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The Ordinal Society
A sweeping critique of how digital capitalism is reformatting our world.
We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.
The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provide the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality.
While we obsess over order and difference―and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds―what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.
We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.
The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provide the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality.
While we obsess over order and difference―and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds―what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published April 16, 2024
15 people are currently reading
391 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 30, 2024
Read for a reading group. Really interesting but i struggled with the structure of the book. It jumped around a lot, sections felt tangential, and I wasn’t always clear about what the throughline was. It got me thinking about our data and how it’s used to control us and both extract and assign value to us. But is there anything we can even do at this point?
June 28, 2024
Generally speaking, this book is a quite pleasant and interesting read. The authors attempt to retrace how many societies across the globe have come to be "ordinal societies"; that is, societies in which digitally-mediated ordering schemes (such as rankings) have come to crucially structure various domains of social life. In the following, I retrace the individual chapters' main arguments.
The book's introduction, "Valley Fever", first defines the concept of ordinal society as "a society oriented toward, justified by, and governed through measurement" (p. 1). It goes on to trace the rise of the Silicon Valley, Stanford, and coutercultures throughout the 1960s. Later, it recalls the rise of computing infrastructures in the 1980s and 1990s as well the invention of the WWW in 1993. It reminds us of the dotcom-bubble late 1990s and how the firms who survived need to begin making profits, which they did through generating "behavioral surplus" (p. 11) - the data gathered on users was mobilized to make revenues. Then came the rise of Web 2.0 with social media sites etc., which spurred the pervasiveness of interactive online content. We here also begin to see the roots of feedback and tracking, for example eBay's reputational system (p. 22). Another example is Google's PageRank algorithm which sorted websites by popularity (p. 23), thereby instituting the way in which knowledge on the web is accessed. PageRank "made the now much larger online world come alive again by making it navigable and useful to people looking for things on it." (p. 25). Social media, beginning in the late 2000s, once more fundamentally transformed interactions on the web , connecting billions of people and promoting new forms of sociality (e.g., through the like-button) which were geared towards massive data collection. (p. 27).
The first empirical chapter, "The Box of Delights", argues that the use of digital technology - as long as successful - often feels in a sense magic (p. 34). Mobilizing anthropological theories of gift giving (e.g., Marcel Mauss), the authors suggest that the popularity of many digitally networked technologies come from being presented as gifts (e.g., the ability to freely sign up to many of them). Of course, this is not a simple gift, but initiates a relationship in which one's data is being used for other purposes. Ultimately, they once more engage with the fact that social media platforms and internet companies had to find ways to "exfiltrate" sociality. That is, social activity online had to be made measurable, tractablel, and profitable. For example, this included the invention of the like-button, comment functions, etc. They argue "Facebook accommodated and then egged on people's social and creative impulses - their willingness to freely give, freely connected, freely produce, and freely exchange with one another - while also converting that tendency into profit." (p. 64)
The second chapter, "The Data Imperative", historicizes and engages with the contemporary imperative for all kinds of organizations to collect as many data as possible on all kinds of things. The rationale: these will be valuable sooner or later. The authors draw upon histories of numbers (Porter; or Deringer) to show how numbers were progressively seen as "a privileged medium for political knowledge" (p. 70). This was also the rise of statistics, embodied in counts, charts, atlases (p. 71). Interesting point: people about whom data were collected also increasingly got to see themselevs in terms of the classifications applied to them (p. 72). The general tendency of the data imperative was "one of ever greater granularity in observation, data collection, and analysis." (p. 73). Crucially, the data imperative was also a cultural abnd political accomplishment; not merely one of economics (p. 77). Today, almost all organizations have "learned to see the data they have collected as an asset" (p. 83). Finally, these data are now put to use by machine learning techniques which can make accurate predictions (p. 89) - deep learning further complicates this tendency. Crucially, deep learning techniques depend on huge reams of data, further bolstering the already generalized data imperative (p. 93).
