whether each element of your digital presence is unmediated by artificial intelligence (‘Is it really you?’) This emergent regime of authentication transforms interactions from a set of performances to be judged into a series of actions to be verified by machines at every step. Being a legitimate self now requires one to be publicly identifiable, authentic and, increasingly, fully authenticated. What began as a celebration of individual uniqueness that avidly encouraged the production of digital evidence is evolving into an elaborate system of verification that will treat any trace as a potentially suspect record. As fake versions of ourselves start to circulate, we may soon find ourselves caught in endless cycles of proving and defending the reality of our own existence, submitting ourselves more and more to a machinery of institutionalised scepticism that would have repulsed the early internet’s champions of identity play and experimentation.

Aristotelian Science and Modern Science

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

The underlying principle – that any human endeavour can be usefully reduced to a set of statistics – has become one of the dominant paradigms of the 21st century. The historian of capitalism Jerry Z Muller calls it “metric fixation”, a ubiquitous concept that pervades not only the private sector, but also the less-quantifiable activities of the state, such as healthcare and policing. “We live in the age of measured accountability, of reward for measured performance, and belief in the virtues of publicising those metrics through ‘transparency’,” writes Muller. And although, as he stresses, measurement itself is not a bad thing, “excessive measurement and inappropriate measurement” will distort, distract and destroy what we claim to value. At the turn of the 20th century, this system was augmented further by two complementary concepts: scientific management and mass production. The latter is best encapsulated by the work of auto-maker Henry Ford, whose low-priced Model T reshaped not only industrial practice but American culture, helping create a prosperous middle class that defined itself by mass consumption. Ford claimed that his assembly lines, which kept workers static while material moved through their stations on conveyor belts, had been inspired by an aide’s visit to a Chicago slaughterhouse. There, the aide observed the opposite process: a “disassembly line” in which a row of butchers took apart pig carcasses, joint by joint, with each individual focusing on a single repetitive task. This compartmentalisation of labour led to the scientific management movement, pioneered by efficiency-obsessed engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who advocated a set of working practices now known as Taylorism. Taylor and his followers observed labourers and broke down the flow of their work into constituent parts that could then be standardised. The aim, said Taylor, was to “develop a science to replace the old rule-of-thumb knowledge of the workmen”. Importantly, this also necessitated a transfer of knowledge – and a corresponding shift in power – from the labourers who carried out the work to the managers who oversaw it. Writing in the New York Times in 2010, the technology journalist Gary Wolf heralded our age of quantification. Using data to make decisions is now the norm in nearly all spheres of life, he wrote. “A fetish for numbers is the defining trait of the modern manager. Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counselling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio.” Business, politics and science are all steered by the wisdom of what can be measured, said Wolf, and the reason why is obvious: numbers get results, making problems “less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually”. Only one domain has resisted the lure of quantification: “the cozy confines of personal life”. That, said Wolf, would soon change. Thanks to new technology – namely, the ability to digitise information, the ubiquity of smartphones and the proliferation of cheap sensors – humans now have historically unprecedented powers of self-measurement. At the turn of the 17th century, in order to better understand the workings of his metabolism, the Italian physician Santorio Santorio constructed a set of giant scales in which he could sit. Santorio would measure his weight constantly, particularly before and after meals and defecation. Today, we are rewarded with floods of comparable information with minimal effort. We can track our sleep, exercise, diet and productivity with apps and gadgets. We have become beacons of unseen measurement, emitting quantified data as heedlessly as uranium produces radiation. For Wolf, the potential of this information is huge. “We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyse a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election,” he writes. “Why not use numbers on ourselves?” His article is the nearest thing to a manifesto for the Quantified Self movement: a loose affiliation of individuals whose pursuit of “self-knowledge through numbers” shows how far we have internalised the logic of measurement. The movement’s origins can be traced back to the 1970s, when enthusiasts cobbled together the clunky ancestors of today’s wearable tech. But the idea came to greater public attention after Wolf and fellow journalist Kevin Kelly coined the term “quantified self” in 2007 and founded a non-profit to proselytise their ideas. When thinking about measurement in today’s world, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa suggests it is characteristic of a particular 21st-century desire: to structure our lives through empirical observation, rendering our interests and ambitions as a series of challenges to overcome. “Mo untains have to be scaled, tests passed, career ladders climbed, lovers conquered, places visited, books read, films watched, and so on,” he writes. “More and more, for the average late modern subject in the ‘developed’ western world, everyday life revolves around and amounts to nothing more than tackling an ever-growing to-do list.” This mindset, says Rosa, is the result of centuries of cultural, economic and scientific development, but has been “newly radicalised” in recent years by digitalisation and the ferocity of unbridled capitalist competition. Measurement has been rightly embraced as a tool to better understand and control reality, but as we measure more and more, we encounter the limits of this practice and wrestle with its disquieting effects on our lives.

Most everyone in the critical-studies and eco-critical pantheon — from Socrates to Marx to Arendt to Derrida; from Carolyn Merchant to Rachel Carson, Bakhtin to Bookchin — worried about this kind of calculative abstraction, taking us away from the material, real effects of what it is we are quantifying, counting, calculating about.