In *Metric Power*, David Beer examines the intensifying role that metrics play in our everyday lives, from healthcare provision to our interactions with friends and family, within the context of the so-termed data revolution. This is a book that illustrates our growing implication in, and arguable acquiescence to, an increasingly quantified world, but, *Thomas Christie Williams* asks, where do we locate resistance? *Metric Power. David Beer. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. * My initial reaction to Metric Power was that, for an essay on the challenges of big data, there was remarkably little of it throughout the book. As David Beer shied away from drawn-out case studies, figures and concrete examples, I found myself getting more and more irritated. How could I trust what he was saying without evidence to back it up? But as I progressed, I realised that this is probably part of his point. As a ‘neoliberal subject’, Beer argues, people like me have a ‘cultural interest in numbers, and a culture that is shaped and populated with numbers’ (149). If something cannot be quantified, our trust and interest in it diminishes. There is indubitably more data in the world than there has ever been before. In my field, medicine, genomes are being sequenced at an exponential rate, and many institutions have legitimate concerns about where this data will be stored – indeed, some scientists are trying to store data in DNA itself. Companies like Apple and Google have moved into health metrics and are storing tens of thousands of physiological measurements about people who use their health apps. The entirety of Scotland’s computer-based medical records are being made accessible to researchers, who are using machine learning to try and decipher patterns in the relationship between demographics and disease. Can, or will, this data be used to increase our understanding of basic biological processes, improve health or reduce inequality? And is the metricisation of everyday life leading to changes in ways that we construct social values, live our everyday lives and even how we relate to our bodies? Beer would argue that it is, and he spends Metric Power dissecting the challenges that big data poses both methodologically to the social sciences and to us as individuals. Beer frames his analysis about the causes and effects of metric power around three key themes: ‘Measurement’, ‘Circulation’ and ‘Possibility’. In ‘Measurement’, we learn about the history of assessing social entities quantitatively. Beer argues that this mode of thinking shapes the social world, quoting Heidegger: ‘calculation refuses to let anything appear except what is calculable’ (235). ‘Circulation’ examines the processes by which metrics about social subjects circulate and a ‘social life of data’ is created. In ‘Possibility’, metrics are related to power, and how they are used to ‘maintain, strengthen, or justify new types of inequality, to define value or worth, and to make the selections central to affording visibility or invisibility’. […] Continua qui: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/10/27/book-review-metric-power-...