The third chapter, "Classification Situations", engages with the human act of classifying people and things. Classification, however, is a messy affair with "looping effects" (p. 102) through which the people classified in a given way may change their behavior as a response to being thus classified. What the authors call "classification situations" are "positions in a generated system of categories that are consequential for one's life chances", they are "independently generated taxonomies that canc ome to have distinctive and consequential effects on the outcomes people experience in life" (p. 105). Specifically, ordinal classifications are "explicitly organized by measures of position, priority, or value among some countable dimension. Something is ordered, rather than simply named, and distinctions are expressed in terms of scores or ranks on that scale of measurement." As examples of such ordinal classifications they mention "graded examinations, standardized tests, competitive sports rankings, occupational pay scales" (p. 107). Modern AI techniques may be especially pernicious here because they "reconfigure the meaning of categories people took for granted and reorganize what can be done with them" (p. 115). The authors finally talk about the notion of "eigencapital" which is acquired by making oneself visible to digital architectures (p. 126). In other words, to have eigencapital in the ordinal society means to be visible in all kinds of data collection systems.
The fourth chapter, "The Great Unbundling", describes how digital technologies "foster new strategies of accumulation" (p. 132). This entails several transformations, for instance targeted and personalizd pricing mechanisms (p. 145). Another mechanism here concerns the unbundling of rights associated with hardware and software. For example, with the purchase of hardware equipment today (PlayStation, TV, tractor), one is only at the beginning of an economic relationship. Concretely, for all these devices, it is furthermore necessary to pay for services on a subscription-based model. Economically speaking, this means that sellers of hardware have an additional means of extracting a regular source of income from product owners; the connection between buyer and seller is transformed from a one-off transaction to an ongoing relationship (p. 153).
The fifth chapter, "Layered Financialization", on the other hand, argues that financialization is an integral component of the Ordinal Society. Financialization takes three main forms: 1) a rise in the share of corporate profits that comes from the financial sector; 2) a rise in the share of revenues generated by portfolio income; 3) the diffusion of financial thinking about the economy and the world at large (p. 162). This gives rise to such apps as Robinhood (p. 169). It also gives rise to meme stocks, NFTs, and crypto coins (p. 171). Interesting point: speculation as the episteme of our times (p. 177). These aspirations of cryptofinance, NFTs, etc. are criticized in light of their anti-institutional imaginaries.
In "The Road to Selfdom", chapter 6, the authors demonstrate that ordinal subjects have to abide by two somewhat contradictory imperatives of modernity: 1) a bureaucratic impulse for rationalization and control; 2) a romantic impulse for authentic self realization (p. 187). Crucially, at its core, "an ordinal society is about individuals" (p. 189). They connect this, for example, to how social media platforms - notably Facebook - encouraged people to express their "true" selves (p. 194). Another interesting dimension here is the "Searching Disposition" (p. 203), described as the modern day need to be able to independently search for information and knowledge on the web: "the obligation to search is both a kind of responsibility [...] and a necessity" (p. 210). Moreover, the ordinal society needs one "to explicitly locate oneself within a universe of highly differentiated, externalized, socially recognized categories" (p. 217).
Chapter 7, "Ordinal Citizenship", argues that ordinal citizenship is "a form of social inclusion that depends on the universal and precise measurement of imprecise ideals of intrinsic equality, personal merity, and social value" (p. 232). This is also mediated by new metrics of merit, "from financial responsibility to social influence, from friendliness to punctuality, and from physical fitness to personal reliability." (p. 236). Ordinal societies assess individuals as individuals, not as members of groups (p. 237). This is also related to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s 90s (p. 239). While ordinal measurements may seem objective, often times they merely erase the social structures that are baked into them. Importantly, also, "any priority order, any queue, any ranking system, tends to become imbued with value" (p. 246). Crucially: "Ordinal systems cannot really "adjust" or "correct" for an entire society and its past." (p. 247). Ordinalization is of course also tinget with a general ideology of merit. In this chapter, the authors really lay out the mechanics of ordinalization: "Scoring changes the intrinsic meaning of activities and the reasons why people pursue them, transforming them into so many metric-chasing games" (p. 253). The prime example of an ordinal subject: "An ordinal citizen's personal goals might include walking a certain number of daily steps and hydrating regularly." (p. 255).
