These social uses of numbers were a crucial site for contesting power. An emerging social state aimed at the betterment of all created “experts of the social” with new types of professional authority. A key dispute within statistical science was whether “the norm” (for example, the norm of average family size or income) was a real-world reference point around which human variation actually turned or an abstract mathematical point that random variation implied. As Hacking writes, “Normality” emerged “to close the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’” Science apart, statistics’ emergence as a forum for debating “the social” did not escape contamination by more sinister dreams of managing life—indeed, the evolutionary prospects of the human race. The most scandalous example was eugenics, the pseudoscience of managing births to secure better genetic outcomes for the overall population. Here the apparently objective science of numbers merged with the racial hierarchies between peoples that had already shaped colonialism for centuries.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 376