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, loc. 390