Another book on panspectric business and society: The Numerati

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Karl Palmås

This week’s issue of Business Week plugs yet another book on panspectric management.

The “managing by numbers” issue features an excerpt from a chapter of The Numerati,  written by Stephen Baker. On the web, one can also read an excerpt from the introduction which outlines the panspectric world that we are currently entering.

As noted several times before here on panspectrocism.org, this world emerges from two parallel movements. First, the fact that more an more digital data generated from our “analog” behaviour (what we call “universal modulation”):

When it comes to producing data, we’re prolific. Those of us wielding cell phones, laptops, and credit cards fatten our digital dossiers every day, simply by living. Take me. As I write on this spring morning, Verizon, my cell-phone company, can pin me down within several yards of this café in New Jersey. Visa can testify that I’m well caffeinated, probably to overcome the effects of the Portuguese wine I bought last night at 8:19. This was just in time for watching a college basketball game, which, as TiVo might know, I turned off after the first half. Security cameras capture time-stamped images of me near every bank and convenience store.

And don’t get me started on my Web wanderings. Those are already a matter of record for dozens of Internet publishers and advertisers around the world. [...] Late in the past century, to come up with this level of reporting, the East German government had to enlist tens of thousands of its citizens as spies. Today we spy on ourselves and send electronic updates minute by minute.

[...] Taken alone, each bit of information is nearly meaningless. But put the bits together, and the patterns describe our tastes and symptoms, our routines at work, the paths we tread through the mall and the supermarket. And these streams of data circle the globe. Send a friend a smiley face from your cell phone. That bit of your behavior, that tiny gesture, is instantly rushing, with billions of others, through fiber-optic cables. It’s soaring up to a satellite and back down again and checking in at a server farm in Singapore before you’ve put the phone back in your pocket. With so many bits flying around, the very air we breathe is teeming with motes of information.

Secondly, of course, all this data has to be sifted through for patterns - this “science that turns our everyday realities into symbols” is also a matter of making sense out of the data. These mining exercises are performed by “the numerati”: The emerging class of professionals (mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers) that - according to the author - will control this new world. Thus,

Data whizzes are pouring into biology, medicine, advertising, sports, politics. They are adding us up. We are being quantified.

I still haven’t read the book, so I can’t say how much of an overlap there is, in relation to Davenport & Harris’ Competing on Analytics, or Ayres’ Super Crunchers. But it seems that, in relation to the other authors, Baker is more interested in the numerati profession itself.

Another interesting aspect of the book is that Baker is quite explicit in trying to connect the numerati to the development of operations research during WWII. (Note how military-led development of operations research/management science plays a crucial role Manuel DeLanda’s War in the age of intelligent machines.) Moreover, it seems Baker is keen to stress the negatives of this technology, and engage with discussions on surveillance - see this blog post.

In any case - the book, and the issue of Business Week, suggests that the issue of panspectric organisation is indeed becoming a hot topic.

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