When culture pushes us to measure things that don’t matter to us, our values are captured.
Once the metrics turn a profit for corporations and those in power, they are amplified, and almost overnight, begin to matter to us, even if they run contrary to what we originally set out to do or become.
We’re easily seduced by scoreboards, competition and dark patterns.
Professor C. Thi Nguyen has written a brilliant book on the philosophy of games—big and small. The Score helps us understand that dominant industrial and cultural systems push to deskill us as we become fungible, replaceable parts in an easily measurable enterprise. His book is wide, deep, and unforgettable. (It also includes riffs on yoyos and fly fishing.)
Measurements are sticky, contagious, and relentless. Once a competitor begins to move ahead on a metric, it gives them an advantage, and that pushes us to focus on the same metric or fall behind. The Red Queen races ahead, simply because racing ahead is what they’ve been trained to do.
Perhaps, though, falling behind on a metric we don’t care about might be exactly the right thing to do.
In a game like Scrabble or chess, the values capture is right there in the rules. It’s explicit, agreed upon, and the whole point. You feel good about landing a seven-letter word because that’s what scores, and you don’t mind trading your rook for a better position—that’s the game you signed up for. But when we carry that same instinct into how we spend our working hours (and months, and decades), we might end up sacrificing far more than a rook.
Once we see values capture unfolding, we have a shot at making a choice. Measure what matters.
