The Ordinal Society

tags

Datafication

On the origins and societal effects of pervasive quantification, ranking, and matching schemes.

Notes

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Contents

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Introduction: Valley Fever

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Technology gave us the means to grasp the totality of people’s lives in the form of discrete, standardized units of information.

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our moral intuitions about merit and personal worth are changing too.

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An ordinal society creates order through automated ranking and matching.

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For people who are “well classified,” the results are often quite gratifying and carry a sense that what is personally convenient is also somehow morally correct.

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Homestead Dreams

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Information technology really did seem to have abolished the constraints of time and space

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self-consciously worn social identity was often expressed in this language of pioneer, homesteader, explorer, or frontiersman—people who left the noninitiated in the dust.

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“the digital sublime.” The computer promised to “lift people out of the banality of everyday life” and the drudgery of history, geography, and politics.

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the importance of hardware design and manufacturing was in steady decline in Silicon Valley. Instead, software ruled, and services offered on the web were at the center of the action.

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what had previously been a cost of maintaining a service—­all the infrastructure of servers and their log files, databases and transaction records, their user actions and their histories—­became a source of data that might be turned into revenue.

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early on, Sergey Brin and Larry Page argued that, by contrast, “advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

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The opportunity to learn from the incomprehensible quantity of data passing through Google’s servers meant that the needs of consumers might stand a little reconceptualization.

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Code was made, it seemed, in forges, with engines, through pipelines, by foundries—an entire metaphorical world of intensely physical production was conjured up to represent the activities of people who spent their days in front of screens, typing. They were not writing; they were building. Soon they would be mining also.

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Crabgrass Frontier

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making direct and relatively unmediated use of [protocols] was not what most people wanted.

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if they were in the business of producing what later came to be called “content,” they wanted that process to be easy and quick. That meant having someone else do the work of serving it up.

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recalls the disappointment verging on contempt that revolutionaries can have for the preferences of the peasants they have liberated. Repeatedly, the opportunity to build a little online homestead from the ground up was rejected

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The values of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and privacy seemed to give way easily before the desires for convenience, ease of use, and practicality. Like Silicon Valley, the web steadily became more suburban.

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the growth of these services and the digital economy in general was not simply imposed on people. The tech landscape is littered with the wreckage of huge investments that were catastrophic failures, rusted hulks of grand schemes that were a gigantic waste of money because people simply did not care to use them.

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again, as before, enthusiast investors (such as venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) and tech evangelists, as the industry calls its product marketers, tend to focus on the liberating possibilities of the protocol rather than the centralizing tendencies of the server/service layer being built on top of it.

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Once things settle down, the benefits of the new way of doing things will be transparently, reliably, and equally accessible to all. The difficulty is that reaching this point tends to bring just the sort of concentration in infrastructure and elaboration of administrative control that the evangelists insist we are about to transcend.

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Soft City

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a reputational system could not by itself sustain a market at this scale. Feedback itself became a target for gamesmanship and exploitation. But as an initial mechanism it was extremely powerful.

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The websites were selected and categorized by hand. As a search engine, Yahoo! originally sent queries to this directory and encouraged users to browse it. In structure and spirit, searching its listings was the last gasp of the sort of comprehensive index of interesting stuff that had been pursued by the Whole Earth Catalog.

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this kind of infrastructure expresses a distinctive conception of power. Unlike institutionalized “spaces of enclosure” such as prisons, schools, or factories, “spaces of control” are distributed and connected through technical gateways and standards.

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1. The Box of Delights

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Social theorists underestimate the power of delight. When a technology can deliver that experience—again, whether in the service of something “useful” or simply for its own sake—people really love it.

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Compared to these forces, focusing on the role of individual delight in technology and its affordances is surely trivial, or even vaguely obscene.

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The technology is still assumed to work as claimed, even though in practice it may be buggy or broken most of the time. Thus, while the temperament of theory is critical, a fundamental belief in the propulsive power of technological change still lives in its marrow. The algorithms and the science behind them are assumed to work.

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we use the word datum rather than captum for the elemental unit of evidence.

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enclosure akin to the primitive accumulation of more tangible forms of property.

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During this expansionary phase, the best strategy is simply to see how much you can get away with.

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If this is robbery, it is less like being held up at gunpoint on the street and more like having your pocket picked at a party.

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The Gift of Everything

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Calculation and money arise out of the desire to escape the inequality and moral entanglements created by gifts.

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Gift exchange has an intrinsically hazy or fuzzy character that allows both for clear calculation and a kind of plausible obfuscation.

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Meeting the obligation to return or reciprocate what one has received, in some appropriate form and at some appropriate moment, is what makes gift giving a social relationship. Indeed, that sort of activity is what an actually existing, ongoing social relationship is. There is nothing more to it.

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pure market transactions mediated by money can be thought of as an effort to make exchanges happen in a way that escapes the tendrils of the gift, that avoids the tendency of gift giving to draw transactors into ongoing cycles of obligatory transfers with all their atten dant spillovers and duties.

