Spring Lecture: Marion Fourcade

The Ordinal Society

We live in an ordinal society. Fueled by digital technologies, the infrastructure of the internet, and ever-expanding computing power, scores and metrics increasingly form the invisible scaffolding that structures social life, down to its most intimate aspects. In this talk, I will explore how this atomization of human experience into streams of analyzable data has transformed the process of capital accumulation, facilitated a deeper integration of financial logics into everyday life, and sustained the rise of insidious forms of social competition, moral judgment, and inequality.

This talk is based on the recently published book with Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society. (Harvard University Press 2024)