Metrics that didn't exist (but now they do)
This article is about what happens when data dreams of being human.
For some time now, I’ve been collecting small observations about how our inner lives interact with technology. Come to think of it, that’s the theme of this whole Substack… but I felt I needed a format to capture things that didn’t go into a conventional essay.
We get feelings like “my attention is lagging”, “my brain is out of sync”, or “my bandwidth is low”. I have been to cities again that I visited years ago, and they felt differently when I walked the streets with a navigation app. But differently how? And how far do the analogies between digital systems and our consciousness carry us before they break down (because we are not computers after all)?
I could attempt to discuss these questions in essays (and I do), but I was looking for another way of capturing the questions. In an essay, there is always the danger of answering a question prematurely, before you have understood it, because you want to come to a satisfying end.
So, here is another way of asking these questions.
Metrics That Don’t Exist: the book
The resulting “metrics that don’t exist” are part data report, part dream fragment. They began as physical and digital notes, written in the streets of my home town or while travelling: in airports, cafés, hotels, and other transitional spaces where technology and emotion overlap. They are the traces of a human system trying to make sense of itself through its own metaphors.
I have played around with those metrics for some time now. Originally, I was planning to use them in a novel. Then, I just posted them randomly here on Notes. And then, one of the metrics became a micro-poem set to the music of an ambient artist whose work I admired - see here:
I felt like the metrics were not “done” yet - they needed another format, a collection because they make more sense in each other’s company.
So now, I have released a physical book (no digital version available!) that brings together ten of them:
Personal Infrastructure Stability Index
Invisible System Sync Rate
Civic Signal Interference Index
Temporal Drift Index
Phantom Notification Index
Urban Displacement Coefficient
Identity Fragmentation Quotient
Unclaimed Memory Density
Reality Rendering Lag
Digital Boredom Resistance Index
And another, final one, in which communication ends and listening begins.
What these pieces measure
Each metric borrows the language of analytics but turns it inward, toward perception and presence. They measure what every system forgets: hesitation, error, longing, pause.
They are accompanied by field notes and echoes.
Together, they describe the quiet friction between the measurable and the lived: the way a spreadsheet’s precision starts to blur when you stare at it long enough.
Images as parallel data
The book is illustrated with my own street photography: objects and corners of the city that look like small glitches in the algorithm. None of them were staged, all of them real. They are visual field notes, reminders that systems exist everywhere: even in decay, even in chance.
The photographs and texts are part of the same experiment: noticing what continues to speak when no one is listening. The quiet intelligence of the everyday runs on its own frequency, and even fragments keep transmitting.
A field guide to the unmeasurable
You can read “Metrics That Don’t Exist” as prose poetry, as conceptual art, or as a series of experiments in attention. They won’t provide you with any answers, but you can join in the experimentation. Because what else is life if not an experiment?