Datafication of Persons

Dickens's single most precise accusation in Hard Times is grammatical rather than rhetorical: he refuses to call the workers of Coketown workers, or citizens, or men and women. He calls them Hands—and holds that word relentlessly for three hundred pages. The repetition is the argument. To be a Hand is to be visible to a system only as a function. The consciousness attached to the arms operating the loom is not present to the system; the grief of the person running the machine is not a feature the system was built to read. This is datafication of persons: the operation by which a human being is reduced to the subset of their attributes that a measurement system can capture, and the resulting vector is then treated as if it were the person. Gradgrind's school performs exactly this reduction on children—accepting only what can be specified and discarding the rest—and Dickens follows the products of the system to their ends to demonstrate that the reduction succeeded perfectly,