What Do Metrics Want

Artist Ben Grosser on the cultural, social, and political effects of software:

The Facebook interface is filled with numbers that count users’ friends, comments, and “likes.” … Audit culture and business ontology enculturate a reliance on quantification to evaluate whether that desire has been fulfilled. These conditions compel Facebook’s users to reimagine both self and friendship in quantitative terms, and situates them within a graphopticon, a self-induced audit of metricated social performance where the many watch the metrics of the many.