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.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/26/measurement-why-we-cant-stop-quantifying-our-lives