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The attendant elements of gift giving are then seen as merely window dressing, a kind of pointless waste of time and energy that could be dispensed with if only people were honest with themselves about their true purpose. But particular gift exchanges express and encompass social relationships as a whole, making the elements of politeness, deference, honor, and obligation far more than simply empty ceremony. Instead they are, in Mauss’s phrase, a “total prestation” that in any particular case metonymically expresses the existence of the social order it forms a part of, and whose ongoing reality it helps sustain.

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what ends up being given away in return—your personal data, for instance, or information about your social network—is not something that had any materiality before the relationship was initiated.

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the constant flux of social life, the flow of things given in everyday reciprocation, does not naturally exist in the form of bundles of enforceable rights, in legal claims over tangible goods or services, or in measured and analyzable datasets. It is simply what people do,

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The Social Substrate

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time was on the side of the network analysts. The scale of computing power and data collection started to catch up, and fast.

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The problem was how to make money. Having constructed a substrate for the generation of quantifiable data on a new sphere of social interaction, companies found that turning a profit from people’s willingness to engage with websites and one another online was quite hard.

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The Exfiltration of Sociality

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Then they began to realize they could actively create as well as retrospectively analyze traces like this.

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would also be a mistake to think that these features are simply the result of delib erate, top­down efforts to design exploitative or extractive features into a platform. Quite often—for good and bad—changes are driven by or originate in user innovations

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find enthusiastic users “overflowing” the application, pushing the product to do this rather than that, changing its character and purpose in the process.

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A step forward for diversity, to be sure, but also a marvelously compact means of unobtrusively generating data on the race or ethnicity of users who choose to react to things.

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these decisions by Facebook have a kind of performative effect. They normalize the use of cartoonish buttons as an expression of care, adjusting people’s sense of social propriety and obligation, or their yearning for validation, or their desire to be liked not only privately but publicly through the new interface.

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The thrill of engagement becomes the madness of crowds.

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overflows are the rule and framing is a fragile, artificial result based upon substantial investments.

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in practice this sort of information is hard to store, awkward to manage, difficult to integrate, tricky to analyze, and risky to exploit. Organizations know they are supposed to collect it. But what are they to do with it all?

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2. The Data Imperative

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When gathering and then storing data in huge volumes is routine, it be comes impossible to imagine such a resource remaining untouched or fully encapsulated indefinitely.

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Thou Shalt Count

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turning numbers into what Theodore Porter called “technologies of distance,” to be deployed in heavily politicized contexts to create an aura of impar tiality, certainty, and finality.

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Even seemingly humble innovations such as the filing cabinet were, in their time, quietly revolutionary.

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Arbitrary as it often was, the use of this data to “place firms in a clear set of ordinal categories” created the impression of precision and order.

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Hollerith would soon found the Tabulating Machine Company and go on to win contracts with census operations outside the United States, including the United Kingdom and, infamously, Germany.

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Thou Shalt Gather

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naturalizing the idea that the long-term profitability of organizations depends on the collection and exploitation of data. This notion, which we call “the data imperative,” was a cultural and political accomplishment,

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Legal experts are the most important formalizers of such activities. For instance, Julie Cohen and Margaret Radin show that platforms rely heavily on legal logics andlegal documents to naturalize their rights to data and their lack of public accountability.

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“Thou shalt gather data” has become second nature for private and public institutions alike. It does not matter that the volume and character of what gets collect-ed may vastly exceed the imaginative reach or analytic grasp of theorganization at the moment of acquisition. The assumption is that it will, somehow, eventually be useful or valuable at some economically justifiable cost.

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At the center of any data infrastructure is what Robert Kitchin calls “indexical data”—data that “enable identification and linking across files

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SSNs gradually became a de facto national identification number for American citizens and residents. Theprocess took about sixty years. At every stage, the government insisted it was not interested in developing a national ID system. But it was, in effect, doing something more ambitious: maintaining a longitudinal file—a “data double”—on every American.

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The facticity of “the user” varies widely. An account may be backed by nothing at all,

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ICE had “searched LexisNexis over 1 million times in seven months.”

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Thou Shalt Learn

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how the bureaucratic logic of organizations interacts with the computational logic of machines.

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It is easy for data pipelines to interact badly with organizational routines and managerial demands.

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According to the best specialists, much of it is no better than “snake oil.”

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Methods for layered neural networks have been around for some time. Initially developed in the 1960s, they came into more widespread use in applied statistics in the 1980s and 1990s. At that point they were seen as “a flexible nonlinear extension of multiple logistic regression.” Their usefulness seemed relatively limited.

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results are not equivalent to iteratively updating a logistic regression hundreds of times. A deep-learning model is optimized jointly across layers. The weighting applied to each layer is efficiently adjusted in response to information from the loss function about how well things are going in the estimation process. This is the crucial backpropagation step.

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an organization employing such a model will be pushed to rethink its operations and digital interfaces in order to facilitate a continuous flow of data.

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the relative opacity of the method tends to encourage a kind of magical orientation to the results.

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Commentators often speak blandly of “digital natives” as if they had a natural technical facility with computing. The reality of the idea may lie more in the tendency to accept a social ecology where everything is indexed, tracked, and measured.

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From a social-scientific point of view, the main issue with empirical associations like these is figuring out what the causal pathways underlying them really are. This requires a theory ofthose pathways, and some sort of method capable of distinguishing in principle between properly causal and merely associational patterns.

