The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism

Abstract

While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we call “high-tech modernism”  the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life  has a dual logic. On the one hand, like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification, even if it categorizes people and things very differently. On the other, like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system. Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes. The Journal of Economic Sociology offers a Russian translation of Professor Henry Farrell and Professor Marion Fourcade’s article, titled The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism, published in 2023 in Dædalus. This translation will be included in a Russian-language collection of Professor Marion Fourcade’s articles on the digital economy, which is being prepared for publication by the Gaidar Institute Press.