Social quantification today serves corporate private access, not societal legibility.

Evidence

The continuity with the nineteenthand twentieth-century European state’s attempt to make society more “legible” is misleading. Unlike the Charles Booth poverty maps of London, no one today can print and put on their wall even a simplified map of how Facebook categorizes the members of a small town or a how a credit rating agency differentiates the customers on its books. Social quantification today produces myriad microcategorizations, but these are privately controlled and largely inaccessible to public view. The social quantification sector exists not to make society generally more legible (that is, readable as and by society as a whole) but to give corporations special and private access to particular forms of knowledge from which economic value can be generated. It is these privileges that giant monopoly/monopsonies such as Facebook and Google can exploit. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 390

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the Scott ‘Seeing Like a State’ legibility frame — connects directly to the data-colonialism vs. surveillance-state comparison this reader is mapping. — connects to: Social quantification has shifted from a state capacity to a private-sector one — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 386; Social quantification lets corporations profit from participation without commodity purchase — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 166; Technology-based surveillance sorts people socially rather than reducing bias. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 221 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angles for an essay contrasting Scott’s state legibility with corporate legibility, and what each hide/occludes in return.

Broader Connections

• Social caching grants corporate power privileged legibility over human life #corroborates (0.95) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 419
• Social quantification lets corporations profit from participation without commodity purchase #expands (0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 166
• Technology-based surveillance sorts people socially rather than reducing bias. #expands (0.80) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 221
• Social software can promote inequality rather than counter it. #expands (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 19
• The term social in social quantification does not imply social coherence or order #qualifies (0.75)