Department Colloquium Series presentation by Marion Fourcade, UC Berkeley.

The Ordinal Society

Abstract:

We live in an ordinal society. Today, the personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. Fueled by digital technologies, the infrastructure of the internet, and the rapid expansion of computer processing power, scores and metrics pervade our lives -- streamlining and automating processes of communication, risk prediction, resource allocation, transaction, labor control and decision-making. In The Ordinal Society (forthcoming, Harvard University Press, April 2024) Kieran Healy and I show how algorithmic predictions not only influence people’s life chances but also generate new forms of capital and social expectation: 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 metrics and rankings 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? We warn that, even though these systems have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.