2025/06/22 by Laura K. Nelson · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Critical Realism in Sociology #Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies #Political Philosophy and Ethics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/00016993251351777
openalex publication_date 2025/06/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Major societal transformations fuel sociological inquiry.As industrial capitalism displaced feudal economies, for instance, early theorists sought to understand the new forms of authority, labor, inequality, and social cohesion that emerged in its wake.We may now be living through another such transformationone driven not by industrial production or bureaucratic governance, but by data, metrics, and algorithmic systems.The Ordinal Society builds on-and in key ways redirects-Shoshana Zuboff's (2019) claim that we are witnessing the rise of a new economic formation: surveillance capitalism, in which human experience is mined as "behavioral surplus" and turned into data to predict and shape behavior, and to generate profits.But where Zuboff focuses on extraction and surveillance, The Ordinal Society asks what comes next: how that data is used to classify, rank, and sort people in ways that structure access to opportunity and power.The stakes of this question are high.Authoritarianism is on the rise in democracies around the world.Generative AI is reshaping who counts as an expert, what counts as knowledge, and how value is produced-displacing not only jobs, but entire systems of authority, as companies like OpenAI monetize user data at massive scale.The challenge for sociologists is to make sense of a social world increasingly shaped by digital infrastructure.It means treating the ordinal turn, as the book does, not just as a technological shift, but as a social transformation that needs to be situated in relation to power and inequality.At the center of The Ordinal Society is a question posed explicitly midway through the book: "What does it mean for computers to intervene in the business of seeing and organizing society?" (p.108).The authors argue that what is distinctive about the current moment is not just the scale of data or the speed of computation, but a shift in how people are categorized and acted upon, as individuals are increasingly slotted into ordinal rankings using difficult-to-interpret methods (p.115).Visibility, Fourcade and Healy argue, is a prerequisite for participation in the ordinal society.To be ranked, individuals must first be legible to the systems that govern access and allocation.This produces what they call "eigencapital" (p.117): a form of capital based on visibility derived from others' visibility