The conclusion, "The Unbearable Rightness of Being Ranked", draws together the various arguments put forth in the book. They articulate quite nicely: "The fulcrum of an ordinal society is the idea of coordination by ranking and matching, where rank is derived from the objective measurement of actual behavior and matching criteria depend on the purpose at hand" (p. 260). Moreover, "Rankings and ratings, and the associated matches that they enables, underpin an ordinal society's imagination" (p. 261). Ordinalization has a deeply problematic dimension insofar as by "making comparison mandatory, rankings normalize competition" (p. 265). Crucially, ordinal systems also enforce their power by "setting the metrics through which competition is assessed" (p. 268). The authors conclude quite bleakly: "Life in the ordinal society might well be unbearable" (p. 285).
This book's great strength is that provides a very comprehensive history of our present; that is, a history of how we have arrived in a society in which digital rankings and orderings are pervasive features of everyday life. The authors largely succeed in that task. However, I do feel like the chapters were somewhat disconnected and I do not see how all of them were necessary to provide a genealogy of the ordinal society. For example, how was the chapter on "Layered Financialization" really relevant to understanding an ordinal society? I would have preferred to see the authors engage with the history of neoliberalism and its relation to rankings/measurements; a point that unfortunately remains relatively underdeveloped as it is only briefly touched upon in chapter 7. Furthermore, what was somehow missing was an account of ways in which to resist the ordinal society. I know this is a lazy criticism to make since this wasn't the authors' aim. But why not? I think it's quite intuitive to retrace the steps which have brought us to our current moment and our lives in the ordinal society. It would be great to learn how it is possible to resist. Nevertheless, the book was very pleasant, interesting, and enjoyable. Definitely recommendable.
The book's introduction, "Valley Fever", first defines the concept of ordinal society as "a society oriented toward, justified by, and governed through measurement" (p. 1). It goes on to trace the rise of the Silicon Valley, Stanford, and coutercultures throughout the 1960s. Later, it recalls the rise of computing infrastructures in the 1980s and 1990s as well the invention of the WWW in 1993. It reminds us of the dotcom-bubble late 1990s and how the firms who survived need to begin making profits, which they did through generating "behavioral surplus" (p. 11) - the data gathered on users was mobilized to make revenues. Then came the rise of Web 2.0 with social media sites etc., which spurred the pervasiveness of interactive online content. We here also begin to see the roots of feedback and tracking, for example eBay's reputational system (p. 22). Another example is Google's PageRank algorithm which sorted websites by popularity (p. 23), thereby instituting the way in which knowledge on the web is accessed. PageRank "made the now much larger online world come alive again by making it navigable and useful to people looking for things on it." (p. 25). Social media, beginning in the late 2000s, once more fundamentally transformed interactions on the web , connecting billions of people and promoting new forms of sociality (e.g., through the like-button) which were geared towards massive data collection. (p. 27).
