The Ordinal Society

Date/Time

Tuesday
8th December 2026
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location
Barbara and Gerson Bakar Gateway, Room 1420
Room 1420 is located in the west wing of the Gateway Building, first floor. Enter from the breezeway.

Event Type
Human Technology Futures (HTF) Colloquium

Marion Fourcade

Professor of Sociology

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: who gets a loan, a job, a ride, a date, and on what terms. 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 my recent book with Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society (Harvard University Press 2024), and extends its argument to the present.