OK, so maybe the last entry Artist was a little far from a tangible exploration of Non-representational technology. Let’s try something a bit more direct.
BMI, or “body mass index”, is a very old — and famously completely fucked — health metric.
As reported by NPR:
The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.
The BMI was introduced in the early 19th century by a Belgian named Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet. He was a mathematician, not a physician. He produced the formula to give a quick and easy way to measure the degree of obesity of the general population to assist the government in allocating resources. In other words, it is a 200-year-old hack.
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There is no physiological reason to square a person’s height (Quetelet had to square the height to get a formula that matched the overall data. If you can’t fix the data, rig the formula!).
You can think of BMI as a very early public health algorithm. By packaging it up as a population-level health measure it topologically resembles an ‘app’ — a process with a consistent input, process and output that promises a certain kind of insight. It’s so simple to calculate with so few datapoints that it’s irresistible for anyone with population level health stats and a colonial mindset to implement. You can read the NPR article for more info on all the ways it distorts but for me just the fact that the unit of measurement is the same as it is for paper — weight per distance squared, so kg/m^2 or g/m^2 respectively, maybe indicates how silly it really is.
Public health wants to improve population health through diet and exercise, and of course I agree those are good things. But how do you really make those things easier? You improve availability and reduce cost of fresh food and vegetables, reduce car use and improve air quality, fund grassroots sports activity, fund community spaces so there’s free things to do locally that aren’t just going to the pub, improve food culture and 1,001 other things. The fact that fresh fruit and veg is so unaffordable that voucher schemes have been introduced to address it is absolutely shocking to me. And the local projects focussing on food sovereignty are in a constant battle for funding and with local councils over rezoning to be able to literally grow food to keep people alive.
BMI is a really concrete example of Goodharts Law, which states that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Even if by some stroke of the imagination, we had a perfect metric that measured what BMI is meant to do, applied to individuals it is a complete nonsense. The way it is applied by the NHS concretely shifts the blame from population-level failure to create healthy and livable cities onto yet another personal fault that disproportionately, of course, affects the poorest and most marginalised. This gross logic is how shoplifting is now being spun using the medicalised language of disease as “an epidemic”, as if people simply trying to stay alive is the disease and capitalism is the cure.
The tech industry has done an awful lot of work to make tech seem like a neutral force that just processes information into other forms. Without the enormous power of capital and state to force these technologies upon us, maybe they’d wither and die. FitBit’s popularisation of 10,000 steps a day, a goal fabricated by a Japanese company to sell pedometers and then sent global by an Silicon Valley company selling pedometers (but attached to the internet) comes to mind.
Here lies the power of representative technology. By creating fundamentally unsound abstractions of social problems, giving them authoritative sounding names, and using the power of a state or corporation to roll them out over large areas, it casts a kind of spell which reframes real tangible structural things with real causes into something more like a generalised religious or moral duty. A non-representative approach asks simply how I can make my neighbourhood a healthier place to live. And the answer to that is definitely not simple.