We Are The People Who Counted

And. We. Just. Can't. Stop.

Thousands of years from now archaeologists will look upon our ruins (hey, it’s happened to everybody else) and call us “The people who counted.” They won’t say that to mark us as more significant than the Maya or the Assyrians. They’ll mean we were a culture obsessed with numbering and counting things.

We check the number of steps we take daily, hoping to cheat death. We read the numbers on our packages of food, and stare at the numbers on our car dashboards, our wrists, the grades our school-age kids both have and are in, learning all about numbers. You can count on this, so to speak.

But that’s not the kind of counting we’ll be remembered for. Manchu China and the Abbasid Caliphate did stuff like that, counting steps and treasure, the same as everybody else in history. What really sets us apart is our massive standardized counting, the way we’re trying to monitor and count everything. We store it digitally. That way, if we want we can count it again in new ways.

A cloud computing data center, where some unknown fraction of everything we’re counting resides. Image: Microsoft

It has been a growing feature of life for a couple of centuries. The key thing that drove the Industrial Revolution was measuring and counting in standardized ways, so we could make the exact same thing by the hundred, and eventually by the billion.

Now our counting is in hyper drive, thanks to the way the digital world counts things using sensors, phones, browser clicks, loyalty cards, telemetry (movement of data) across different data analysis frameworks, among many other ways.

We follow this path, thinking that by counting everything we may come to know everything.

The problem is, “everything” turns out to be a really elusive number.