Don’t Worry. It’s All Completely Meaningless, But We Have It Totally Under Control

Sometimes it seems as though the world is filling up with metrics.

Okay, I know a lot of these are vanity metrics, and I didn’t think that the number of followers you have on social media sites actually means anything (I have 2.7, which is clearly a lie, but boy does that decimal point make it sound real, don’t you think?)

But more of them are seemingly ‘serious’ metrics. I hesitate to use the word ‘performance’ in connection with a metric because performance is subjective and …well… multidimensional without recourse — often — even to approximate dynamic programming.

But I think these metrics — despite often being meaningless- serve a couple of rather wonderful purposes in response to increasing levels of uncertainty.

The first is that they give us reassurance in a world where- according to Baudrillard — reality has become hyperreality. Where the link between descriptions and actuality has become so blurred that we are rapidly distancing ourselves from reality- which I think can be defined as the accuracy of correspondence between what is being described or represented and its description or representation.

Today, the Doomsday Clock ticked thirty seconds closer to human extinction. But we do not need to worry. After all, for many of us, human extinction is (a) guaranteed and (b) not to be feared because we spend most of our time playing Gears of War where you can switch the simulation OFF.

On Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram (and Linkedin) we can aspire to have and pretend to have lives in which simulation plays a major part. And even #bitcoin’ although dear to my heart, is really just a simulation.

In business, we see an increasing focus on #DataScience and being data driven, when we have not a clue what data — or information -actually is. We produce pretty visualisations, and interpretations of data using models and tools that are increasingly powerful, but still rely on data collection methods which if not outdated are deeply inappropriate.

Here we have gone beyond the need for reassurance and the output of these products is justification — for decisions that are being taken in such increasingly discontinuous environments that any choice is going to be spurious. And that’s why we need justification.

So, in social terms being data driven is fine, but don’t we need first of all to try and weld the data onto reality? Okay, philosophically, I know the weaknesses of Evidentialism, but don’t we have a responsibility to ourselves to return to reality.

Because the gap seems getting bigger. And who knows? Baudrillard may be right, but when framing the debate is increasingly about a pseudo liberal tech and a pseudo conservative non-tech, the real issues get lost. And the real issues are important because uncertainty creates lots of…difficult…behaviours that will never have been seen at such a scale before.: