A piercing sound awakens you: the alarm on your phone. Through squinted eyes you peer in its direction and discern a blinking 7:00 AM. This number denotes the beginning of your day—a day in which you will feel like the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, except rather than being transformed into a giant insect, you are reduced to an insignificant number. It’s equally dehumanizing.

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You reach to silence the alarm. Phone in hand but not ready to escape the ensnaring warmth of bed, you instinctively tap the TikTok icon to delay facing reality for a few minutes. Of the billions of videos you could be shown, TikTok’s algorithm mysteriously chooses just a single video to show you first. Then another. Then one more after that. It uses a secret math formula to create this personalized playlist, but you have no idea how it works.

While you’re mindlessly watching TikToks, a witticism strikes you, one you’d like to share with the world. You head over to Threads or Bluesky or X to do so but are confronted with a harsh realization: every remark on the platform, including the one you are about to post, is boiled down to a handful of numbers—views, Likes, reposts—that are on display for all to see. What if your witticism wallows in obscurity? Virality is a numbers game, but frustratingly you’re not told the rules.

This data turns us all into numerical grist for the mathematical mill, allowing the powers that be to predict, optimize, and profit with unprecedented scale and success.

By now your mind has moved on to another thought: follower counts on social media compress your importance to a single number judged by humans and algorithms alike. Want to be a writer? Be prepared to tell publishers how many TikTok followers you have. Want to sell handcrafted soaps? The number of Instagram followers you have is likely more important than the number of weekends you spend at the local farmer’s market. I’ve seen applicants for a teaching position beat out others for an interview by having a larger YouTube following. Even the importance of politicians is now sometimes measured by the number of social media followers they have. Real impact, meaningful personal connections, and deeper forms of friendship all become secondary to this shallow game of online quantification. Social media is pushing us all to act like social influencers— whether we want to or not. Time to put the phone down and start your day.

First up, a trip to the grocery store. You hop in your car, blissfully unaware that doing so results in numerification—the assignment of numbers to complex human acts. There’s an entire industry, projected to be worth half a trillion dollars by 2030, dedicated to collecting and selling the trails of data your car emits when it hits the road. Everything is tracked. Your location and speed. Your acceleration and braking patterns. The music you listen to along the way. Who you call from your car and for how long you speak. Many cars today produce around twenty-five gigabytes of data per hour. That’s roughly the size of all English-language Wikipedia articles—every hour.

While this data is used for safety features and navigation assistance programs, it also fuels a range of businesses, from car manufacturers to insurance companies to tech firms, that want to know as much as they can about their customers so they can squeeze every ounce of profit out of them. And as cars are increasingly wired with internet apps—giving new meaning to the term “mobile device”—the auto industry is taking on the tactics of the tech industry. You know those annoying ads you see while riding in some taxis? It might not be long before they spread to private cars. And when they do, expect those ads to be micro-targeted with your personal data just like all the online ads you see on your phone and computer. The old adage in marketing to know your customers has unsettlingly been taken to new heights in today’s digital economy where everything you do is tracked, packaged as data, and sold to the highest bidder.

Fifteen minutes (and a quarter-Wikipedia worth of data) later, you arrive at the grocery store. Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the US, has over thirty-five petabytes of customer data. That’s over 50 percent more data than the entire digital collection of the US Library of Congress. It uses this data to optimize its inventory and marketing campaigns—but it also sells some of this data to other companies in a lucrative data market. In the UK, Tesco and Sainsbury’s sell customer data for an estimated £300 million a year. To put it bluntly, these stores don’t just sell milk and eggs and other food products; they sell whatever private details they can collect from you.

You return home (after producing another quarter-Wikipedia of data on the drive), open your laptop, and decide it’s time to face the painful task you’ve been putting off: applying for jobs. You search for openings in your area and get lots of hits. But something doesn’t seem right. As you scroll down the page, you see link after link of crappy recruiter sites charging exorbitant fees, interspersed with job ads that aren’t great matches for you. That’s because the links you see don’t represent the most relevant opportunities; they represent the companies that paid Google the most to put their ads at the top.

You might think of Google as a search company, but 80 percent of its quarter-trillion-dollar annual revenue comes from ads—both hosting them and placing them throughout the internet. And a big part of what makes Google the most profitable advertising company in the world is that it knows a lot about you. This includes what you search for, when you search for it, how often you click different types of links, what videos you watch on YouTube (which is owned by Google) and how long you watch them, and what you type in your Google Docs and Gmail if you use those apps. All your actions online are fuel for the ad-targeting industry. Google and other tech giants now have another fancy tool for turning you into a pile of numbers and personal data: chatbots. These aren’t just friendly personal assistants; they’re data harvesting machines that give their developers an even more intimate algorithmic window into your thoughts and desires.

Back to your job search. You swim through the sea of sponsored content and find a few jobs worth applying to. Large companies today typically use computer programs to handle the mass of applications they receive. Some rate how well applicants match the positions being applied to, and some rank applicants to save recruiters the time and trouble of doing so manually. You are once again reduced to a number. It would be nice to know what keywords you should include, and what experiences to highlight, to increase your odds of receiving a favorable number. But don’t expect the cold, calculating algorithms to provide you with any helpful feedback. They are programmed to maximize efficiency, not humanity.