The first empirical chapter, "The Box of Delights", argues that the use of digital technology - as long as successful - often feels in a sense magic (p. 34). Mobilizing anthropological theories of gift giving (e.g., Marcel Mauss), the authors suggest that the popularity of many digitally networked technologies come from being presented as gifts (e.g., the ability to freely sign up to many of them). Of course, this is not a simple gift, but initiates a relationship in which one's data is being used for other purposes. Ultimately, they once more engage with the fact that social media platforms and internet companies had to find ways to "exfiltrate" sociality. That is, social activity online had to be made measurable, tractablel, and profitable. For example, this included the invention of the like-button, comment functions, etc. They argue "Facebook accommodated and then egged on people's social and creative impulses - their willingness to freely give, freely connected, freely produce, and freely exchange with one another - while also converting that tendency into profit." (p. 64)
The second chapter, "The Data Imperative", historicizes and engages with the contemporary imperative for all kinds of organizations to collect as many data as possible on all kinds of things. The rationale: these will be valuable sooner or later. The authors draw upon histories of numbers (Porter; or Deringer) to show how numbers were progressively seen as "a privileged medium for political knowledge" (p. 70). This was also the rise of statistics, embodied in counts, charts, atlases (p. 71). Interesting point: people about whom data were collected also increasingly got to see themselevs in terms of the classifications applied to them (p. 72). The general tendency of the data imperative was "one of ever greater granularity in observation, data collection, and analysis." (p. 73). Crucially, the data imperative was also a cultural abnd political accomplishment; not merely one of economics (p. 77). Today, almost all organizations have "learned to see the data they have collected as an asset" (p. 83). Finally, these data are now put to use by machine learning techniques which can make accurate predictions (p. 89) - deep learning further complicates this tendency. Crucially, deep learning techniques depend on huge reams of data, further bolstering the already generalized data imperative (p. 93).
The third chapter, "Classification Situations", engages with the human act of classifying people and things. Classification, however, is a messy affair with "looping effects" (p. 102) through which the people classified in a given way may change their behavior as a response to being thus classified. What the authors call "classification situations" are "positions in a generated system of categories that are consequential for one's life chances", they are "independently generated taxonomies that canc ome to have distinctive and consequential effects on the outcomes people experience in life" (p. 105). Specifically, ordinal classifications are "explicitly organized by measures of position, priority, or value among some countable dimension. Something is ordered, rather than simply named, and distinctions are expressed in terms of scores or ranks on that scale of measurement." As examples of such ordinal classifications they mention "graded examinations, standardized tests, competitive sports rankings, occupational pay scales" (p. 107). Modern AI techniques may be especially pernicious here because they "reconfigure the meaning of categories people took for granted and reorganize what can be done with them" (p. 115). The authors finally talk about the notion of "eigencapital" which is acquired by making oneself visible to digital architectures (p. 126). In other words, to have eigencapital in the ordinal society means to be visible in all kinds of data collection systems.
The fourth chapter, "The Great Unbundling", describes how digital technologies "foster new strategies of accumulation" (p. 132). This entails several transformations, for instance targeted and personalizd pricing mechanisms (p. 145). Another mechanism here concerns the unbundling of rights associated with hardware and software. For example, with the purchase of hardware equipment today (PlayStation, TV, tractor), one is only at the beginning of an economic relationship. Concretely, for all these devices, it is furthermore necessary to pay for services on a subscription-based model. Economically speaking, this means that sellers of hardware have an additional means of extracting a regular source of income from product owners; the connection between buyer and seller is transformed from a one-off transaction to an ongoing relationship (p. 153).
The fifth chapter, "Layered Financialization", on the other hand, argues that financialization is an integral component of the Ordinal Society. Financialization takes three main forms: 1) a rise in the share of corporate profits that comes from the financial sector; 2) a rise in the share of revenues generated by portfolio income; 3) the diffusion of financial thinking about the economy and the world at large (p. 162). This gives rise to such apps as Robinhood (p. 169). It also gives rise to meme stocks, NFTs, and crypto coins (p. 171). Interesting point: speculation as the episteme of our times (p. 177). These aspirations of cryptofinance, NFTs, etc. are criticized in light of their anti-institutional imaginaries.
In "The Road to Selfdom", chapter 6, the authors demonstrate that ordinal subjects have to abide by two somewhat contradictory imperatives of modernity: 1) a bureaucratic impulse for rationalization and control; 2) a romantic impulse for authentic self realization (p. 187). Crucially, at its core, "an ordinal society is about individuals" (p. 189). They connect this, for example, to how social media platforms - notably Facebook - encouraged people to express their "true" selves (p. 194). Another interesting dimension here is the "Searching Disposition" (p. 203), described as the modern day need to be able to independently search for information and knowledge on the web: "the obligation to search is both a kind of responsibility [...] and a necessity" (p. 210). Moreover, the ordinal society needs one "to explicitly locate oneself within a universe of highly differentiated, externalized, socially recognized categories" (p. 217).
