Table of Ranks for the Digital Age
Рецензия на книгу: Fourcade M., Healy K. 2024. The Ordinal Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 384 p.
Abstract
The review examines Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy’s The Ordinal Society (Harvard University Press, 2024), a book that offers a broad theoretical account of digital capitalism. The book’s central argument is that contemporary society is increasingly organized through the measurement, sorting, and evaluative ordering of people, objects, and actions. This ordering becomes a fundamental principle of social coordination. The review discusses the book’s key concepts: the platform exfiltration of sociality, understood as the extraction of data from everyday social interactions; eigencapital as a new form of digital capital; and the “classification situation,” which produces social hierarchies at the bottom of which stands a newly disadvantaged class — the lumpenscoretariat. The review also considers critical responses to the book published in international journals. These critiques argue that Fourcade and Healy may be too quick to present the processes they describe as totalizing; that they do not fully explain how eigencapital is converted into concrete advantages; and that they redescribe older forms of social inequality in the language of digital ordering. By turning to the Russian experience of digitalization, the review identifies an important limitation of the book. In Fourcade and Healy’s account, the production of a person’s digital “legibility” is largely tied to the market logic of platformization. The Russian case, by contrast, illustrates the intensification of algorithmic ordering through state-directed forms of digital control. Overall, the review argues that a genuinely general theory of ordinal society remains to be developed. Building such a theory requires a comparative perspective that accounts for non-Western trajectories of digitalization, as well as an analysis that extends beyond economic domains to include interpersonal relations.
