People tend to forget, but words have a history. ‘Society’ – as philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour reminds us – combines the Latin socius (an ally or companion) with ‘-ties’. It’s about how we as individuals bind ourselves to one another to form communities. But the way we govern and understand ‘socie-ties’ – be they states, public or private institutions – has not escaped our modern obsession with interpreting the world around us through calculation. Whether through financial figures, electoral polls or reality show audience votes, we’ve come to believe we can simplify anything with supposedly objective data. In this drive to manage corporations, states and communities by numbers, we have come to believe […]