Numb and Number
The linguistic roots of our digital ennui
Numbers are remarkable tools of power. They enable us to assess and manage the world around us with precision, laying the foundation for projects of social engineering with monumental scope and scale. The digital revolution is really a revolution of quantitative power, made possible by the invention of calculating machines capable of holding and manipulating numbers in new ways that are at once massive and intricate.
The new dimensions reality we experience, as businesses pulling in huge amounts of revenue, and as individuals moving through life under the guidance of the enchanting screens of our smartphones, are numbered dimensions.
As undeniably powerful this new numbered world is, it is not constructed without cost. Certain side effects may be experienced as a result of excessive measurement.
A Common Root
Human beings are a linguistic species. When we use language, we don’t just describe the world we live in. We remake the world according to the way we speak of it.
The study of the history of language can be thought of as the study of the development of the complex cultural systems with which we interpret reality. Etymology isn’t just a dry, theoretical obsession pursued by blinkered librarians. It’s a way to reveal clues to deep metaphors of truth that pervade our lives.
So, if we want to understand the full implications of the growing dominance of numbered ways of perceiving and constructing the world, we need to examine the conceptual roots of what we’re really talking about when we talk about numbers.
The word number is ancient, going back beyond the birth of civilization itself, to the dry plains of central Asia where the languages of both Europe and the Indian subcontinent have their origin. Thousands of years ago, the people who developed the Proto-Indo-European language spoke of nem.
Nem was a verb these people used to refer to the act of seizing things, and then choosing where those things would go. Imagine a group of semi-nomadic herders raiding a neighboring tribe, seizing their cattle, and then dividing the cattle up between people who had participated in the raid. That’s what nem was all about.
In order to be fair, nem had to include the accurate counting of the materials that had been seized. So, the practice of nem was intimately connected to the development of numbers. When nem reached the Italian peninsula, it was transformed into numerus, the mathematical system by which the Roman Empire managed the territories, assets, and people it had seized.
The experience of being seized requires a different kind of language, one developed along the northern rim of Roman expansion, in Germany and England. There, nem was shaped into a word that described the feeling of being objectified after a capture. Nem became niman, which continuted to describe the act of seizing things, to make them possessions, but then took a different turn, as niman became nome, a word that described the feeling of having been seized oneself.
Nome became numb, which we experience in a physical way when our ability to sense physical touch goes away. In the Old English way of talking about it, a person experiencing numbness has been seized in the same way that a person experiencing epilepsy has a seizure, or a person can catch a disease.
The word numb can be used to describe more than just a lack of physical touch or pain, of course. It also describes the psychological feeling of detachment that occurs in the wake of a traumatic experience, such as the experience of being physically assaulted or abducted, being treated as an object that can be taken and used as a tool. A person who is numb in this way is not just bereft of the ability to feel physical touch, but has become unable to feel emotion as well.
The difference between these linguistic siblings is the voice with which they are spoken. Numb gives voice to the experience of a person who has been seized, while number is spoken by the one who does the seizing.
Those who use numbers seize power for themselves. Those who are numbered by others, however, lose power. Specifically, they lose the ability to feel.
Together, numb and number tell us a story of what it feels like to live within a system that quantifies the human experience, capturing it and subjecting it to quantitative manipulation. If you have been numbered, you have been seized. Numbness may result.
The Miserable Quantified Self
This unusual etymological story isn’t just a linguistic curiosity. It gets to the heart of the cultural crisis provoked by the digital revolution.
The promise made by those who sold us the new technologies and media of the digital revolution was that, if we would go along with the revolution, we would experience wonderful new opportunities. A golden age would come about, in which we would be more wealthy, more healthy, more satisfied in our work, and happier all around.
These benefits, we were told, would come as the result of increased economic efficiencies made possible through quantification and automation. It was to be an echo of the original ancient insight of numbering, but at a much larger scale, enabled by new machines capable of working with numbers at a rate far beyond anything that a human could ever hope to achieve.
What the digital revolution brought us turned out to be the exact opposite of what was promised.
Wages have gone down since the advent of widespread digital technologies. Benefits have thinned. The cost of an education has skyrocketed. Economic inequality has increased. Just as in ancient times, the wealth created through new efficiencies has been seized almost exclusively by a small number of elites.
Since the advent of digitally-enabled social media, people have become more lonely, feeling less connected. Young people, those who are supposed to have the most active social lives, are the most lonely of all in this new world.
