Mechanical Values and Bureaucratic Metaphysics: On the Epistemology of Scale

Scale changes how information flows, and constraints on information flow also place pressures on the social processes by which we formulate our concepts and our metaphysics. There are particularly important lessons here to be learned from historians, anthropologists, and sociologists who study data, bureaucracy, and institutional memory – such as Lorraine Daston and Theodore Porter. I will attempt to extend these lessons, and show the deep implications of scale and replaceability on epistemology and social ontology.

Two key lessons: Large-scale informational processes prefer:
1. Low-nuance, standardized informational kernels that can travel easily between contexts.
2. Mechanical rules which produce similar results across an ever-shifting array of replaceable workers.

These tendencies place systematic pressures on what we can collectively formulate as good values and targets: we will prefer to target the kinds of things that anybody can measure. They also place systematic pressure on our concepts and categories, and our folk ontologies. Conceptual engineering has been happening all along. Many of our concepts have already been re-contoured to have mechanical edges: to be readily usable on a large-scale by an array of fungible workers. This produces an effect which we might call objectivity hacking, whereby certain concepts and values provide a shortcut to key indicators of objectivity. It is easy to agree on judgments involving these concepts – precisely because they have been engineered to make convergence easy.

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