More parts than elements

MORE PARTS THAN ELEMENTS. HOW DATABASES MULTIPLY (Mackenzie, 2010)

“Databases can be understood as the pre-eminent contemporary doing, organising, configuring and performing thing-and-people multiples in sets. Participation, belonging, inclusion and membership: many of the relations that make up the material social life of people and things can be formally apprehended in terms of set-like multiples rendered as datasets. Mid-twentieth century database design derived different ways of gathering, sorting, ordering, and searching data from mathematical set theory. The dominant database architecture, the relational database management system (RDMS), can be seen as a specific technological enactment of the mathematics of set theory. More recent developments such as grids, clouds and other data intensive architectures apprehend ever greater quantities of data”