Chapter 7, "Ordinal Citizenship", argues that ordinal citizenship is "a form of social inclusion that depends on the universal and precise measurement of imprecise ideals of intrinsic equality, personal merity, and social value" (p. 232). This is also mediated by new metrics of merit, "from financial responsibility to social influence, from friendliness to punctuality, and from physical fitness to personal reliability." (p. 236). Ordinal societies assess individuals as individuals, not as members of groups (p. 237). This is also related to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s 90s (p. 239). While ordinal measurements may seem objective, often times they merely erase the social structures that are baked into them. Importantly, also, "any priority order, any queue, any ranking system, tends to become imbued with value" (p. 246). Crucially: "Ordinal systems cannot really "adjust" or "correct" for an entire society and its past." (p. 247). Ordinalization is of course also tinget with a general ideology of merit. In this chapter, the authors really lay out the mechanics of ordinalization: "Scoring changes the intrinsic meaning of activities and the reasons why people pursue them, transforming them into so many metric-chasing games" (p. 253). The prime example of an ordinal subject: "An ordinal citizen's personal goals might include walking a certain number of daily steps and hydrating regularly." (p. 255).
The conclusion, "The Unbearable Rightness of Being Ranked", draws together the various arguments put forth in the book. They articulate quite nicely: "The fulcrum of an ordinal society is the idea of coordination by ranking and matching, where rank is derived from the objective measurement of actual behavior and matching criteria depend on the purpose at hand" (p. 260). Moreover, "Rankings and ratings, and the associated matches that they enables, underpin an ordinal society's imagination" (p. 261). Ordinalization has a deeply problematic dimension insofar as by "making comparison mandatory, rankings normalize competition" (p. 265). Crucially, ordinal systems also enforce their power by "setting the metrics through which competition is assessed" (p. 268). The authors conclude quite bleakly: "Life in the ordinal society might well be unbearable" (p. 285).
This book's great strength is that provides a very comprehensive history of our present; that is, a history of how we have arrived in a society in which digital rankings and orderings are pervasive features of everyday life. The authors largely succeed in that task. However, I do feel like the chapters were somewhat disconnected and I do not see how all of them were necessary to provide a genealogy of the ordinal society. For example, how was the chapter on "Layered Financialization" really relevant to understanding an ordinal society? I would have preferred to see the authors engage with the history of neoliberalism and its relation to rankings/measurements; a point that unfortunately remains relatively underdeveloped as it is only briefly touched upon in chapter 7. Furthermore, what was somehow missing was an account of ways in which to resist the ordinal society. I know this is a lazy criticism to make since this wasn't the authors' aim. But why not? I think it's quite intuitive to retrace the steps which have brought us to our current moment and our lives in the ordinal society. It would be great to learn how it is possible to resist. Nevertheless, the book was very pleasant, interesting, and enjoyable. Definitely recommendable.
Read
September 1, 20251 the box of delights
The gift of everything
The social substrate
The exfiltration of sociality
2 the data imperative
Thou shalt count: Pay attention to the numbers. Keep track of what’s happening, measure things, and don’t just guess.
Thou shalt gather: Collect what you need. That might mean bringing together resources, people, data, or tools before moving forward.
Thou shalt learn: Reflect and improve. Take the time to understand what happened, learn from it, and get better for next time.
3 classification situations
Naming and ordering
Testing and matching
Eigenvalues and eigencapital: eigenvalue is a special number that tells you how much a certain “direction” gets stretched or squished when you apply a transformation (like rotating, scaling, or flipping a shape). the eigenvalue tells you how much it stretches in that special direction. eigencapital would mean a kind of “core” or “special” capital that shows how resources, influence, or value naturally grow (or shrink) along certain important directions in a system. eigencapital might represent the “dominant way” wealth or influence accumulates, just like an eigenvalue shows the dominant way something stretches in math.
