Run up the Digits: how optimization culture and the quantification of everything degrades experience

One of the main themes I write about is the attention economy and its impact on various aspects of our lives. In doing that, I’ve largely ignored what that economy is built off. Data. Information is the new key resource of our economy and unlike previous resources such as oil or precious metals, there’s an ever-increasing supply. We as customers are the ones generating all of the data. As we spend more time on our devices, more of it gets created. By carefully tracking and analyzing this data, brands aim to influence our behaviors and attitudes so that we spend as much time as possible on their products. While problematic, this isn’t much different from how our economy has always worked where the goal is neverending growth. What’s changed is that there’s a data point for almost everything you can think of now. Nuanced decision-making is nearly impossible because of this. With the help of algorithms designed purely to optimize results, decisions are reduced to whatever pushes the numbers as far as they can go. In that pushing for optimization, things like quality, context, and intention are lost. That’s the problem with big data, it makes you think the complexities of human life and decision-making can be reduced to a dashboard or model. It’d be one thing if this were isolated to the business world, but they’re not the only ones obsessing over data. The race to quantify everything has infected how we make art and live our lives. 

I’d argue that art and entertainment are some of the biggest losers of the big data revolution. The movie industry is a great example. Historically, success was measured on metrics like awards, popularity, or box office sales, preferably all three. While studios had access to some data, they didn’t always have a clear picture of what’d work and what wouldn’t, so more projects got greenlit in case something unexpected became a hit. Studios today only want to invest in what the data says will get the most views. Sure, the old model was a gamble but it created much better art. It allowed for new filmmakers to make their passion projects and see how the world responded to it. Now, they have to make some movie dictated by an algorithm and try their best to make it good to even get a shot at making something real. Many of those algorithmic movies do well in the sense that a lot of people do watch them, but when you look at the ratings they’re middling. That’s because the heart’s been ripped out of them and replaced with data. The same can be said about the music industry where labels are more concerned about if music is optimized for social media algorithms rather than if it’s high-quality art. You can’t create art based on what an algorithm says. While it may reach more people that way, it loses the human touch, originality, and creativity that makes it so special in the first place. 

While I knew how data ran the business world, I started to look at my relationship to it because of my Apple Watch. I’ve noticed how much time and energy I spend focusing on all the metrics it collects. There are some that I don’t know anything about except that they should go up or down. Don’t get me wrong, access to this information is helpful because it provides valuable insight into our health. Having constant access though is where I see the problem. It makes it so this information is no longer just a guide. Instead, we become attached to the numbers themselves instead of what the numbers mean. Walking is one of my daily rituals to get out and clear my mind after sitting at a desk all day. Since I started wearing a smartwatch, it no longer feels like I’m just going for a walk. Now, I’m playing a game where it’s about how many miles I see on my screen. It wouldn’t be a big deal if I missed a day or two, but because I have the data, seeing a low number triggers this weird sense of anxiety. This also happens with products like the Oura Ring, where even if you feel great when you wake up, seeing a low sleep score makes you second-guess yourself. You may have seen the online discourse about how parties in San Francisco suck because of how worried the tech bros are about their Oura scores. In the interest of optimizing scores, they don’t serve any alcohol, workout instead of dance, the snacks are all Keto, and everyone needs to leave early to be in bed by 9. That sounds like hell but also the natural culmination of our lives and health being reduced to numbers. 

It’s not just our health where we’re hyperfocused on data. Social media has made us all fluent in what metrics are and what they mean for performance. We inherently track which posts get more engagement and then try to replicate them. We try to optimize what will get us the most attention. This may not be the explicit goal but we can’t help it because of how our brain’s reward centers work. It feels good when we notice those likes are going up because it means we’re being validated in some way. Think about hard it is not to check how many people viewed your story. These platforms are also designed to get you tuned into the engagement of your posts. It becomes about the numbers rather than the art or update you wanted to share. It’s no different with education and job performance. Instead of focusing on our learning or career development, we chase after metrics that may not be true reflections of what’s important. More than that by constantly trying to optimize for the highest possible score or performance indicator we lose out on opportunities to be creative, innovate, and rest. We also lose touch with people because everyone becomes a number. This happens a lot in political campaigns where optimizing polls and analytics takes precedence over understanding constituents and what they actually need in their lives. There are countless other examples, but the core of it is that a data-driven culture reduces what or who’s behind the measurement to just the measurement. 

If we boil everything down to just being data, it makes us no better than the algorithms we all claim to loathe. We not only track the data but start making decisions purely based on how to optimize the data instead of all the other factors that exist outside of it. Music is one place where I notice my choices being affected by how algorithms have trained us to behave. I catch myself avoiding certain songs or albums because I don’t want them to mess up my streaming recommendations. By doing this I’m declaring that I view myself and my behaviors as a collection of data. I may want to check out an artist's work but I’m afraid that wouldn’t be optimal for what I want my data to look like. It’s thinking that all of this collected data is me, and I need to make sure that data is optimized for the best possible results. I’m probably on the extreme end of this because I’m aware of how data is used, but I think many of us deal with something like this or the other examples I’ve explored in this piece. We make decisions not based on what we actually want but on how we want our numbers to look. Information should give us an idea about where we are and how to get where we want to go. It shouldn’t be the sole thing informing what our goals should be. Think about someone training for a marathon. Having all this data is amazing for their training, but they didn’t choose to run a marathon because it’d be the best way to optimize their step count. There’s a whole range of complex factors that led to them making that decision, then they focus on metrics that let them know they’re on the right track. In the way we use data, we’re slowly becoming extensions of it, not the other way around. 

Life isn’t all about numbers. Not everything can be quantified, nor should it be. There’s beauty in not knowing. We also don’t need to optimize every part of our lives. So much of life is a feeling process where there’s subjectivity and nuance. Results aren’t always the most important thing. They’re also not always measurable. How do you measure joy or adventure? We miss out on that when we distill everything down to just the data points. Some of the best art definitely wouldn’t have been chosen or created by an algorithm. Imagine how boring everything will be when all we watch, listen to, and read is dictated by some formula. Eventually, everything will run together because there are no original ideas. It will all be recycled over and over again because that’s “optimal”. The same goes for us, we’ll be pretty boring if everything we do is in the service of optimization, whether that’s how we live, the pictures we post, or the music we listen to. We’re all different and have different needs. Our health is a lot more complex than a set of numbers collected by a ring. At times I’ve tried to optimize everything about my health and it’s miserable. Living a fairly clean and healthy lifestyle is an important goal of mine, but like everyone else, I need to mix it up a little. It’s fine to drink a little too much one night, and have that weekly ice cream or whatever. You can listen to that artist because you want to surprise your partner. It may slightly decrease your sleep scores or mess up that one daily playlist, but that’s ok. That’s what being human is about. It’s not optimal. A lot of the time it’s suboptimal. Life is interesting because of that though. We can do things that wouldn’t make sense to an algorithm and make choices that bring us to unexpected moments. Experience is what matters, not what the numbers say about that experience.