AFETY in numbers, the idiom runs. And it sums up the zeitgeist in more ways than one. Never has our planet been more populous, nor humanity so sheltered from reality. As capitalism (shorthand for terminal shit-show) proceeds to monetise every last aspect of our existence, converting everyone, everywhere and everything on Earth to sterile numerical values, the herd remains distracted, which leaves the rest of us vastly outnumbered. And if the wealthiest few prevail (which the debt-ridden many seem bent on enabling), what little of our money they haven’t yet extracted will transmigrate to the digital ether unless we push back.
Because money is the modern incarnation of God, watched over not by angels but technology, and we swallow it: the census, surveys and stats that guide policy, help big business to sell us more crap, and inform most of our decisions. Yet numbers shortchange the past, tame the present, and shape the future. Like, how much more CO2 can we emit before global warming obliterates us? We trust the numbers scientists quote more than what our senses tell us (hotter summers, wilder weather, less insects, more jellyfish). Ditto pandemic protection measures (14-day quarantine, a magic circle of 1.5 metres, the vax Pfizer touted as 95% effective) – arbitrary figures, yet holy writ to the ignorant (or those fearing fines and social stigma).
How apt that the word number originally comes from the Proto-Indo-European nem: to divide. And then, once they’re assigned to us and our property, numbers serve to conquer. Lot, flat, postcode, mobile phone, tax file, PINs galore, ABN, credit card, driver’s licence and so much more – extending and increasing beyond our powers of recall, hence we depend on devices to save and store them.
Imagine a world without numbers. As if! They contribute to regimentation, rigid mentation, rigged elections, dodgy developments, digital tracking, hacking and diverse trickery. Impersonal, instrumental, they diminish us as they get bigger and empower the inner administrator native to the left side of your brain. No-one in our digital age gets to see nature spirits or pixies – just internet trolls who disrupt and divert discourse, or grids of pixels that simulate subtler images the way Lego constructions imitate objects: clumsily. Close in on something real (vs. digital) and you get ever more detail, to the extent that your eye or lens can detect it. But pick any image on the world wide web then zoom in. After a few clicks, instead of more clarity, you see pixels: blocks of tone/colour. Blockage. Blank wall. Dead end. Images disintegrate, revealed as less than the sum of their parts. And a high-res option will cost. The more you pay, the more is revealed – much like at strip clubs or peep shows. But a corporate pimp has a global reach.
Today, the digital realm surrounds and invades us, denying our brains the stillness needed for deep concentration, colonising space that once sustained imagination. Even the silver screen that enchanted via analogue visions has, over a century, morphed into a black mirror that mines our souls then sells the dross back to us. Which a famous Nietzschean maxim seems to anticipate: ‘And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ When did we first begin to gaze into this boundless yet depthless space? Nietzsche was writing about fighting monsters. And that’s what keeps a lot of folk busy. The monsters look like Putin or Trump, neo-Nazis or transphobes or anti-vaxxers, depending on your ideology, but the aim is the same as in any video game: to win and keep playing.
But hey, that’s progress: an excuse for the zillion abuses digits facilitate. Originally, fingers (or symbols for them) counted off amounts until hands produced the first abacus, precursor of calculators all the way up to supercomputers reducing real-world multidimensionality to algorithmic abstraction via a process veiled in mystique maintained by a technocratic priesthood.
Numbers generate awe, and the bigger, the better; numbers enthral. More abstract than names, they play an ever more vital role in our lives. Height, weight, heart rate, blood pressure, bone mass, circumference… Seeing is believing, we used to say back in the day. But now we defer to calculations. Take the BMI (body mass index): your weight divided by the square of your height. Devised by a Victorian-era statistician, it tells us less than our reflection in a mirror. And when did we start to compare the relative merits of women’s bodies numerically? Remember 36–24–36, the hourglass figure (an unreal ideal named after a device for measuring time)? Epitomised by Marilyn, it dominated the fifties (then along came sixties supermodel Twiggy). And the seventies movie 10 portrays Bo Derek (who?) as perfection.
True divinity used to reveal itself for free to anyone with the innocence (or presence) to see it. Yet who, now, has the eyes to spy reality in the raw? What Guy Debord called the spectacle has deadened our senses, trained us to crave the intensity of instant gratification. Hence the digital marketplace trades on simplistic ratings: a quantitative economy where quality is negated. Numbers trump nuance. Norms set the agenda. Averages rule. Removalist or real estate agent, neurosurgeon or plumber, all get a Google star rating from the customer. Who has time to read or write comprehensive reviews?
It’s a numbers game, from Google rankings to punishment via formal sanctions: jail time reckoned in months, years or consecutive life sentences; fines based on the amount of km/h by which you exceed the speed limit; strokes of a cane from a teacher, or so many Hail Marys that the sinner needs rosary beads to keep track. Numbers have always been pivotal to the civilised condition. It’s just that as it advances, the numbers expand.
Ambition. Drive. Motivation. How we prize them in our society. And, for just a while, I was a high-achieving child. My mother rewarded me for sharing her self-improvement quest. Her mind had been co-opted by women’s magazines. Thankfully, my father modelled a more creative approach. Instead of focusing on himself, he strove to enhance his surroundings, an urge largely confined to the garden. My mother ruled the house, an extension of her ego, like me. I inhabited text- and exercise books. My task: to score top marks. And those marks often landed me in different classes to my few friends. Alienated by numbers and averse to equations, I doodled in the margins of schoolbooks. Art as consolation.
And during that lonely first year at high school, a vocational guidance counsellor advised each of us Year 7 students concerning our future. These private consultations were short and the man in the suit did most of the talking, though he knew jack shit about us beyond the grades on our reports. So, with my flair for art and maths, he said, I could be an architect. (I hated maths! Or maybe just the violent male teacher? What about my high English marks?) At twelve I’d begun to distrust my elders, and clearly this suit had no idea. So I said I thought that architecture sounded really boring. And by the end of that year, my maths marks had lapsed because I sat up the back drawing tropical islands instead of facing the blackboard.
That little chat with the ‘counsellor’ was just one of many irrelevancies. For four years I burned to escape not just a deadening secondary ‘education’ but a meddling mother who felt threatened when I showed independence, and used me to make herself feel more secure. Which is how those now in power use us: we can count on it.
observer of times 