4 the great unbundling
Informative payments: When you buy something with a credit card, the payment tells the seller what you bought, when, and how much you value it. That information can shape future prices, recommendations, or services. In economics, “informative payments” means money flows that reveal preferences, risks, or trust levels.
Market modulations: they can be tuned, dampened, or amplified, like adjusting volume on a speaker. Example: Central banks “modulate” markets by raising or lowering interest rates, which slows down or speeds up borrowing and spending. Companies also modulate markets with discounts, promotions, or by holding back supply to influence demand.
Streams of income: Simply the different sources of money flowing to a person or business.
5 layered financialization
Layering abstractions: another layer of abstraction away from the real economy.
Popularizing protocols: Once a financial trick or structure works, it gets spread and standardized.
Banking on speculation: At higher layers, finance is less about “real value” (like food, houses, or machines) and more about betting on bets.
6 the road to selfdom
Authenticated exposure: Letting yourself be seen as you truly are, not hiding behind masks or false versions.
The searching disposition: A mindset of curiosity and openness — always seeking, questioning, and learning.
The self-organization man: Someone who can shape and order their own life rather than being shaped entirely by outside forces.
7 ordinal citizenship
The problem of equality: how do you balance fairness, sameness, and difference?
The problem of merit: does meritocracy really reward true ability, or just privilege in disguise?
The problem of value: who decides what’s valuable — markets, culture, or morality?
Conclusion: the unbearable rightness of being ranked
Ordinalization’s double movement: The double movement is that ranking both organizes life (helps us compare, choose, and progress) and distorts it (turns unique qualities into mere positions in a hierarchy). Example: school grades help track learning, but they also reduce complex abilities to a number.
The will to progress and the will to power: They often overlap — progress can be a path to power, and power can drive progress — but they’re not the same.
The twofold truth of social science: Social science has a double truth because it studies people and is practiced by people.
Truth 1: it aims for objective explanation (patterns, data, laws of society).
Truth 2: it always contains subjective meaning (since researchers, citizens, and cultures are inside the system being studied).
So unlike physics, where an experiment is outside nature, social science is reflexive: studying society changes society.
The gift of everything
The social substrate
The exfiltration of sociality
2 the data imperative
Thou shalt count: Pay attention to the numbers. Keep track of what’s happening, measure things, and don’t just guess.
Thou shalt gather: Collect what you need. That might mean bringing together resources, people, data, or tools before moving forward.
Thou shalt learn: Reflect and improve. Take the time to understand what happened, learn from it, and get better for next time.
3 classification situations
Naming and ordering
Testing and matching
Eigenvalues and eigencapital: eigenvalue is a special number that tells you how much a certain “direction” gets stretched or squished when you apply a transformation (like rotating, scaling, or flipping a shape). the eigenvalue tells you how much it stretches in that special direction. eigencapital would mean a kind of “core” or “special” capital that shows how resources, influence, or value naturally grow (or shrink) along certain important directions in a system. eigencapital might represent the “dominant way” wealth or influence accumulates, just like an eigenvalue shows the dominant way something stretches in math.
4 the great unbundling
Informative payments: When you buy something with a credit card, the payment tells the seller what you bought, when, and how much you value it. That information can shape future prices, recommendations, or services. In economics, “informative payments” means money flows that reveal preferences, risks, or trust levels.
Market modulations: they can be tuned, dampened, or amplified, like adjusting volume on a speaker. Example: Central banks “modulate” markets by raising or lowering interest rates, which slows down or speeds up borrowing and spending. Companies also modulate markets with discounts, promotions, or by holding back supply to influence demand.
Streams of income: Simply the different sources of money flowing to a person or business.
5 layered financialization
Layering abstractions: another layer of abstraction away from the real economy.
Popularizing protocols: Once a financial trick or structure works, it gets spread and standardized.
Banking on speculation: At higher layers, finance is less about “real value” (like food, houses, or machines) and more about betting on bets.
6 the road to selfdom
Authenticated exposure: Letting yourself be seen as you truly are, not hiding behind masks or false versions.