If you’re lucky enough to land a job, prepare to be treated as a number there, too. From truck drivers and factory workers to white-collar office workers, employees of all types are increasingly monitored by productivity tracking apps—tying hourly pay, bonuses, and continued employment to a laundry list of surreptitiously recorded statistics. Of the ten largest private employers in the US, eight now use this technology in some capacity. Some office workers recommend purchasing a mouse-jiggling device that keeps the cursor moving so you’re not dinged for idle time.

At an investment management firm in Connecticut, each employee is scored on seventy-seven different measures. These performance numbers are displayed like batting averages and slugging percentages on a baseball card. Perhaps this focus on metrics works: this firm, responsible for over $100 billion, is the second-most-successful hedge fund on the planet. In Minneapolis, a hospice chaplain’s employer tallies “productivity points” of a different kind. Visiting a dying patient is worth one point; participating in a funeral is worth one and three-quarters. From 2019 to 2022, as the pandemic pushed many into remote work, global demand for employee monitoring software rose by 65 percent. A legal advice firm in the UK now coaches businesses on the pros and cons of using AI to “track employees’ performance, monitor their actions, and predict their future behaviour”—something we’ll surely see a lot more of in the coming years as AI continues to proliferate.

Uncomfortable with this relentless drive for efficiency, you decide to take matters into your own hands. If you start your own business, you’ll be your own boss and escape the quantitative confines of productivity trackers. First stop: your local bank, to apply for a business loan. Alas, you are once again a number as your credit score dictates your ability to secure funding.

Perhaps it is instead time to go back to college. Standardized tests ensure you’re a number before you apply, while college rankings affix a number to your degree after you graduate. Think your time in between will be less of a numerical nightmare? Think again. Many schools issue students official laptops that automatically report to professors how much time each student spent on the required readings and how long they looked away from the screen during an exam.

The tracking software installed on these laptops also reports data to campus police and college administrators—and to private companies that leverage students’ intimate information for profit. The parent company of the learning management system Canvas, used by over a third of higher-ed institutions in North America, once said that its troves of education-related data are key to the company’s multibillion-dollar valuation. Cengage, a massive online textbook company, doesn’t just track how many pages each student reads. It also collects information on webpages visited, links clicked, keys typed, and more. And it sells portions of this data to companies that use this information to target students with invasive ads.

We must reclaim the mathematical tools currently being used to manipulate and exploit us by the public and private sectors alike.

Seeing all the ways in which you are treated as a number is enough to make a person sick. Speaking of being sick, don’t expect a break from this incessant numerification when you go to the doctor. And I’m not talking about numbers like heart rate and blood pressure. Health insurance companies plug you into their formulas to compute your premiums and payouts, hospital managers use formulas to shape staff sizes and hours, and triage nurses use a point system to determine your spot in line at the emergency room. Need a kidney or liver? There’s a number for that too: algorithms rank potential recipients to determine who gets the next available donated organ.

At this point, it might feel like your life itself is just a number. To some government agencies, it literally is. FEMA put the “value of a statistical life” at $7.5 million. The EPA is more generous, using a $10 million price tag. Well, that’s for lives in the US. In at least one document trying to assess the cost of climate change in terms of lives lost, the EPA controversially decided to adjust the value of a statistical life based on per capita income. This means the number assigned to someone in Germany is ten times the number assigned to someone in Ghana.

Those in power have long been inclined to see people as numbers. This partly reflects a practical constraint. You can treat the members of your family and your local community with the individuality and respect they deserve. But a government is responsible for so many citizens, and a large company for so many customers, that individual faces and identities inevitably blur into a fog of impersonal statistics. However, it goes far beyond this. Treating people as numbers is also a way to uncover patterns in behavior and optimize operations for efficiency. That’s because numbers are the language of mathematics, and mathematics provides an array of potent tools for analyzing trends and making predictions.

While numerification is not new, its extent today is mind-boggling. The apps on our phones and computers and in our cars have made our lives more comfortable and our activities more convenient, but they have also enabled the collection of a staggering amount of personal data. This data turns us all into numerical grist for the mathematical mill, allowing the powers that be to predict, optimize, and profit with unprecedented scale and success.

What can we do to regain our humanity and autonomy? I believe we must reclaim the mathematical tools currently being used to manipulate and exploit us by the public and private sectors alike. Math is commonly portrayed as something only prodigies and savants can do. But this is a myth. You don’t need to be an algebra all-star or geometry guru to avail yourself of the wondrous benefits of math. You just need math to be presented in a new and more inclusive light, focusing not only on the formulas that techies and quants use to get ahead—but also on how ordinary people can use these formulas to confront the challenges faced in everyday life. I call this Robin Hood math because it takes the power of math from the rich and gives it to the poor. This won’t stop you from being seen as a number, but it will help bridge the chasm that has grown between those with quantitative backgrounds and those without. 

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From Robin Hood Math: Take Control of the Algorithms that Run Your Life by Noah Giansiracusa. Copyright © 2025 by Noah Giansiracusa. To be published on August 5th, 2025 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.