Digital technologies have woven themselves into every facet of our lives, introducing shifts –sometimes subtle, sometimes quite profound— in the workings of virtually all social institutions. Arguably, the most important of these shifts concerns the link between digital technology, power and social inequality. How have digital capitalism and algorithmic management reshaped the mechanisms that stratify people, now reborn as “users,” into distinct classes and strata? What do these shifts mean for the theoretical frameworks we have inherited from the past? In their important 2017 paper, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argued that the use of digital systems to harvest almost unlimited data about individual users has rendered obsolete many of the core assumptions that have long informed sociological thinking about class, status distinctions and social inequality generally. Now, in their 2024 book, The Ordinal Society, Fourcade and Healy have contributed a more richly developed analysis of the many consequences that flow from the automation of class inequality (see Eubanks’s 2017). The result is a deeply researched, provocative but often frustrating book. It deserves a wide audience for reasons I spell out below.
The book is perhaps best read as a series of tightly integrated essays, each of which provides a key plank supporting the overall argument. In chapter 1 (“The Box of Delights”) the authors emphasize the contradictory nature of our digital engagements. When apps, websites, and software all work as intended, the result seems almost magical. We can access information instantly and seamlessly, share in one another’s lives via posts, photos, and Zoom calls, and easily summon products and services to our front doors. So long as the magic works, we remain under its spell, happily unaware of the structural dynamics underway in the cloud. This is the “Maussian bargain,” a term the authors use throughout the book, alluding to Marcel Mauss’s anthropological analysis of gift giving as a ritual. Some readers may however find this metaphor to be somewhat forced, since users seldom feel morally obliged to engage in reciprocity toward apps (as the Maussian metaphor would imply).
The economic and organizational basis of these hidden dynamics is addressed in chapter 2. Given the near complete prevalence of digital devices, firms can extract an unending stream of data about us as individuals –our credit scores, cell phone numbers, email addresses, zip codes, browsing histories, educational degrees, criminal justice records, social media posts and ‘likes’— all of which has enormous value to firms in virtually all branches of the economy. Surprisingly perhaps, firms outside the financial sector were slow to recognize the value in such data; it was not until 2003 that Google submitted a patent application for digital tools designed to repurpose user data, in effect transforming digital waste into revenue. This innovation has evolved into a “data imperative,” a taken for granted feature of corporate operations. Mindful of this hidden source of value, firms are compelled “to become platforms rather than simply service providers” (48), hoovering up as much user data as they can and then either selling it to data brokers and analytics firms, or using it to gain leverage over potential customers. What results is the provision of an almost unlimited body of information that routinely reveals “what people are doing, writing, or saying (or thinking of saying, as in unsent draft messages)” (86). The result has opened up an entirely new continent for the extraction of value, a latter day equivalent of Marx’s primitive accumulation (58-59). What Habermas once called the “colonization of the life world” has taken a new, digital form.
Much of this material will be familiar to readers who are well versed in the literature on algorithms, platform capitalism, and the digital revolution. What is decidedly new is the authors’ effort to theorize the many implications that flow from these shifts. Their argument, developed in chapters 3 through 5, is that a new form of social order –the “ordinal society”—has emerged whose distinctive feature is the ranking of individuals through digital mechanisms rather than the institutions that operated “off-line.” Implied here is an overturning of the role that social and cultural mechanisms have played in the distribution of life chances in contemporary society. Required, in this view, is a substantial rethinking of the sociological frameworks with which social scientists have approached class inequality –especially that of Bourdieu.
Bourdieu’s framework hinged on what he termed the “classification struggle” –the ongoing process through which actors invoke the various forms of capital they possess, with results that generally reproduce the structure of social inequality within any given social field. Since algorithmic ranking systems now do the work that face-to-face and institutional processes previously carried out, the result is a new, overarching form of capital –“eigencapital”— which represents the summation of the various digital traces that our digital activity has left behind. Eigencapital provides a quantitative metric that captures our value to the various firms that surround us, keen to evaluate us as potential customers, clients, employees, or citizens. Though typically invisible to the user, one’s eigencapital operates behind the scenes in highly consequential ways. Our ability to buy a home, to get a job, or to qualify for health, auto or life insurance are all affected, as is the wait time we encounter when contacting a call center, the prices we way for consumer goods, or even to cross a national border –all begin to reflect the eigencapital affixed to our digital identities. Efforts to avoid this ranking system by withdrawing one’s engagement of it are sure to fail, since disengagement itself has become suspect, labeling oneself as a dubious citizen, elevating one’s risk of disqualification or digital invisibility. And as digital systems become more powerful and precise, owing to their incorporation of machine learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence, the stratification-producing mechanisms that characterize the ordinal society become all but impregnable.
