In the beginning of Numbered Lives, Wernimont summarizes the ways in which quantum media, media that “counts, quantifies, and enumerates,” has been transformative and reflective of Anglo-American culture, and how the quantification of human data is heavily influenced by race, gender, and the way one died (Wernimont 2). Among the most notable examples of this is the story of “Saint Savior,” the nickname given to a 17th-century woman who hanged herself in a church. According to Wernimont, she may have done so because of the high likelihood for her existence to be entirely forgotten. A notable death-via-suicide in a sacred place would guarantee her a death record. I find it interesting that despite this, her identity was almost entirely forgotten. Her real name was smudged from history, and her existence was tied solely to a newspaper column titled “hang’d and made away with themselves” (Wernimont 37), which was then included in more generalized documentation of the dead called “Mortality Bills.” Nevertheless, her identity is more concrete and detailed than most of the dead of her time because it includes both her gender and “the agent of her death (herself)” (Wernimont 37). While I initially found this to be reminiscent of some modern-day science fiction novels in that human lives are disregarded a nothing more than a number, it seems to be just as prevalent in modern-day insurance company practices. The oversimplification of data to identify trends that modern insurance companies do follows suit with what Wernimont states in the introduction, “Tracking and quantifying human life, whether motivated by corporate, state, community, or individual reasons, is intimately linked to the ways in which we record and enumerate human death” (Wernimont 2). If we take Wernimont’s words to heart, it is not hard to see that we may be heading back to an age of oversimplification. With the current rise data collection by insurance companies and horror stories like those surrounding Ancestry.com, it’s no wonder XN is concerned with the situation, stating “If our deaths are just seen as numbers, the impact we have on society can get lost in everyone else’s numbers” (XN).
