The Metric Is Not The Mission: When They Still Understood Us

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The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part II — When They Still Understood Us

Part I looked at the slow transformation taking place beneath the daily controversies surrounding Big Tech. This second part goes back to the beginning, asking what these companies originally understood about people and how the metrics that once measured their success gradually became the definition of it.

It has become fashionable to tell the story of Big Tech as though it were always destined to end here. In retrospect, it is easy to portray the rise of the major platforms as the inescapable march of surveillance capitalism, monopolistic ambition, and unchecked technological power. That narrative is emotionally satisfying because it offers clear villains and a comforting sense of inevitability. It also happens to be incomplete.

Cory Doctorow has given this deterioration a memorable name: “enshittification.” His argument is that platforms initially serve users well, then, once users and business customers are locked in, progressively shift value away from both toward shareholders, degrading the service in the process. It is a powerful account of how platforms become extractive. But it is not quite the argument here. The deeper problem is not simply that Big Tech has learned to extract more from us but that it has become increasingly convinced that because it can measure and predict our behavior, it understands us and, by extension, the societies it has come to mediate. The failure is therefore not only economic; it is also epistemic. The metric has become a substitute for the mission.

One cannot understand why these companies now appear increasingly disconnected from the societies they helped shape without first acknowledging that, for a remarkably long time, they understood those societies exceptionally well.

Technology succeeds when it solves technical problems. It changes the world when it solves human ones.

That was the genius of the first generation of internet platforms. Their founders did not invent friendship, curiosity, creativity or community. They simply recognized that the internet had reached a stage where these deeply human instincts required new forms of expression. The web of the late 1990s was exhilarating, but it was also fragmented, uneven and, for many people, intimidating. Finding information often required patience. Discovering interesting websites depended on chance as much as design. Publishing demanded a degree of technical literacy that excluded far more people than it empowered. The internet was open, but openness alone does not necessarily produce accessibility.

The great platforms emerged not because they sought to replace the internet but because they made it intelligible. Google transformed an expanding wilderness of information into something navigable. Wikipedia demonstrated that knowledge could be organized through collaboration rather than hierarchy. YouTube lowered the barriers to publishing so dramatically that expertise escaped universities, broadcasters and production studios. Facebook addressed an even more fundamental challenge. It recognized that the internet was no longer simply about information; it had become about people. Until then, maintaining relationships online had been surprisingly cumbersome. Email was too formal, instant messaging too ephemeral, personal websites too static. Facebook reduced social interaction to something almost frictionless. Its success lay not in technological sophistication but in psychological intuition.

This is easy to forget because the platforms that dominate our lives today bear only a partial resemblance to the ones that first captured our imagination. Facebook did not begin as an endless stream of algorithmically selected content. It was, in essence, a digital address book enriched by photographs, conversations, and the ordinary rituals of everyday life. It became valuable because it mirrored existing relationships rather than attempting to manufacture new ones. There was comfort in discovering former classmates, following the lives of distant relatives, or organizing gatherings that would otherwise have required dozens of emails and phone calls. The platform expanded social life without yet attempting to redefine it.

YouTube offered a similarly modest promise. It was not originally designed to maximize engagement or optimize watch time. It functioned more like an immense public archive whose value derived from its unpredictability. One could arrive searching for a lecture on astronomy and leave having discovered a forgotten jazz performance, a documentary on Greek history, or a repair manual for a washing machine. Recommendation existed, but it remained subordinate to curiosity. Users still felt as though they were exploring rather than being guided.

Even Twitter (now X), before it became a battleground for politics, culture wars, and performative outrage, captured something important about the changing nature of public conversation. It collapsed distance between journalists, academics, politicians, and ordinary citizens in ways that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years earlier. For all its imperfections, it suggested that expertise and authority might become more accessible rather than less.

Looking back, what united these companies was not simply technological innovation but a particular philosophy of the internet. They assumed that openness generated value. The more people connected, the richer the network became. Every new participant increased the possibilities for everyone else. Economists describe this as a network effect, but the phrase barely captures its cultural significance. Participation itself became the source of optimism. The internet appeared to be validating one of the oldest liberal ideas: that societies flourish when individuals are free to exchange ideas, collaborate voluntarily, and build institutions from the bottom up.

It is difficult to overstate how persuasive this vision became. Most governments celebrated the digital economy as an engine of innovation. Investors poured unprecedented sums into technology because the opportunities seemed limitless. Civil society organizations embraced online platforms as tools for democratic participation and global advocacy. Even critics of globalization often regarded the internet as an exception, a domain where openness appeared to distribute power rather than concentrate it.

For a brief historical moment, these interests aligned. What was good for technology companies often appeared to be good for users, for markets, and, in many respects, for the internet itself. The incentives reinforced one another. Companies grew by making the network more useful. Users benefited from larger communities. Developers built new services on open standards. The web expanded because success depended on drawing people further into its richness rather than confining them within a single destination.

History, however, has an inconvenient habit of changing the problems that institutions are asked to solve. The sociologist Robert K. Merton once observed that organizations often become prisoners of their own success. Practices that were rational under one set of conditions gradually harden into routines, and routines into orthodoxies. Institutions continue refining the solutions that once made them indispensable even as the environment around them evolves. Success breeds confidence; confidence breeds certainty; certainty eventually makes adaptation more difficult than persistence.

There is no reason to believe technology companies are exempt from this pattern. If anything, their extraordinary success may have accelerated it.

The platforms that once competed to help users navigate an open internet eventually found themselves managing ecosystems of unprecedented scale. Their priorities changed almost imperceptibly. The models they developed during the internet’s age of expansion proved astonishingly effective at connecting people, organizing information, and lowering the costs of participation. The metrics through which they evaluated success, such as growth, engagement, scale, and network effects, were not arbitrary inventions of venture capital. They reflected a period during which connecting more people genuinely created more value for everyone involved. The problem is that the world changed while the metrics remained stable. A measure that once indicated success gradually became the definition of success itself.

There is an obvious parallel here with Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The principle, first articulated by economist Charles Goodhart in the context of monetary policy, describes what happens when an indicator that works as a proxy for an underlying objective is turned into the objective itself. But the problem here is slightly different. The issue is not simply that platforms began gaming their metrics, or that users learned to optimize for them. It is that the metrics gradually became so deeply embedded in the companies’ understanding of success that the distinction between the measure and the mission was lost. The metric did not merely distort the objective; it quietly became the objective.

None of this happened because a group of executives gathered in a boardroom and decided to undermine the open internet. Institutional change is rarely so theatrical. More often, it emerges from countless rational decisions made in pursuit of perfectly reasonable objectives: improve the user experience, reduce friction, personalize recommendations, increase safety, remove inconvenience. Each adjustment appears modest in isolation but collectively they alter the character of the system itself.

This is where history becomes quietly ironic. The companies that had once understood the internet better than anyone else slowly began to forget what had made the internet exceptional in the first place. They continued to believe they were connecting the world, even as they increasingly replaced the world with carefully curated representations of it. They accumulated unprecedented quantities of information about human behavior while becoming progressively less attentive to the human condition.

The distinction is subtle, but it may prove to be the defining story of this technological era. To observe behavior is not the same as understanding experience. A platform can know how long we hesitate before clicking a link, which videos hold our attention for an extra seven seconds, or what sequence of images is most likely to keep us scrolling late into the night. It can infer preferences with astonishing accuracy. It can predict patterns that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Yet prediction, however sophisticated, remains an impoverished form of understanding. It reveals what people do. It says far less about why they do it, what they fear, what they hope for, or what kind of society they are trying to build together.

That difference, almost invisible at first, is where the story begins to change.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

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