The quantitatively-direct experience of digital life has made us more sleep-deprived, more anxious, more depressed, and more suicidal. The quantified self is an emotionally deprived self. As our society has become more numbered, we have become more numb.
The Disappearing Human Face
Popular discussion about the link between digital life and poor mental health tend to center around teenagers, in part because adults care about them, but also because it’s easier for adults to talk about the problems young people have than to admit that they have similar problems themselves.
Still, it’s become clear that the quantification of the adult world has led to suffering as well. A classic truism in business is that, “If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed.” Digital tools have amplified management bias toward quantitative ways of understanding in business, leading to the creation of workplace and commercial interactions in which employees are treated as objects to be manipulated through algorithmic calculations rather than human beings to be treated with respect.
Amazon has become the defining example of the cruelty of the quantified workplace. Workers at Amazon subjected to constant automated measurement of their labor, as if they are objects to be engineered, are denied the counterbalancing right to organize for more humane conditions. Amazon isn’t alone in this approach, of course. A few months ago, it was discovered that Google is developing a suite of services that will enable corporations to quantitatively measure employee activities and respond with automated actions to force workers to change their behavior.
Under such regimes of computer-mediated numerical interactions, work becomes like a game, with employees trying to earn points in an environment where feedback comes from an algorithm rather than from a human face. Though these systems promise precise measurements to create a new generation of scientific management that traditional Taylorists could only dream about, the limited, numerical nature of the measurements severely constricts the breadth of issues that management is capable of working with.
Similar problems with a narrowing quantification are taking place within market research as well. Last week, I attended a conference about the future of business intelligence. A quantitative market researcher there gave a lecture arguing that soon, complex questions will need to be reduced to simple binary questions with only two possible answers: Yes or now, good or bad, black or white.
Why would this digital reduction of market research be necessary? Soon, the researcher said, almost everyone will be using Alexa or similar voice-activated digital assistants, rather than reading or writing. So, he argued, the questions that businesses ask will need to be simplified to match the medium. Because nobody is going to have the patience for an extended conversation with Alexa, or attend to a complex question from a voice-activated digital assistant, the lecturer concluded that researchers will need to stop having extended conversations with people, and stop asking complex questions. Our research needs to become simple to match the digital language of our machines, he said, reducing the entire world to zeroes and ones.
When we stop asking complex questions, we stop thinking complex thoughts. We stop being able to perceive the complex context in which we do our work.
The technologies we invent aren’t just tools in the hand. They settle in our minds as well, and over time begin to dictate the way we think. They warp our language, restricting with weighty metaphors the boundaries of what we are able to say to one another.
As the example of the Alexa-obsessed researcher indicates, digital technologies are contributing to a reduction in both the quantity and quality of human-to-human interaction. What once were rich, subtle, emotionally-laden conversations are being replaced with brutally simplified
In an economy increasingly dominated by trade in numerical measurements of a qualitative human experience, life itself has become a process of permanent anaesthesia.
The same quantitative power that brings us masterful precision leads us to become estranged from the very things we are trying to master, leading us to wonder what the point of it all is, or even worse, numbing us to such an extent that we no longer even think to consider the purpose of our calculations. Our emotions dulled, we are sapped of the motivation to even try to imagine alternate possibilities. We shuffle on, working on autopilot, into a world where our own sensations have become irrelevant.
A Return to Whole Humanity
How can we ever hope to break free this numbing of numbers, once we have been seized by it?
A complete rejection of quantification cannot provide us with a reasonable escape plan. The truth is that we sometimes need the numbing effect of numbers, to provide some simulation of objectivity, providing reliable measurements so that we can be sure of our footing. Without the intricate math of digital systems, our civilization would soon disintegrate into chaos.
What we need is a new human system of aesthetic power to match the robust anaesthesia that our numbered society has produced. In the workplace, management needs tools to produce wonder and delight that are equal to the tools they use to ensure that we meet our deadlines. Market researchers require methods that meet people on fully subjective terms capable of comprehending the full-throttle weirdness that is the human experience without reducing it to a numerical code. Wherever we go, we need the opportunity for uncertainty, ambiguity, and sublimely ridiculous experiences.
Digital systems have seized our lives, claiming us as their property, and we’re suffering as a result. We need to ensure that, as the digital empires count their assets, a portion of their spoils be allocated to a the monumental task of the rewilding of the human animal.
We can keep our yardsticks, our facial scanning devices, our weights and measures, but for the sake of our sanity, we need to create substantial reserves in time and space, number-free zones in which we can learn to feel again.
