Third, the search for statistical generality in no sense required an abandonment of the human individual. One of the most intense debates of nineteenth-century intellectual history was about whether statistical laws, operating at the level of the whole society, were compatible with individual free will. Some, like the French social theorist Adolphe Quetelet, insisted the answer was yes; others, like the British historian Henry Buckle, insisted the answer was no, with popular culture (Charles Dickens in his novel Hard Times) weighing in to mock statistics’ mechanistic view of humanity. Statistics’ significance for human self-understanding was debated in public. Perhaps this is unremarkable in itself, but it is sharply different from today’s development of Machine Learning tools for computing the social world, largely unobserved and entirely under the control of commercial corporations.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 380