The searching disposition: A mindset of curiosity and openness — always seeking, questioning, and learning.
The self-organization man: Someone who can shape and order their own life rather than being shaped entirely by outside forces.
7 ordinal citizenship
The problem of equality: how do you balance fairness, sameness, and difference?
The problem of merit: does meritocracy really reward true ability, or just privilege in disguise?
The problem of value: who decides what’s valuable — markets, culture, or morality?
Conclusion: the unbearable rightness of being ranked
Ordinalization’s double movement: The double movement is that ranking both organizes life (helps us compare, choose, and progress) and distorts it (turns unique qualities into mere positions in a hierarchy). Example: school grades help track learning, but they also reduce complex abilities to a number.
The will to progress and the will to power: They often overlap — progress can be a path to power, and power can drive progress — but they’re not the same.
The twofold truth of social science: Social science has a double truth because it studies people and is practiced by people.
Truth 1: it aims for objective explanation (patterns, data, laws of society).
Truth 2: it always contains subjective meaning (since researchers, citizens, and cultures are inside the system being studied).
So unlike physics, where an experiment is outside nature, social science is reflexive: studying society changes society.
December 25, 2024
One of the great social science books I've read this year, which will definitely shape the way I understand and engage with 21st century society - or as the authors put it, "the ordinal society".
I think the book is at its strongest when it is looking through the lens of ordinalization, that is, the measurement and ranking of citizens in society - and the way in which we cannot avoid to be ranked in modern society. Further, the development of terms such as "eigencapital" and "ordinal citizenship" were very strong - i.e., the way we all carry certain numerical scores (credit scores, likes, ratings, etc) and are evaluated on these by the state, the market and other citizens.
Further, this is a strong sociological effort, as it does not see any predetermined logic to why certain companies and states ended up focusing so much on ordinalization - for instance, google thinking of digital trace as "waste" in early days, to then understand that it was the gold that it would eventually be able to sustain itself on.
My only reservations with the book is when it connects tangent phenomena to ordinalization, where the connection feels a bit stretched. This is the case with "financialization" and "neoliberalism", which both seem as incredibly stretchy terms, where I lack a tight definition and connection to ordinalization. For instance, the chapter on "layered financialization" has a full section on "Banking Speculation", where crypto, bubbles and NFTs are discussed. Is this something that is particular to the ordinal society? Not clear that is the case. That being said, the book is generally on message, and the message is quite interesting and original. Highly recommended.
I think the book is at its strongest when it is looking through the lens of ordinalization, that is, the measurement and ranking of citizens in society - and the way in which we cannot avoid to be ranked in modern society. Further, the development of terms such as "eigencapital" and "ordinal citizenship" were very strong - i.e., the way we all carry certain numerical scores (credit scores, likes, ratings, etc) and are evaluated on these by the state, the market and other citizens.
Further, this is a strong sociological effort, as it does not see any predetermined logic to why certain companies and states ended up focusing so much on ordinalization - for instance, google thinking of digital trace as "waste" in early days, to then understand that it was the gold that it would eventually be able to sustain itself on.
My only reservations with the book is when it connects tangent phenomena to ordinalization, where the connection feels a bit stretched. This is the case with "financialization" and "neoliberalism", which both seem as incredibly stretchy terms, where I lack a tight definition and connection to ordinalization. For instance, the chapter on "layered financialization" has a full section on "Banking Speculation", where crypto, bubbles and NFTs are discussed. Is this something that is particular to the ordinal society? Not clear that is the case. That being said, the book is generally on message, and the message is quite interesting and original. Highly recommended.
July 27, 2025
Disappointed in this. I was hoping for the same clarity of writing as in Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction, even though this is such a different topic.
Read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power instead, with a bit of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed too.
Read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power instead, with a bit of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed too.