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the feedback between effective prediction and presumptive causality can start to loop

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Magical technologies work . . . mostly. When they fail and you ask for an explanation, they present you with a blank face.

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the gods care nothing for ordinary people; their ways are mostly unfathomable, and our means of control over them are obscure and unreliable. Instead of elevating us to a world of magic, the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning reduces us to it.

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technology’s priesthood may find itself degraded to the unhappy state of the laity. It, too, must confront what it means to live in an age where a sufficiently advanced technology really has become indistinguishable from magic.

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3. Classification Situations

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The most basic insight of sociology is that the joint action of human beings produces a social world that has the character of objective fact.

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Intersubjective expectations must be constantly recreated and revalidated in practice. This process is neither error-free nor uncontestable.

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present-day liberal democracies tend to have a “politics of recognition” that accords moral importance to ideas of self-categorization, personal authenticity, and dignity. This makes it easier for many formerly primordial categories and classes to be contested. It also makes possible the sort of entrenchment and sacralization that is distinctively modern, centered on the individual.

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Its work is never done. Each use generates new uses. Each application justifies another. It is efficient, having largely been automated. . . . The panoptic sort is a system of actions that governs other actions. The panoptic sort is a system of power.

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We call these outcomes classification situations. These are positions in a generated system of categories that are consequential for one’s life chances.

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Naming and Ordering

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Nominal judgments are oriented toward essence. They define what something is.

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Nominal judgments require decisions about the criteria for resemblance and then some sort of interpretive assessment

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nominal categorizations tend to work with ideas about ideal or typical members of a class,

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Ordinal classifications, meanwhile, are explicitly organized by measures of position, priority, or value along some countable dimension.

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naming and ranking are much more general than quantification.

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Testing and Matching

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A key source of trouble is the need, in many methods, for some baseline or “ground truth” of correctly classified items or training data that the model must be built with. It can be hard to find datasets of sufficient size or quality

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training data is often lacking in ways developers are unaware of or do not think to consider.

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Training data, almost necessarily, comes from a social world already structured by deeply entrenched categories and classifications,

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they live in places that are out of the reach of socialservices and deal with problems through private insurance and experts, whose interventions, in the name of privacy, are not recorded in public databases

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Nothing, no matter how mundane or tacit or confidential, is a priori irrelevant as a basis for honing a classification scheme.

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unnoticed but strictly irrelevant features of the data will end up becoming the basis for identification and labeling.

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based on consistent similarities in the production quality of the images, the model was able to detect which hospital an X-ray originated with and adjust its predictions accordingly.

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likelihood of specious associations producing “shortcut learning” is high.

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In the case of the pneumonia classifier, we can straightforwardly say what went wrong in the training of the model and easily see the reason why it would not do to have it implemented that way in practice. But the implications for more purely social data are not so clear.

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One of the chief motives for using these tools in the first place is their ability to take large volumes of data and seethings that a human user or even a traditional statistical analysis cannot. But when the model is opaque, the question of its performance is intrinsically tricky.

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A steady income or a bank balance is replaced by a synthetic risk score. A passport or visa is trumped by membership on some watchlist or other.

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Eigenvalues and Eigencapital

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some vector of information that summarizes your situation and value across many features—something that compactly represents your position in the multidimensional space of classification situations.

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in principle an individual’s eigencapital is calculable from all of the digital information available about them,

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In its embodied form, eigencapital is expressed in durable dispositions. This is the “habitus,” incarnated directly in the body and the mind, and expressed in the overall presentation of self. The well-situated individual naturally inhabits their data double.

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In a way, the infrastructure of eigencapital revives an old kind of privilege. It promises the portable, universally recognized trustworthiness and good reputation of the gentleman abroad, sustained by his word and letter of introduction.

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The mark of being rich, on the other hand, is the ability to spend the time of others.

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With the rise of predictive analytics, the social differentiation of wait times has been automated.

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In its more tangible, objectified form, eigencapital is realized in transmissible property.

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You can work toward a better position by paying attention to producing “good data” for yourself. But you need to know what good data is in the first place.

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being invisible to digital infrastructures is suspicious, and organizations code it negatively. The failure to engage and properly care for one’s data double is a moral fault at best, a sure sign of illicit behavior at worst. Invisibility is as much a trap as visibility. Simply avoiding debt will not do: you’ll just end up with a bad score,

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people who are inactive are of little value to organizations. They are expensive to know and unprofitable to manage.

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In its institutionalized form, eigencapital may exist as a measured quantity that may be widely used and circulated.

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The resulting one-dimensional measure will contain much less information than its multidimensional parent.

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But even in the most totalizing systems,there is always an outside. Those who try to evade being measured and classified, as well as those who perform poorly by the system’s standards, face high costs, unsuitable matches, and, increasingly, outright exclusion.

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4. The Great Unbundling

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money is no longer anonymous. Because its circulation can be traced, it becomes a kind of ledger. Economic transactions become data bundles.

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This allows economic rights to be disaggregated, rebundled, and sold off with a degree of precision that was previously unattainable.

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Informative Payments

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in consumer markets, the successful adoption of electronic payment systems—from credit and debit cards to retail charge cards and store loyalty cards—spearheaded “the proliferation of transactional data” and the rise of modern consumer surveillance.

