For subjects who interact with it, the social quantification sector’s actions are extraordinarily complex, highly distributed, massively comprehensive, continuously updated, and, for these reasons, almost entirely opaque. Social quantification is contestable by individuals or groups only with the greatest difficulty. This is the challenge of “the black box society,” in which, as legal scholar Frank Pasquale puts it, “the spaces of our common life that are supposed to be the most open and transparent are being colonized by the logic of secrecy.”

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 389