The Dashboard

Its Etymology and Function

When hearing the word "dashboard", perhaps two definitions spring to mind. The first and most common is the dashboard of a car, with its instruments that provide important but secondary information. The primary information being that which is on the road itself, as of course it is more important when one is driving that they do not hit the other cars on the road rather than obey the speed limit to the specific digit. The other definition is the dashboard of a web app or similar, which provides some condensed information about some system or service so that it can be monitored. How truly useful that information is in a specific dashboard is variable, many professionals relying heavily on some specific dashboard, others being keenly aware that such-and-such a dashboard is utterly useless.

But the word "dashboard" itself used to have nothing to do with displaying information. A folk etymology may go something like: a dashboard is a board that information "dashes" to, or one that someone can "read in a dash". Here dash conveys the meaning of speed or quickness, but in dashboard's original usage dash was used to mean "hit", such as in the phrase "the ship was dashed against the rocks". The dashboard was the board of the carriage that protected the passengers from the mud that was kicked up by horses. It was a board for that mud to dash against.

From that, the "dashboard" of a car comes naturally from its position in the car which mirrored that of the dashboard of the carriage. While the dashboard in a computer application comes thence by their common usage for conveying information. Reasonable enough... but software dashboards as a tool evolved before the term was applied to them. They were precursed by programs designed to provide high-level data to executives for making business decisions (still a primary purpose of the modern dashboard, although now not the only one), which— like another overly-ambitious-and-ultimately-doomed-to-fail program concept of the 80s: "expert systems"— was given a very literal named that ended in the very generic "systems", namely "executive information systems".

So our conception of the sleek, modern, web app dashboard emerges from two veins of history, one formal and one material. The latter gives it the lofty role of providing all the critical information necessary to business executives needed to make critical business-level decisions (note that "business-level" convokes importance and significance, but also detachment, without detail, corporate) and the former gives it the role of catching mud. The analogy takes form: the dashboards conjoin and the information dashed against our computer screens is seen for what it is, mud kicked up by horses.

For the 19th century carriage driver though, it is the horses, the road, and the carriage itself that they watch when driving. Even for the automobile driver the dashboard is secondary. The experienced drivers watches the car and the road first. But if the executive is as they would like to position themself in the metaphor of the carriage as the company, as being the drivers of the cart, then they are not the proper, trained and elegant carriage drivers purported, but rather they have been inaugurated¹ as the corporate diviner, the hierophant who alone has the privilege to speak with the gods. They in their folly try to read the patterns of mud on the dashboard, patterns which must, as hard numbers and descriptive charts must, give all the bits and pieces needed to turn the carriage left or right, or hire and fire this employee or that, or work with some partner company or another.

And this is no trifle of a comparison! Businesses are no longer physical things, but rather aggregates of arcane numbers. To the manager of the rank-and-file worker, regardless of how many will purport otherwise, what matters is not the person who is the worker themself, their skill and ability, their personality or candor. No! All those are secondary. What matters is whatever arbitrary measure of performance has been decided on by the manager or their superiors.² Even when it is clear that the numbers are meaningless, and admitted so by those using them, they must be had. For to have no numbers is to be blind! There is no longer any other path to understanding.

No longer is the "measure" an approximation of the real, it is now the real itself!

And this applies equally to those above the manager, who invoke similar measures, and then all the way up the priestly hierarchy to the executives and CEO, whose decisions, companies and lives are ultimately at the whim of the one superior number and measure to which all others are beholden: capital value. Normally, for the company which does not have outside investors (be that in private or public markets), this is felt more directly, with revenue and profit margins. But for the majority, these fluxes of capital value comes through a strange machine with a plethora gauges, dials, buttons and gizmos. So many that one of those experts of the stock market has taken to calling the movement of stock prices a "Random Walk".

Of course, for all those professional investors whose esoteric methods of "analysis" are not sufficient to beat the index, there are some who are blessed with the actual ability to commune with the corporate gods. Of course this direct communication with the gods of the stock market, those who cause tickers to rise and fall as Luna does the tides, is condemned (when made public) as the blasphemous "insider trading". But for the rest, those arcane numbers must be resorted to. That is not to say that there is no place for pure fundamentalists (in both senses of the word) to make money from these numbers, but regardless of this truth, the relationship remains just between numbers: whether fundamentals translate to making money or not does not change based on the reality of the company, but numbers that are the fundamentals themselves. Not their basis in reality. For the reality of what those numbers mean, and how they translate into the numbers of one's growing coffers, have become as removed from reality as an urban astrologist who can no longer even find Venus in the night sky (or see it if they found it) is disconnected from any astronomical (or even astrological!) meaning. At least W.D. Gann was honest to his methodology.

One of the great new tricks of the contemporary era is to make us all think that we are investors.³ Another is that executives are no more and we are all one family, giving the rest of us in turn the faux appearance that we must be invested in the company's outcome to the extent that an executive is, while failing in truth to give us their powers. Or that we too can leverage the same awesome power of the stock market that the Wall Street banker leverages, even though, as they say, "you gotta spend money to make money", or equivalently, investments even when leveraged multiplicatively can only make money proportional to the amount you initially invest. The poor still are doomed to be poor. And as our retirement money is turned into the loathsome tool for capitalist speculation that is the 401k and its ilk, the corporate world teaches, through dashboards and propaganda, that we are the numbers we see on the screen.

Numbers are inculcated into the psyches of executives, managers and bankers today as much as those of the call center worker who knows that if they do not meet their quota they will be canned. They manifest in the factory worker (be it a physical or mental factory) whose job was moved overseas (or underseas, back into unconscious of the market) simply because it was cheaper to hire labor there and ship whatever is produced back to its market, or in the grandmother whose line of credit on her house intended as a stave against economic ruin was only a source of increasing debt and increasing worry... But the system must do this. It must extract the maximal amount of labor value and capital value possible from people. If it were to do otherwise, if it were to try to have compassion or to give people autonomy, it would undermine its own nature. It would be denying its own truth, that there is no measure of happiness or success other than net worth, the only number that makes anyone worthy of anything.