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Money itself started to become more like information, explicitly playing the role that some economists had long argued was its most important function.

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It changes the character of what money is. Its convenience as a medium of exchange takes a back seat to its usefulness as a source of information.

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Market Modulations

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Hayek went on to argue that, in a competitive economy with abundant information, the price system is the most efficient way to make this distributed knowledge available.

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Evgeny Morozov remarks that, relative to data now routinely produced, the information transmitted by prices is “condensed” and a relatively poor guide for many kinds of exchange.

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price may be just one among many variables that are both relevant and rapidly communicable.

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In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

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Accurate data promises better “personalization,” which in turn opens a path toward a more fine-grained form of price discrimination.

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What were once threats of adverse selection and moral hazard for insurance companies can be transformed by the flow of data into problems of costly premiums and insurability for customers.

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corporations are in a position to squeeze out far more of the surplus on both the buy and the sell sides.

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discrimination along some other dimension might have sharply regressive effects. For instance, perhaps our data can help us to identify a class of people who will be tempted by a particularly rotten deal,whether for reasons of poor literacy, straitened circumstance, social stigma, or citizenship status. Economists and legal scholars have accumulated substantial evidence that such practices are routine and quite profitable.

NOTER_PAGE: (156 0.39505300353356887 . 0.4125132555673383)

Streams of Income

NOTER_PAGE: 158

When a company sells a physical but datafied good, the buyer owns the physical item (e.g., a car, a refrigerator, or a smoke alarm), but the seller may retain ownership of both the software and of data streams associated with its use.

NOTER_PAGE: (158 0.742756183745583 . 0.6394485683987275)

responses to this sort of model may range from puzzlement to outright anger. It is one thing for a phone to demand a software update, or for a PlayStation to require an internet connection. But when your refrigerator, dishwasher, or doorbell do too, things may seem a little strange.

NOTER_PAGE: (159 0.47067137809187276 . 0.31177094379639453)

Although expressed in terms of the relative costs of bringing factors into production, the concept of an economic rent is rooted in a visceral sense that a principle of fairness is being violated. The producer is extracting this money just because it can,

NOTER_PAGE: (160 0.4459363957597173 . 0.18981972428419938)

The user remains tethered to the manufacturer or the service provider when they use the machine or even, simply, by keeping it powered on.

NOTER_PAGE: (162 0.47067137809187276 . 0.3128313891834571)

In 2004, for instance, the Wall Street Journal remarked that General Motors was already more a bank than a carmaker.

NOTER_PAGE: (164 0.49328621908127207 . 0.5249204665959704)

Credit’s integration with tethered commodities gives it much greater potency than before. With an ongoing connection to the car or tractor enabled by default, the manufacturer effectively has a persistent link to the owner and operator as well.

NOTER_PAGE: (166 0.13922261484098938 . 0.20360551431601276)

The data collection embedded in most new cars allows for more efficient claims processing. It also opens the possibility for insurance underwriting to become much more personalized and dynamically priced.

NOTER_PAGE: (167 0.34275618374558303 . 0.4772004241781549)

When these technologies are embedded everywhere and everyone is surveilled in this way, insurance premiums will depend on the specific risk profile as measured and scored by the sensing algorithm. But what remains of the purpose of insurance—to socialize risk—when everyone pays the price they “deserve”?

NOTER_PAGE: (167 0.71660777385159 . 0.33297985153764587)

shifting from socialized to individualized risk also transforms the very purpose of insurance.

NOTER_PAGE: (168 0.1901060070671378 . 0.5440084835630965)

in other domains, such as health or place of residence, the most significant sources of risk—and thus the proper allocation of responsibility—may lie outside the individual in the natural or social environment. The fact that these structural forces cannot easily be measured does not mean that they can be conveniently ignored.

NOTER_PAGE: (168 0.26996466431095406 . 0.59915164369035)

5. Layered Financialization

NOTER_PAGE: 171

Financialization is “a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production.”

NOTER_PAGE: (171 0.4183745583038869 . 0.16330858960763522)

Beyond this, the term financialization connotes the diffusion of broadly “financial” ways of thinking about the economy—and, indeed, the world at large.

NOTER_PAGE: (171 0.6190812720848057 . 0.36161187698833513)

leave the firm in a situation where it hopes to profit from investment decisions or general price movements in markets that adversely affect the very customers it sells its equipment to, and from whom it collects data.

NOTER_PAGE: (173 0.39222614840989395 . 0.40296924708377524)

Layering Abstractions

NOTER_PAGE: 174

The tech industry and its financial backers depend less on secure expectations of future cash flows and more on a constant stream of hopeful believers,

NOTER_PAGE: (174 0.14346289752650176 . 0.2778366914103924)

Commodities present themselves as interchangeable things whose value is fully expressed by the price one pays for them. As a rule, the specific history of any particular thing is of no interest.

NOTER_PAGE: (175 0.46784452296819784 . 0.4538706256627784)

the “higher” or more abstract the derived form, the more platonically homogeneous it will tend to be, and thus the more liquid and fluidly tradable it can become.

NOTER_PAGE: (176 0.22120141342756183 . 0.5164369034994698)

the broker’s source of profit depends on the retail investor being relatively ill informed.