A key factor underlying the durability of such digital stratification is the individualization that the ordinal society produces, a theme developed in chapters 6 and 7. The neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek is briefly invoked as a useful theoretical foil. As is well known, Hayek saw the institutional power of citizenship and democracy as posing a growing threat to the liberty of the individual. Hence the title of his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, which furnishes the title for chapter 7. In essence, Fourcade and Healy stand Hayek on his head, arguing that the real threat to freedom stems from the radical individualization that the digital revolution has imposed on the social landscape. Because the ordinal society employs individualized data that “personalize” our search results and recommendations, we are increasingly insulated against any collective realities or shared public sphere. And with the erosion of legacy cultural institutions, whose content was vetted by editors, gatekeepers, and accredited authorities, there has occurred a leveling of expertise that leaves each individual to his or her own devices –quite literally. We learn to “do our own research” as individuals, fashioning personalized truths. And as digital systems make it possible to “personalize” economic transactions, what emerges is a digitally enforced conception of “ordinal citizenship” –the West’s equivalent of the Chinese social credit system— in which our rights and duties are subtly shaped by the value reflected in our everyday practices. Respectable members of the ordinal society learn to embrace a host of quantifying technologies –e.g., fitness apps, or digital systems that monitor our driving, drinking, or dietary practices— all of which incentivize “good” behavior. What Cedertstrom and Spicer once called the “wellness syndrome” has been built into the architecture of our digital world. “Public goods and collective goals are being dissolved in the acid bath of individualization and competition,” the authors conclude, “leaving us increasingly alone in a hyper-connected world whose social ordering is precisely metered and, in its factitious way, inarguably ‘right’. Life in the ordinal society may well be unbearable” (285).
The strengths of The Ordinal Society are readily apparent. The book covers an enormous amount of ground. It boasts a clear and at times casual style that will be useful for readers at varying levels of preparation. The book is also audacious, especially in its application of Bourdieusian theory. Yet hand in hand with these strengths can be found three important flaws that weaken the book’s contribution.
First, the book’s claim to originality rests largely on its application of Bourdieu to the classification systems that the ordinal society erects. This is an important and daunting task, but one the authors only partly address. They are surely right that digital capitalism has “encoded” the classification process, shifting many of its functions into an algorithmic form. Bourdieu’s famous axiom regarding the stratifying effects of cultural capital –“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”—has been absorbed into snippets of Javascript such as Meta Pixel (a digital tool commonly used to extract user data). Yet building on this insight opens up a thicket of issues that The Ordinal Society leaves unaddressed. How does the possession of “eigencapital” combine with the older, “off-line” forms of capital, variously affecting the lives of the different classes in contemporary capitalism? And how does digital capitalism alter the shape and functioning of the various fields within modern societies? Perhaps most important of all, the book neglects to specify how the shape of the class structure itself –the “dominated” and “dominant” classes and class fractions that Bourdieu took care to map— has been transformed apace with the increasingly algorithmic governance of inequality.
A second limitation concerns the book’s emphasis on individualization. Though there is evidence that individualizing explanations of inequality have proved remarkably tenacious –see Mijs 2021—the counter-tendencies seem at least as pronounced. By weakening the epistemic authority of many cultural gatekeepers, the digital revolution has unleashed an outpouring of populist insurgency, rife with irrationality but decidedly collective in its form (see Habermas 2022). For this reader at least, it seems hard to square the extraordinary polarization underway in the United States with the authors’ account of a uniform trend toward the digital individual. We may be ranked as individuals but our responses to the affordances of digital capitalism are anything but. It is hard to envision the growth of right wing authoritarian movements –think #nolivesmatter or #incel— without 4chan and now X. Arguably, the data imperative does individualize users even as the affordances of social media foster more collective and insulating trends that feed into the tribalism now rampant across the internet.
A third and final limitation in The Ordinal Society concerns, logically enough, the link between digital capitalism and liberal democracy itself. Running as a subtext throughout the book is the argument, gaining force in various quarters (Zuboff 2019; Varoufakis 2024; Schaake 2024) that digital capitalism stands firmly at odds with democratic institutions. Implied in Fourcade and Healy’s analysis is the view that ordinal society “hardens” social and economic hierarchies and removes them from public visibility or discourse. The result is either a post-hegemonic society (in which subjective experience becomes irrelevant) or worse, a society in which the user-citizen slavishly complies with digitally enforced norms. Implied in this view is a digitally administered society, as if Adorno’s culture industry had been reincarnated in a digital form. These are chilling possibilities, but for that reason they demand a fuller political-economic analysis than The Ordinal Society provides. Arguably, what digital capitalism has unleashed is a blurring of the lines between capital and the state, as digital behemoths assume the functions that state had provided; a newly emergent fraction of capital that favors authoritarianism over democratic institutions; and perhaps even a transition to an entirely new stage of capitalism has emerged whose nature is unfolding before our eyes. These issues notwithstanding, The Ordinal Society is an important book, on which future research urgently needs to build. The stakes that flow from the digital revolution are only too apparent in our daily newsfeeds, however personalized they may be.
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Fourcade, M. and Kieran Healy. 2024. The Ordinal Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.