Book Review: The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy
Reviewed by Laura K. Nelson for Acta Sociologica.
Blurb in the image:
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 transformation—one 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.
My review of Fourcade and Healy's The Ordinal Society
Their central question (in my read): “What does it mean for computers to intervene in the business of seeing and organizing society?” (p. 108).
The stakes of this question are now higher than ever.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
23.06.2025 17:46 — 👍 45 🔁 9 💬 1 📌 2
Just an incredibly ugly ISM Manufacturing report.
The only categories that are rising relate to prices and inventories. Everything else going down. And virtually all of the comments are from manufacturers complaining about the tariffs.
Full newsletter here: www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...
01.04.2025 14:57 — 👍 569 🔁 187 💬 39 📌 18
The thing about watching a JD Vance speech is that everyone knows he’s a little pig man. Everyone knows he exists to squeal for Trump‘s amusement. No one respects him and he clearly doesn’t respect himself.
28.03.2025 18:56 — 👍 17899 🔁 2439 💬 449 📌 188
Dozens of volunteers posing together with Zohran for NYC posters in Union Square.
Dozens of volunteers posing together with Zohran for NYC posters.
Volunteers standing on Church steps.
A “field lead” training a group of volunteers.
600+ volunteers.
8 neighborhoods.
≈7,000 ballot signatures collected.
In a single day.
Our momentum is powered by people.
01.03.2025 23:57 — 👍 284 🔁 48 💬 9 📌 5
I’ll keep pushing this line of analysis because I’m increasingly convinced the clearest path out of this mess is for Dems to adopt a relentless anti-corruption, anti-inequality, anti-oligarchy, pro-democracy platform. The Dem leadership hasn’t realized it yet, but they’re now a reform party.
21.02.2025 03:38 — 👍 2383 🔁 803 💬 88 📌 45
Scatterplot titled “Empirical Evidence of Ideological Targeting in Federal Layoffs: Agencies seen as liberal are significantly more likely to face DOGE layoffs.”
• The x-axis represents Perceived Ideological Leaning of federal agencies, ranging from -2 (Most Liberal) to +2 (Most Conservative), based on survey responses from over 1,500 federal executives.
• The y-axis shows Agency Size (Number of Staff) on a logarithmic scale from 1,000 to 1,000,000.
Each point represents a federal agency:
• Red dots indicate agencies that experienced DOGE layoffs.
• Gray dots indicate agencies with no layoffs.
Key Observations:
• Liberal-leaning agencies (left side of the plot) are disproportionately represented among red dots, indicating higher layoff rates.
• Notable targeted agencies include:
• HHS (Health & Human Services)
• EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)
• NIH (National Institutes of Health)
• CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau)
• Dept. of Education
• USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development)
• The National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE), despite its conservative leaning (+1 on the scale), is an exception among targeted agencies.
• A notable outlier: the Department of Veterans Affairs (moderately conservative) also faced layoffs despite its size.
Takeaway:
The figure visually demonstrates that DOGE layoffs disproportionately targeted liberal-leaning agencies, supporting claims of ideological bias. The pattern reveals that layoffs were not driven by agency size or budget alone but were strongly associated with perceived ideology.
Source: Richardson, Clinton, & Lewis (2018). Elite Perceptions of Agency Ideology and Workforce Skill. The Journal of Politics, 80(1).
The DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning. 🧵⬇️
20.02.2025 02:18 — 👍 10805 🔁 4871 💬 258 📌 404
Most real life villains, from serial killers to Donald Trump and his cocaine Boer, are dullards. Mediocrities with nothing more complex driving them than "fuck you, I want this"
And that's a pretty flat, boring character if you're trying to keep someone interested in a story
19.02.2025 01:03 — 👍 9 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 0
Support Comrade Trump's heroic struggle against the kulaks.
13.02.2025 17:12 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Drawing of two hands clasping over a flower and the Portuguese phrase “NIN GUEM SOLTA A MAO DE NIN GUEM”
No one lets go of anyone’s hand.
08.02.2025 22:28 — 👍 4152 🔁 580 💬 96 📌 217
YouTube video by Herman The Tosser
Spitting Image - I've Never Met A Nice South African (Lyrics In Description)
youtu.be/l9dmoT9AfoI?...
08.02.2025 01:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
A stacked area chart titled “Campaign Funding Increasingly Dominated by Elite Donors,” showing the growing share of total campaign contributions coming from top donors from 1980 to 2024. The x-axis represents election cycles, and the y-axis represents the share of total campaign contributions in percentage terms. The chart distinguishes between the Top 100 donors (dark blue), Top 1K donors (light blue), Top 10K donors (orange), and Top 100K donors (light orange). Over time, the influence of elite donors has grown, with the top 100 donors now contributing 20% of all campaign funds. The data source is the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME).
Campaign finance has profoundly changed since Citizens United. The overall story is one of growing inequality. But the patterns differ by party—and do so in ways that help explain the GOP's oligarchical tendencies.
These charts break down the evolving landscape and provide some context. 🧵
07.02.2025 23:46 — 👍 70 🔁 24 💬 7 📌 4
Tariffs won’t bring back American manufacturing
If we want to revive American manufacturing, we need to move beyond simple solutions and commit to the complex work of rebuilding the manufacturing capacity of our industrial base.
Good piece from @macabekeliher.bsky.social
“Today we are not only a declining fifth behind Italy and China in machine tool production and sales, but also rapidly losing a workforce knowledgeable in machine tool development.”
thehill.com/opinion/fina...
07.02.2025 16:58 — 👍 4 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
It's clear that we are currently in a constitutional crisis. Previous crises have included Watergate and the Civil War. The question is whether we enter a period of constitutional collapse, where the constitutional order simply ceases to function for part or all of the country.
06.02.2025 23:23 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Excited for the book and great thread, which highlights importance of states in first-term resistance to Trump. This is one reason it really matters if Elon has the power to cut off state funding.
05.02.2025 17:47 — 👍 13 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
One of us! One of us!
04.02.2025 00:29 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
GLP-1 hormone research goes back to the 1970's, its testing to treat diabetes goes back to 1993, phase II clinical trials for Ozempic go back to 2008.
Your desire to see others punished for losing weight 'the wrong way' is ignorant, mean spirited, and most importantly a tired & lousy joke
05.01.2025 18:56 — 👍 5546 🔁 703 💬 160 📌 44
Krugman hits the basic point, which so many savvy commentators get tripped up on: The fact that *somebody* is always deciding how to ration care, does not mean that private health insurance companies as they actually exist are performing any useful function. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/health-ins...
18.12.2024 16:05 — 👍 61 🔁 21 💬 1 📌 0
Opinion | The Secret Behind America’s Moral Panic
Trans rights aren’t just trans rights. They’re reproductive rights.
This is genuinely great from Gessen if only because it takes something pretty basic about anti-trans politics (it's part of a broader reproductive regime akin to the eugenics of fascist cults) and explains it to an audience still convinced this has anything to do with fairness in women's sports
22.11.2024 11:30 — 👍 1416 🔁 435 💬 33 📌 19
Crash Course
How Boeing's managerial revolution created the 737 MAX disaster
This is a long read, but it's worth every word. If you want to know how Jack-Welchism has fundamentally made being a professional absolutely horrible, this is outstanding.
09.01.2024 12:48 — 👍 556 🔁 268 💬 15 📌 43
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