While a general sense of alarm surrounds the inexorable progress of algorithms and artificial intelligence, and the critique of misleading or toxic metrics in several domains is by now a genre on its own, mathematical modelling appeared on the radar as a potentially dangerous member of the family of quantification only recently, in relation to its use and abuse during the latest pandemic.
Previous apparitions, such as those related to the subprime mortgage crisis, were quickly forgotten in the face of other socio-economic dysfunctions highlighted by that crisis.
In the present work, I pull models to the centre of the action, investigating their not-so-discreet charm and epistemic authority.
I characterise them as a powerful source of symbolic capital at the disposal of scientists, which permits them a disproportionate control over the narratives we use to make sense of the world.
The technical, the sociological, and the political are entangled in every modelling practice. In contemporary societies, mathematical models are not merely tools for understanding reality; they have become instruments for governing it.
Because models translate political choices into technical necessities, they play a crucial but largely invisible role in shaping public policy while redistributing responsibility and accountability.
Apparatuses of quantification provide the skeleton, or, better, the nervous system interconnecting science and society, and to reveal this nexus, history, philosophy and the sociology of both science and policy will be called to the stand, with some more than occasional incursions of fiction.
At stake is not merely the quality of our models, but the quality of the democratic life they increasingly shape.