NOTER_PAGE: (179 0.36890459363957595 . 0.37963944856839876)

Profitability depended more or less entirely on there being a substantial number of retail investors without a solid grasp of the risks

NOTER_PAGE: (179 0.6911660777385159 . 0.27995758218451755)

In a previous era, trade inthese products might have been confined to elaborate, technically complex, but also highly restricted market settings. Now, however,these financialized abstractions easily reintegrate with the world of socially driven investor excitement. This also greatly expands the scope for fraud.

NOTER_PAGE: (180 0.4968197879858657 . 0.4772004241781549)

Popularizing Protocols

NOTER_PAGE: 181

The appeal of Robinhood was as much political as economic.

NOTER_PAGE: (181 0.2862190812720848 . 0.15906680805938495)

They lost in the end, of course. They were taken advantage of by the very platform that was supposed to be liberating them. But their determination to live up to their image of themselves did not die. It just drifted further toward the even more disintermediated, volatile, and risky world of decentralized finance.

NOTER_PAGE: (181 0.5717314487632509 . 0.19936373276776248)

Modern finance is electronic. It not only depends upon but fundamentally just is the protocols or conventions governing the treatment, formatting, recording, and circulation of data within a network.

NOTER_PAGE: (182 0.34134275618374554 . 0.25344644750795337)

Banking on Speculation

NOTER_PAGE: 185

universalization of predictive capacity has primed the “full range of social and political life” for speculative activity.

NOTER_PAGE: (186 0.446643109540636 . 0.16330858960763522)

speculation writ large as the episteme of our time.

NOTER_PAGE: (186 0.5462897526501767 . 0.29586426299045604)

transactions in crypto are almost all transactions for other crypto assets. The question is whether the connection with state regulation will be made by any path other than criminal prosecutions

NOTER_PAGE: (190 0.5201413427561837 . 0.20890774125132558)

Painting himself, a billionaire in his mid-fifties, as the leader of a “revolutionary youth movement,” Thiel throws acouple of one-hundred-dollar bills to an adoring crowd

NOTER_PAGE: (193 0.13851590106007067 . 0.16012725344644752)

This sort ofthing is only necessary because cryptocurrencies have failed to prove themselves,

NOTER_PAGE: (193 0.4763250883392226 . 0.19618239660657477)

The main technological advantage of the blockchain, its encryption, does not require any kind of privatization.

NOTER_PAGE: (193 0.6706713780918727 . 0.16012725344644752)

a month before his barn-burning speech at the 2022 Bitcoin Conference, Thiel’s Founders Fund had disposed of almost all of its Bitcoin holdings,

NOTER_PAGE: (193 0.823321554770318 . 0.8335100742311772)

6. The Road to Selfdom

NOTER_PAGE: 196

On one side, the side of socialorganization, is the domain of rationalization and control.

NOTER_PAGE: (196 0.44452296819787984 . 0.4729586426299046)

On the other side, the side of the individual, is the domain of experience and expression.

NOTER_PAGE: (196 0.6247349823321554 . 0.447507953340403)

Utopian or emancipatory tendencies in social theory seek to have both of these dimensions at once.

NOTER_PAGE: (196 0.7745583038869258 . 0.2025450689289502)

“radicals and their opponents [both] identified the capitalist economy and the liberal state with ‘individualism’ and equated radical aims with a ‘collectivism’ that negated individuality.” It was the “cultural explosion” of the 1960s, Berman asserts, that forced the idea of individual authenticity back to the center of politics.

NOTER_PAGE: (197 0.24098939929328622 . 0.4072110286320255)

New technologies would transform society into a kind of anarchically cooperative and productive network.

NOTER_PAGE: (197 0.4939929328621908 . 0.6405090137857901)

Authenticated Exposure

NOTER_PAGE: 199

the meaning of privacy. The expressive impulse of romantic modernity is that persons should be truly themselves. The administrative demand of high modernity is that they should be properly identifiable.These first-person and third-person perspectives on the lives of individuals are, in fact, deeply connected.

NOTER_PAGE: (199 0.1929328621908127 . 0.28525980911983034)

while, at its upper limit, existing and being recognized in the eyes of others is a kind of narcissism, at its lower bound it is an essential feature of being a person.

NOTER_PAGE: (200 0.319434628975265 . 0.43054082714740194)

As technologies of visibility change, so too do the baseline conditions of social existence and participation.

NOTER_PAGE: (200 0.43957597173144874 . 0.2142099681866384)

degree to which components of individual identity and self-sameness are now portable across institutional settings.

NOTER_PAGE: (202 0.16607773851590105 . 0.24178154825026513)

“interstitial liberty.”Here it is not that people are truly anonymous but that the information available about them is sparse, fragmentary, or hard to gather.

NOTER_PAGE: (202 0.5978798586572438 . 0.5026511134676565)

Much more common in the past, it is the freedom to move far away and completely start over without being followed by one’s background.

NOTER_PAGE: (202 0.8042402826855123 . 0.27359490986214213)

Interstitial liberty dries up as the gaps between systems are closed. Aspirations to recover something like it can be seen in the effort to create some sort of “right to be forgotten.”

