The story of how one metric has changed the way you see the world
The Metric Is Not The Mission: When The Reckoning Reaches The Courts
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and as…
All Those Metrics Bleed Your Obsessions - Aaron Ross Powell
The internet once encouraged us to build entire identities around our weirdest, deepest fascinations. Then metrics and distribution flattened those obsessions into fungible content.
kill the metrics in your head
Get in, loser, we’re doing an old-fashioned conversation-by-blog-post. Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era: The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either. It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore. Then Les Orchard wrote in response that Only the Metrics Care: The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization—metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs. … The point isn’t to communicate. It’s to simulate relevance in order to optimize growth. It’s all goal-tracking, A/B tests, fake doors, and dark patterns. Both of those posts are great and you should read them, but reading them is not a prerequisite to reading this one. I just wanted to place this post in context of the conversation I’m dropping into.
Ledger of Harms
Under immense pressure to prioritize engagement and growth, technology platforms have created a race for human attention that’s unleashed invisible harms to society. Here are some of the costs that aren't showing up on their balance sheets.
The Metric Is Not The Mission: The Finished Internet
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and as…
It's time to retire metrics like GDP. They don't measure everything that matters | Joseph Stiglitz
The way we assess economic performance and social progress is fundamentally wrong, and the climate crisis has brought these concerns to the fore
A fact-based worldview for all | Gapminder
We live in a globalized world, not only in terms of trade and migration. More people than ever care about global development. But most people have severe misconceptions about contemporary global development. We know, because we have tested people’s knowledge. One of the main reasons for this is that students don’t learn to understand the world based on statistics and facts. Instead, we have a dramatic worldview formed by outdated school books and sensationalist news-stories. People intuitively believe that most things are getting worse. The dramatic worldview leads to irrational decisions by individuals, nonprofits, governments and business. For the first time in human history reliable statistics exist. There’s data for almost every aspect of global development. The data shows a very different picture: a world where most things improve; a world that is not divided; and a world where the fast population growth will soon be over. The world has never been less bad. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
Too much of a good thing
Profits are too high. America needs a giant dose of competition
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false…
Who Is Watching You?
Companies and institutions track us almost indiscriminately. Is this the world we want to live in?
How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next | William Davies
The Long Read: The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over – and putting democracy in peril
Thanks for killing the planet, boomers!
The world as we know it is ending, and the indifference by Americans, politicians and mainstream press is maddening
Valuing What Counts: Framework to Progress Beyond Gross Domestic Product: Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 4
Humanity’s Endgame
A new history of societal collapse by an expert in existential risk argues that our globalized society is edging toward the precipice.
Google's TPU Paradox
Why the massive Anthropic deal ($50-80 billion over six years) is a map to a thousand-customer problem.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Social-Media Metrics
Those view counts on Twitter, TikTok, and Netflix? Be very skeptical.
