My main argument is that that datafication is the phantasmagoria of the 21st century, the same way mass consumerism was the phantasmagoria or the dream of the 20th century. My inspiration is the work of Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project.

I am defining datafication as the quantification of qualitative aspects of life, i.e. human experience generally.

I am arguing that this phantasmagoria is creating a massive epistemological shift towards a more impoverished type of knowledge because in this massive enterprise of quantification, what cannot be turned into computer data or in other words what cannot be quantified is just abandoned. And now that algorithms are making decisions in most areas of life such as education finance justice and so on this quantification has a direct impact on the system as we live in.

More on this later…