NOTER_PAGE: (203 0.37173144876325087 . 0.55779427359491)

displace the playful freedoms and pleasures of “decentered identity” that early computer users found so enjoyable

NOTER_PAGE: (203 0.5498233215547703 . 0.415694591728526)

Facebook successfully reframed the web as a space where real people ought to present themselves as themselves.

NOTER_PAGE: (203 0.6226148409893992 . 0.5630965005302228)

high baseline of visibility makes them ipso facto suspicious. Why would someone work so hard to evade scrutiny if they did not have something illicit to hide?

NOTER_PAGE: (206 0.4254416961130742 . 0.3510074231177095)

Meanwhile, for organizations, and especially the state, almost the opposite process takes place. Led by the development first of “official secrets” in government, and subsequently “trade secrets” in business, legitimate forms of organizational secrecy continuously expand, whether in the name of national security, market competition, or simply the need for “confidentiality.”

NOTER_PAGE: (206 0.545583038869258 . 0.3902439024390244)

Social life is all about the dread that accompanies our awareness that we can never access what the other sees. We can only guess.

NOTER_PAGE: (207 0.5957597173144876 . 0.4135737009544009)

contradictory risks that their online performances of violence will be both doubted as fake posturing by rivals and treated as solid evidence of authentic behavior by prosecutors.

NOTER_PAGE: (208 0.7265017667844522 . 0.5461293743372216)

a test of personal authenticity. In the ordinal society, you must be identifiable and auditable.

NOTER_PAGE: (211 0.5469964664310953 . 0.4517497348886533)

The Searching Disposition

NOTER_PAGE: 212

Ivan Illich argued that society needed to be “deschooled.”

NOTER_PAGE: (212 0.4946996466431095 . 0.2513255567338282)

the substantive authority of experts has also been displaced in a way that depends less on broadly “neoliberal” trends eroding university life and more on the increasingly distributed and relatively open world of knowledge.

NOTER_PAGE: (214 0.7265017667844522 . 0.4634146341463415)

prospect of emancipation from the constraints of the present knowledge system can easily carry with it the idea that people will eventually come around to having correct views

NOTER_PAGE: (215 0.6473498233215548 . 0.6086956521739131)

uneasy tension between advocating for the democratization of knowledge, on the one hand, while retaining the expectation that people ought to listen to expert authorities, on the other.

NOTER_PAGE: (216 0.14346289752650176 . 0.18663838812301167)

their purpose is not to distribute knowledge or even to convey news. It is to sell advertising.

NOTER_PAGE: (217 0.41696113074204944 . 0.37327677624602335)

firms that make it their business to deliver relevant content fall back on an ostensibly laissez-faire attitude.

NOTER_PAGE: (218 0.6734982332155477 . 0.37327677624602335)

the mode of distribution is what now tends to count as knowledge. The very notion of epistemic authority has changed.

NOTER_PAGE: (219 0.36537102473498234 . 0.645811240721103)

the shift toward personalization, guided by the appetite to advertise, has happened while maintaining the original image of direct engagement with a collective or general stock of knowledge.

NOTER_PAGE: (220 0.46925795053003533 . 0.27571580063626727)

the beliefs they bring to the search process itself, embedded in the vocabulary they use to consult the search engine, together with their whole search history, may yield results that conform to their already well-structured world.

NOTER_PAGE: (220 0.7448763250883392 . 0.2173913043478261)

experts themselves constantly cultivate, benefit from, and indeed enjoy the same searching disposition that they may worry is corrupting the less well informed.

NOTER_PAGE: (221 0.5738515901060071 . 0.6606574761399788)

A searching disposition is not simply the desire to look for and accept the first thing that confirms one’s prejudices; it is also the tendency to search and connect across a network of knowledge without constraint, and to justifiably expect a reasonable degree of success.

NOTER_PAGE: (223 0.13780918727915195 . 0.4655355249204666)

So many routine tasks involve findingthings: a place to stay, and the way to get there; a book or article; a good or service; a piece of information. The expectation is that we will do it ourselves.

NOTER_PAGE: (224 0.22120141342756183 . 0.22481442205726407)

The Self-Organization Man

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The dilemma faced by the “authentic self” under such a system is not so much a matter of asserting one’s identity in the face of some anonymous mass or of resisting subsumption by some overly broad social category. Rather, one is expected to explicitly locate oneself within a universe of highly differentiated, externalized, socially recognized categories. Aspects of experience, especially those that relate to the experience of oppression, become elements of identities that ought to be expressed, settled upon, and flagged. More generally, the redistribution of both status (in terms of “recognition”) and resources along lines of social difference comes to be understood as a critical aspect of the quest for justice.

NOTER_PAGE: (226 0.469964664310954 . 0.1951219512195122)

In this landscape, politics is about finding the right level of group aggregation.

NOTER_PAGE: (227 0.14487632508833923 . 0.1930010604453871)

There is a constant downward pressure to disaggregate to the level of each unique individual.

NOTER_PAGE: (227 0.215547703180212 . 0.2841993637327678)

Insofar as shared, socially recognizable groupings do emerge, theywill tend to be very fine-grained, perhaps almost absurdly so from the perspective of “ordinary” social categories.

NOTER_PAGE: (227 0.3710247349823321 . 0.528101802757158)

These combined pressures severely exacerbate the tendency of any democratic movement to subdivide into ever smaller grouplets.

