Playful Resistance of Data Futures

In an increasingly digital world, it is hardly surprising that a technology that renders everything as numbers should eventually come to reduce human activity to quantified datasets. This process of objective quantification—referred to by José van Djick as datafication—yields metadata that purports to provide insights into a variety of areas of human social life that are otherwise hidden in complexity, privacy and/or [pedestrian] obscurity. Mediated by sophisticated and increasingly incomprehensible algorithms (particularly with the increasing application of artificial intelligence algorithms), these datasets promise access to a truth that is otherwise invisible, and perhaps revelatory.