Paper long abstract:

This essay examines the date practice of Chinese IT professionals of a domestic Internet giant, whose daily work revolved around reducing the complexity of ordinary users into different metrics. Along this process, these tech experts also reproduced the ideology of data superiority and had gone so far to make their own life a quantifiable project. Drawing on this ethnographic investigation, It is argued that the perspective of backstage not only opens up the possibility of ethnography but also illustrates the way in which IT expert community and tracking technology has reinforced the audit culture and brought quantification mode of thinking into broader social fields.