NOTER_PAGE: (227 0.469964664310954 . 0.183457051961824)

Populism is not native to the digital society, but the latter’s characteristically flat, hyperreactive, and teeming knowledge economy certainly stimulates reactionary impulses, born out of opportunism and distrust.

NOTER_PAGE: (228 0.8240282685512367 . 0.1951219512195122)

There is a sort of elective affinity between the deployment of the ordinal society and the elevation of a radical, entrepreneurial kind of individualism

NOTER_PAGE: (229 0.29045936395759714 . 0.18981972428419938)

Thiel explicitly frames the core problem as a struggle between the individualism of liberty in democratic politics, on the one hand, and the individualism of freedom in the competitive market, on the other. For him, the only solution is not some sort of reconciliation between politics and the market, but simply a straightforward victory for the latter.

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Considered as political theory, Thiel’s views have an all-encompassing character that most commentators would not be inclined to take all that seriously were it not for the fact that the person holding them is very rich indeed and has a strong taste forpolitical intervention.

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7. Ordinal Citizenship

NOTER_PAGE: 237

justice tends to be conceived as a matter of mitigating whatever inequalities have arisen between individuals for bad reasons.

NOTER_PAGE: (237 0.7703180212014133 . 0.15694591728525983)

The Problem of Equality

NOTER_PAGE: 241

People are created equal. Casual observation suggests that, in terms of living conditions and material wellbeing, nothing could be less obviously true.

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despite the shift in the basis of social status,these changes benefited the existing elite much more than the common mass. Education was both an effective social ladder and a conduit for the recycling of old inequalities

NOTER_PAGE: (242 0.8007067137809187 . 0.5132555673382821)

Rather than disappearing, economic and social differenceswere legitimated via the morally impeccable seal of a college diploma.

NOTER_PAGE: (243 0.3992932862190813 . 0.2979851537645812)

the fundamental dilemma of liberalism: “The right of the citizen in thisprocess of selection and mobility is the right to equality of opportunity. Its aim is to eliminate hereditary privilege. In essence it is the equal right to display and develop differences, or inequalities; the equal right to be recognised as unequal.”

NOTER_PAGE: (243 0.47208480565371025 . 0.5005302226935313)

When adjustments for social disadvantage come into direct contact with ordinal technologies, conflict is almost guaranteed.

NOTER_PAGE: (245 0.192226148409894 . 0.5662778366914104)

Social inclusion goes beyond being nominally incorporated into these systems. One must then behave and perform according to their rules.

NOTER_PAGE: (245 0.6678445229681979 . 0.34146341463414637)

The Problem of Merit

NOTER_PAGE: 245

as with more familiar demands for civil rights,people wanted to be seen and treated as individuals rather than merely as members of a class. But winning this right tended to come at the cost of control over how, and how much, one would be seen.

NOTER_PAGE: (247 0.6692579505300353 . 0.42523860021208915)

popular belief in self-reliance seems to have risen in step with income inequality, particularly among the working class in the Western world.

NOTER_PAGE: (248 0.4996466431095406 . 0.41887592788971373)

data collection ends up reconstituting, one tiny piece at a time, the ground truth of social structure.

NOTER_PAGE: (250 0.623321554770318 . 0.5291622481442206)

the idea of a purely individual assessment of merit—something fully extricated from the broader social structure by way of more and more data—is a mirage. To the extent that social situations and thus social behaviors differ reliably across demographic categories, scores rooted in behavioral data will continue to differ reliably across these same categories. Group-level differences that the law kicks out the door come back in through the window.

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Scoring technologies appear to be especially well developed in places that have a history of legally enforced segregation, such as the United States and South Africa. In fact, we might turn the analytical logic on its head and argue that an observed gap between groups—an unexplained statistical “residual”—is in fact a measure of advantages or disadvantages that have been produced and reproduced over the very longue durée—a kind of Solow residual for social inequalities.

NOTER_PAGE: (254 0.18939929328621907 . 0.40827147401908803)

the tools of measurement replace structure with action.

NOTER_PAGE: (254 0.469964664310954 . 0.28844114528101805)

coded just in terms of its outcome, recorded only as a behavior,

NOTER_PAGE: (254 0.545583038869258 . 0.2598091198303288)

Any priority order, any queue, any ranking system, tends to become imbued with value.

NOTER_PAGE: (255 0.5724381625441696 . 0.4390243902439025)

The repeated discovery and rediscovery of aspects of society writ large in the minutiae of data writ small produces reliably unproductive arguments. Properly evading these quagmires requires a more radical kind of politics, one which is vastly more challenging to implement than to insist upon.

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The Problem of Value

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think that success is substantively merited in some moral sense. But this is an illusion. Friedrich Hayek dismisses it quickly in The Constitution of Liberty—the market is not rewarding you, it is optimizing itself: “The fact is, of course, that we do not wish people to earn a maximum of merit but to achieve a maximum of usefulness at a minimum of pain and sacrifice and therefore a minimum of merit.”

NOTER_PAGE: (257 0.4664310954063604 . 0.6129374337221634)

personal failing, some specific vulnerability, may be the most useful thing about you as far as the market is concerned.

