Supplemental Post #1 – Max Berwald

For this one I’m thinking back to my very, very late revelation, while reading the Gray for this class, that even the most craven, exploitative corporations are cultural formations. I’ve been reading Kimberly Chong’s Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China for another project. The book is the result of Chong’s year and a half embedded in a multinational management consultancy. In it, she describes the many ways the consultancy quantifies the results of its services and improving internal “performance.” Each time she is able to get to the bottom of a dataset, almost without fail the initial layer of data is completely “soft” (human capital strategic implementation exceeded target improvements by 22% = an employee reported giving 10 powerpoint presentations on organization to his coworkers over the course of a year, when the target was 8). This makes me wonder how the leading streaming services are using data to plan their series cancellations, pilots and acquisitions, especially given the dawning realization we seem to be having that Netflix’s corporate culture is toxic. How does this toxicity interface with the constant imperative to dress highly subjective content decisions in the finery of rationality (data)?