Read
June 27, 2024This is a history of our present moment, of how we came to be classified and incentivized in fine-grained ways by the data we agreed to hand over or that is silently extracted from our patterns of behavior. If you've ever experienced your credit rating going up or (especially) down for incomprehensible reasons, this will give you some general insight into why (but not the details of how to influence these often inscrutable forces). The book ends on a pessimistic note:
Life in the ordinal society may well be unbearable (p. 285)
Life in the ordinal society may well be unbearable (p. 285)
August 29, 2024
Interesting topic, well written and a good overview of ideas and histories related to the topic, but I could not always discover the overall narrative. Given the topic, I had also expected (wrongly, perhaps) more quantitative / modeled insights, and more concrete policy recommendations.
September 16, 2024
Clearly describes a wide swath of current techno-capitalist surveillance and ad targeting, bias-hiding algorithmic ratings, mass and crass individualizing. I expected this to have either more historical context or sociological observation, but alas, only an academic repackaging of my feeds.
June 16, 2024
There are a lot of things to say about the way systems of data collection and classification as deployed by corporations and other major institutions shape contemporary society, and this book does indeed say a lot of them, in ways that are clever, well-written, narratively compelling, and which do not quite hang together. Instead, it seems like a tour of ideas from classic social theory, as applied to the 2020s, along with some narrative history of internet communication, social media, and uses of machine learning and data science.
Some bits of this are clearly articulated and motivated, including the explanations of how it is that companies can actually make money from data (viz, price discrimination, bundling, cherry picking in insurance, securitization or just data sale, and matching), which is probably under-discussed in other works on the social consequences of data systems. Other parts are more free-floating, but still useful updates of traditional ideas. "Eigencapital," Healy and Fourcade's update of the idea of social capital to encompass the ways the conjuncture of user attributes arising from passive surveillance and (possibly socially constrained) deliberate cultivation interface with classification systems to result in system outcomes, both possesses a clear analogy to the traditional idea and a close fit to the action of digital systems.[^1] Other bits, like the history of crypto or bits on the ideologies of the California billionaire class, fit thematically and offered some entertaining stories but weren't linked so clearly together with the rest of the argument. As far as the history goes, it is mostly drawn from secondary sources and documented at a birds-eye-view level of generality, often making it hard to tie the conceptual discussions down to particular instances or get a sense of prevalence. It's clear that the trends they discuss play a role in how people interact on the internet or with bureaucracies; it is somewhat less clear the extent to which these new uses of data are changing more than the form of social outcomes.
[1]: I will note though that while at the time they wrote the article that was adapted to the book chapter, user embedding vectors in recommender systems were often literally (collections of) eigenvectors of a user interaction matrix, nowadays this information is likely to be stored as part of some neural system, making the "eigencapital" nomenclature a little bit less apt.
Some bits of this are clearly articulated and motivated, including the explanations of how it is that companies can actually make money from data (viz, price discrimination, bundling, cherry picking in insurance, securitization or just data sale, and matching), which is probably under-discussed in other works on the social consequences of data systems. Other parts are more free-floating, but still useful updates of traditional ideas. "Eigencapital," Healy and Fourcade's update of the idea of social capital to encompass the ways the conjuncture of user attributes arising from passive surveillance and (possibly socially constrained) deliberate cultivation interface with classification systems to result in system outcomes, both possesses a clear analogy to the traditional idea and a close fit to the action of digital systems.[^1] Other bits, like the history of crypto or bits on the ideologies of the California billionaire class, fit thematically and offered some entertaining stories but weren't linked so clearly together with the rest of the argument. As far as the history goes, it is mostly drawn from secondary sources and documented at a birds-eye-view level of generality, often making it hard to tie the conceptual discussions down to particular instances or get a sense of prevalence. It's clear that the trends they discuss play a role in how people interact on the internet or with bureaucracies; it is somewhat less clear the extent to which these new uses of data are changing more than the form of social outcomes.
[1]: I will note though that while at the time they wrote the article that was adapted to the book chapter, user embedding vectors in recommender systems were often literally (collections of) eigenvectors of a user interaction matrix, nowadays this information is likely to be stored as part of some neural system, making the "eigencapital" nomenclature a little bit less apt.
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