ABSTRACT
The social sciences and governance are inextricably interlinked. The modern state emerged in an “avalanche of printed numbers,” as the rise of statistics as a scientific discipline enabled a new view into the lives of citizens. As digital data proliferates, it is reshaping the social sciences with a new computational paradigm, emphasizing complexity and emergent systems and promising unprecedented insights into human behavior. This chapter traces the history of the epistemology of the digital – through the Santa Fe Institute's articulation of “complexity science” and the rise of computational social science – thereby examining how financial capital and digital capitalism came to shape our understanding of the very nature of society.
