‘How can you not be romantic about baseball?’ Or how we are platonic about data

Abstract

Due to the influence of Michael Lewis’s book and its film adaptation of the same title, ‘Moneyball’ is now a euphemism for using data analytics to generate insights. These texts perform important cultural explications of machine learning. Methodologically informed by critical discourse analysis, film studies, and cultural studies, this essay describes how the 2011 film in particular aestheticizes epistemological notions such as data framing, the semantic gap, and deep learning. Moneyball also proffers a view of analytics as Platonic knowledge, functioning ideologically alongside nerd archetypes and buddy-comedy conventions. The resultant duality between the Platonic and embodied, innervated by relations between visibility and invisibility, typifies the way people relate to Big Data and to the institutions that govern our digital lives in algorithmic culture. Moneyball performs cultural work by encouraging us to embrace data science while remaining alienated from technology and deferential to experts. Calls for technological literacy in the age of Big Data cannot underestimate the importance of cultural literacy.