November 2008

Book predicts a new world
order ruled by number crunchers
In The Numerati, author Stephen Baker says
scientists will use our data to call the shots By Miro Slodki

Recently, author Stephen Baker was in Toronto promoting his just released book, The Numerati, a work of non-fiction that reads like science fiction. It’s about tracking and predicting people by their data. Baker has written for BusinessWeek for over twenty years, covering Mexico and Latin America, the Rust Belt, European technology, and a host of other topics, including blogs, math, and nanotechnology. Ironically, I am sitting across the table from him, enjoying lunch and discussing his book on the day Jack Kirby and Robert Meyers invented the first microchip 50 years ago. Without this invention and an unfathomable string of connecting events, Steve and I probably wouldn’t be having this conversation because the algorithms, databases, data collection and computing platform that form the power base of the “numerati” (a term the author coined to describe the growing number of statisticians, mathematicians, and operations research people that use “our” data to serve and protect us), might not exist.

“These are the early days, but over the course of this century, we are gradually going to see the mathematical modeling not just of humanity, but of the entire world.”

Why did you write this book, Steve?

I was a history major in college. I got into journalism because it gave me a chance to experience and chronicle history. And when I came upon the line of reporting that led to The Numerati, I jumped on it because I saw it as an extremely important change in human history. As I see it, the description in data of our lives and the world that surrounds us will give scientists—the numerati—a chance to assert themselves in areas they never before could touch. These are the early days, but over the course of this century, we are gradually going to see the mathematical modeling not just of humanity, but of the entire world. Sensors will be on everything that can be measured—from birds, to ocean currents, and keystrokes. This will lead to a parallel world, described in data. And it will take shape in clouds of computers, like Google’s.

Nowhere to hide
While The Numerati is not a “How To” guide for marketers searching out the newest techniques, technology or analytic insights, it does illustrate how data is being used to serve and protect us across a wide range of society (in roles as diverse as Workers, Shoppers, Voters, Bloggers, Terrorists, Patients and Lovers). Some aspects might leave readers feeling uncomfortable, but that’s the point of the book; the core message is captured in this excerpt:

As this world takes shape, we’ll have to figure out how much of ourselves to hide. Decades ago, I’m told, my sister-in-law grappled with this question. She was stepping out of the shower in the bathroom of her all-women’s dorm, and she heard a call “Men on the floor!” At many schools, this would have been a non-event, but she was in a highly conservative religious college. She was naked. She only had a small towel to cover herself, and there were men prowling the hallways. She could hear them. She waited, but they didn’t go away. So she began to think about which part of her body to cover with the towel. It barely fit across her bottom or her top. It certainly didn’t cover both. She had to make a choice. Finally she had an inspired idea. She threw the towel over her head – and then scampered naked to her room. Given the options, it was more important for her to cloak her identity than her body.In this new world, all of us are going to face situations in which our most intimate data is exposed, at least to somebody.

Breakthroughs in marketing
Turning back to marketing, I ask Steve what advice he might be able to offer those of us who work in this data driven discipline.

I have little advice for direct marketers because they know their profession a hundred times better than I do. My only point would be that many of these fields, which previously operated in separate silos, now share much of the same data—and similar algorithms. This means that a breakthrough in marketing can conceivably lead to another in medicine or counterterrorism… I’m not saying that this parallel [data] world will faithfully reflect reality. There will be distortions, omissions, errors. But it [this world] will provide speed and efficiency, and in industries that can tolerate a certain rate of error [like marketing], it will have enormous impact. The book’s subtext is about data, how its value and importance have grown and at least in the business world, it is becoming an integral component of the brand’s value. The book is a commentary on how we have grown in our ability to use data to tally, describe, correlate, understand, predict and anticipate the world around us.

Promoting the book
I noticed you are using some of the same data mining/Behavioral Targeting techniques you write about to spread the word to the most likely readers. Can you tell me how that is working for you?

I’ll do one better – I’ll invite all of your readers to my Web site and they can keep track of it themselves, and even comment about it. Please visit this post to catch up on the latest information: http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=61. We are going to target you with behavioural ads and blog about it. In the coming weeks, my publisher Houghton Miffl in, will be running an advertising campaign for The Numeration the vast network of sites affiliated with Platform A/Tacoda, a division of AOL. We’ll be studying the patterns of the people who click on The Numerati ads. Which Web sites do they come from? What types of profiles do they have? Do some profiles click more on one type of ad than another? We’ll make adjustments, and I’ll describe the process, step by step, on this blog. I’ll also be sounding out readers on the conclusions we reach and the advertisements we distribute. Maybe you can steer us along a more reasonable path. Or perhaps the data will lead us along a path that appears to defy all logic—but still works.

The Numerati, is a compelling read for anyone who wants to get a glimpse of how the data world is evolving around us, the importance it will play in all our lives and what questions we might have to ask of it and ourselves.

Miro Slodki is the sole proprietor of Brand Central, a consultancy providing strategic/tactical support for customer centric brand marketers seeking to build stronger, more profitable customer affinity. With a bias toward street-level execution, his experience spans marketing (direct, brand, product and service) market research, loyalty, sales and relationship management, both in the B2C and B2B spaces. He can be reached via e-mail at:miroslodki@yahoo.ca.

The Numerati has been described as an urgent look at how a global math elite is predicting and altering our behavior —at work, at the mall, and in bed. Every day, we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click Web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior —what we buy, how we vote — without our even realizing it. Format: Hardcover, Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, ISBN - 10:0618784608 ISBN - 13:9780618784608