“Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything”

Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology.

Leon Wieseltier, “Among the Disrupted”, The New York Times Book Review (18 January 2015), 1, 14.