--- > populations are surveilled and tracked, their perceptions and politics managed through highly individualized advertising and information selection. The only force that appears capable of breaking with this order is a death drive of extremism, from Donald Trump to Brexit to the Islamic State. And in the end, even this force seems to play back into the governing logic of managerial capitalism, as every crisis, whether flooding, terrorism or the rise of right-wing nationalism, generates the same calls for the retrenchment of an increasingly privatized capitalism --- > Since 2008, algorithmic trading—that is, algorithms that trade stocks among themselves—has accounted for at least half the average daily volume in US stock markets --- > At the same time that these utopian and dystopian visions of a world watched over by algorithms saturate much writing on technology, statistics and machine learning are also in deep crisis: academic knowledge production is beset by unreplicable studies, the carbon impacts of big data infrastructures add to threats of environmental devastation, and artificial intelligence is possibly poised for a new winter of abandonment. --- > On the metaphysical level, different schools of statistics make diverse philosophical claims about the relationship between chance, induction and knowledge: some declare probability to be a subjective measure of belief, while others see it as an objective frequency of a collection of outcomes.16 On the mathematical level, statisticians have built atop these systems a battery of mathematical tests that evaluate how this metaphysical relationship plays out according to an experiment or observed data. --- > Just as Taylorist scientific management revolutionized industrial production at the turn of the twentieth century, the “inference revolution” has revolutionized the production of knowledge and abstraction from data in the late twentieth and early twenty-first --- > According to frequentist thought, probability merely represents the long-run frequency of such an imaginary instrument. --- > Neither the universal equivalent of money in capitalism nor the ideal coin of frequentist statistics exists in this world. Rather, like mystical, imagined actors, both types of coins operate in the nether, suturing metaphysical categories of value and probability to the material world. ... Frequentist statistics and capitalism successfully generated a regime of knowledge based on this imaginary invention that allows us to think of the world as objective. --- > These real abstractions, as measures both of the economic value that labor produces and the scientific value of a hypothesis, act as a marker of this form of rationalization and its lack of material locus. ... This non-locatable impulse, both for the production of knowledge and value, is what constitutes what Postone calls “abstract domination.” --- > This does not mean that capitalism or statistics do away with prior concrete domination based on race or gender; rather they use it to justify such domination in terms of abstract vectors and maintain them in concrete form. For instance, an individual’s inability to secure a mortgage or insurance can be used to create segregation in the form of redlining, concrete domination that is further enforced through targeted police violence. --- > if we are to resist the inequities of algorithmic logic, it cannot be only at the level of technology, nor exclusively at the level of metaphysics. Abstract and concrete forms of domination interact and reinforce each other, just as classed, racialized, gendered and imperialist oppression and violence interact ---