Every weekday afternoon for more than a year, my friend Ben and I would exchange a brief flurry of text messages containing a cryptic set of numbers. “120,” he wrote to me on a Thursday in October. “168,” he added on Friday. “9,201,” I texted him in early January, before clarifying in a separate message, “Relatively flat.”
What 17th-century philosophy teaches us about our data-driven world
When we use data to make sense of the quantified other, we realize how small we are. But it also teaches us that we never act alone.
Perspective by Jacob Brogan
September 2, 2022 at 4:55 p.m. EDT
These were Washington’s raw coronavirus case counts, a record of the prevalence of a disease neither of us had yet caught. Sometimes we leavened this data with other statistics. Ben was preoccupied for a while with tiny fluctuations in the city’s R0, an index of how many people each positive case was infecting. As testing data grew more unreliable, both of us styled ourselves as experts in hospitalization figures, though we often worried over whether these “lagging indicators” really revealed what they seemed to show. Sometimes we would get even more granular: In December, as the first omicron wave washed over our city, we anxiously tracked the number of available ICU beds, painfully conscious of how close our medical system was to collapse.
Neither of us is an epidemiologist or otherwise trained to parse this information. Ben, at least, works with money, but I am just a former English professor turned newspaper editor. We didn’t need to be experts, though. We shared these numbers partly to keep in touch during the doldrum days of the pandemic. More importantly, we were trying to map the space between us — a space occupied mostly by people we did not know.
As I have come to realize, Ben and I were not attempting to diagnose a situation so much as we were struggling to depict a hypothetical person, one I call the quantified other. The quantified other is a composite entity, its life, by definition, distant from our own, even as its intentions and actions structure our experiences and thereby delimit our world. Because the quantified other is really just a conglomeration of information, we can know it only numerically, tracing its outline through mathematical speculation — the way an astronomer might attempt to determine whether a newly discovered exoplanet can accommodate life by studying the wobbling gyrations of its star.
Ben and I were concerned in large part with our safety and that of the people around us, which meant that our quantified other stood in for all those strangers whose choices and experiences determined when and whether we would go out masked, whether and when we would meet up. Knowing that there are, as I write this, 192 people hospitalized with covid in D.C. — 17 of them in the ICU — doesn’t tell me much about any given person I might meet in the world outside my door. But it does tell me a little about how others have moved through that world. And that offers a lesson in how I must move in turn.
All of us have our own versions of the quantified other. Perhaps you construct yours when you read public opinion polls about an issue you care about, attempting to anticipate the nation’s inclinations. Or maybe you find it in the study of unemployment numbers, which you track even though you are stably employed. The former might reveal something troubling about the health of our democracy, while the latter might help you understand the strength of our economy. Neither describes your life, at least not directly or immediately, and neither responds meaningfully to your actions — but both have the power to affect you.
In other words, these numbers tell us what we are not while restricting what we can be. We quantify the other in census reports and electoral percentages, or maybe in Twitter likes and wastewater data (which are much the same thing). We identify the quantified other especially in figures that tell us about mass suffering and loss, as when we learn that more than 150,000 people in Mississippi are without safe drinking water or that 5,000 square miles of the Amazon were lost to deforestation in 2020 alone. Such statistics overwhelm us not just because of their outsize enormity, but also because they describe choices we did not make and consequences we cannot forestall.
I name this phenomenon as a counterpoint to the “quantified self” movement, which holds that we can live better by tracking the numbers that our bodies generate. When you count your steps or record your water intake, monitor your blood pressure or log your sleep cycles, you are probably thinking in terms of the quantified self, proceeding from the assumption that we can overcome our limits by meticulously observing ourselves. “The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass,” declared journalist Gary Wolf in a 2010 TED Talk on the topic. “So if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.”
This is a belief system emboldened by technological innovations — sensors and monitors and apps — but it has origins in popularizations of the ancient Stoic assumption that we can really affect only our own behavior and that we must therefore surveil ourselves endlessly, like harried gardeners forever weeding the peripheries of their plots. To embrace the ethos of the quantified self is, likewise, to insist that if we cannot control what others do, we can at least regulate our own comportment, and in that lies the good life.
The quantified other, by contrast, offers no such comforts. When I anxiously watch the temperatures in Seattle as a historic heat dome rises over my mother’s house, I am not seeking to intervene, because I know I cannot. And when I monitor the wildfire-season air quality in Berkeley, Calif., where my girlfriend’s parents live, I am not attempting to better myself. Instead, I am acknowledging the limits of my agency, admitting that so many of the forces that exert themselves on us are aggregate effects and hence unresponsive to individual action. To quantify the other is to recognize what we have always quietly understood, that our experience of helplessness is predicated on countless actions taken by people we do not know, and not solely on what we cannot do as individuals. The quantified other reminds us how small we are, how little we might accomplish.
This need not, however, be a notion rooted in despair. If the quantified self has origins in the Stoics, the quantified other is anchored in the thought of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher, who writes in his “Ethics,” “It is necessary to come to know both our nature’s power and its lack of power, so that we can determine what reason can do in moderating the affects, and what it cannot do.” That is, we can live well only if we can manage how we are affected — how we feel, and how those feelings lead us to act this way or that. But to do so, we must also recognize that our feelings are determined by the ways others affect us, moving us both physically and mentally.
Simply put, then, we never act alone. We can move only in relation to others, sometimes in concert and sometimes in conflict, here pushed into action by their passions, there brought to a halt by their pains. This inverts the premise of the quantified-self movement, as described by Wolf: For Spinoza, isolated self-knowledge is insufficient and perhaps impossible in a data-driven vacuum. Instead, it is only by learning more about how others act on us and the factors that impel them to do so that we can understand our own actions, since our actions depend on theirs. The better we comprehend those external forces, the more rational our responses will be. And as our actions grow more rational, others stand to benefit from them more. Understanding that we are never the masters of our own destiny is therefore the basic condition of ethical action.
When something moves us, we don’t always have to push back with the same force at the object — indeed, sometimes we cannot. And yet we always do respond, as marbles must when they meet, and we can do so properly only if we strive to grasp why. This is what the quantified other offers: a tangible picture of the otherwise unimaginable powers that act on us, the better to remind ourselves why we do the things we can, however small they may be.
And sometimes they are very small, but they are no less significant for it. My friend Ben takes in my latest panicked missive about covid statistics and, instead of responding in kind, suggests that maybe it’s time I finally come over for a glass of wine. My mother sees a worrisome poll out of Virginia and flies out to knock on the doors of likely voters. Though neither affects the numbers directly, both proceed from an understanding of the feelings those numbers generate. They act in the only way any of us ever can: for our unquantified others.
