Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life

"We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the street, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one."