NOTER_PAGE: (258 0.16890459363957597 . 0.5694591728525982)

why many ordinal systems—such as ratings for online labor platforms—tend to better reward the people who produce value for them.

NOTER_PAGE: (258 0.5717314487632509 . 0.6203605514316013)

TaskRabbit favors workers who complete more tasks over those who are careful to only take on tasks they can do well.

NOTER_PAGE: (258 0.8028268551236749 . 0.27677624602332984)

the point of this ethical work is both increasingly obscure and subjectively pointless. The rules of the game are unclear, and they adjust dynamically,

NOTER_PAGE: (259 0.44805653710247345 . 0.18981972428419938)

Machine learning magnifies this problem.

NOTER_PAGE: (260 0.24381625441696111 . 0.19088016967126195)

AlphaZero’s style remains somewhat alien. Like modern chess players, ordinary people find themselves poorly equipped to orient themselves

NOTER_PAGE: (260 0.7484098939929328 . 0.44538706256627786)

truckdrivers have been threatening to exit the industry after the government required electronic logging devices (ELDs) in 2012. In practice, few have actually done so.

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process of subjective reappropriation often involves workers playing solitary “making out” games with themselves, where they obsessively track their interactions with others and their algorithmic rating.

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Even if the criteria for being rewarded are strange and incomprehensible,there is a tendency for any system that produces a scheme of rewards or ranks, however perverse, to institutionalize itself as a value order and a basis for the attribution of personal merit.

NOTER_PAGE: (262 0.4939929328621908 . 0.2937433722163309)

Scoring changes the intrinsic meaning of activities and the reasons why people pursue them, transforming them into so many metric-chasing games.

NOTER_PAGE: (262 0.6197879858657244 . 0.35949098621421)

straightforward coercion,whether by normative means (through social pressure) or physical ones (through restricted mobility). Such a framing was, for instance, explicit in China’s original social credit system announcement.

NOTER_PAGE: (263 0.47279151943462894 . 0.40190880169671267)

use of choice architectures and incentives to govern individual and collective behavior.

NOTER_PAGE: (264 0.3399293286219081 . 0.48356309650053025)

Perhaps in an effort to circumvent Goodhart's law, the rules of ordinality change often. Alternatively, they tend to shift because the actual magnitude of most of the effects tracked by these metrics is tiny.

NOTER_PAGE: (265 0.6756183745583039 . 0.16224814422057265)

The tendency of the ground to shift makes positions based on prior scores “algorithmically precarious” over the longer term,

NOTER_PAGE: (265 0.8219081272084805 . 0.6808059384941676)

In the final step, the ledger is given purpose as the algorithm works to reinforce those behavioral traits that it finds desirable at the level of the species,

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Conclusion: The Unbearable Rightness of Being Ranked

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The fulcrum of an ordinal society is the idea of coordination by ranking and matching,

NOTER_PAGE: (269 0.7703180212014133 . 0.40827147401908803)

In practice, as we have repeatedly emphasized, this is a patchy process, typically adapted to circumstance, and often quite broken from a technical point of view.

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they promise a form of justice, a kind of “actuarial fairness”

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Ordinalization’s Double Movement

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The academic legal establishment did not so much fall into the trap of rankings as become entangled in them.

NOTER_PAGE: (274 0.13851590106007067 . 0.22587486744432664)

By making comparison mandatory, rankings normalize competition. Moreover, they push people to compete on the dimensions that the ranking method values.

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They are still committed to the view that they know and can assess quality when they see it, and they usually think they can reliably quantify it. They would just rather not be subject to that pressure themselves.

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The ordinalizing tendency is to bring real-time ranking methods from the closed to the open world.

NOTER_PAGE: (276 0.7978798586572438 . 0.3753976670201485)

dating apps may stratify users based on the interest their profile generates but weight those assignments by the scores of the people who express that interest. This, of course, immediately leads to the bleed-in of preference weighting based on the composition of the population.

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in the aggregate there will be both severe homophily on match recommendations, on the one hand, and lower mean scores for non-white people, on the other.

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Ordinalization’s double movement is further propelled by this desire to be in the game and also outside it, to successfully rank and match while also finding ways to personally evade its bad consequences.

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The Will to Progress and the Will to Power

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As Fred Turner remarks, “the ethics of engineering is an ethics of ‘does it work’? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing.”

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To the extent that moral commitment and passionate devotion are perceived as “feeling rules” that help foster social recognition and economic success, one must perform them. The fact that this kind of “emotional labor” may be genuine does not always help.

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the “gladiatorial truth” of technology, the idea that because the people (in this case, administrators, teachers, students, and parents) want it, they should have it.

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dual truth of this species of neoliberalism is that its principled celebration of market competition as an implicitly democratic mechanism gives rise to a practical fascination with winner-take-all outcomes.

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The Twofold Truth of Social Science

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The NSA was and is rather less constrained than the average researcher by money, personnel, or the law. The same goes for Google or Meta. To them, Borges’s map is less a daydream than a design challenge.

NOTER_PAGE: (288 0.2176678445229682 . 0.3181336161187699)

For those social scientists in a position to cooperate, the benefits can be handsome.

NOTER_PAGE: (288 0.6452296819787986 . 0.48674443266171796)

striking how many commentators expressed first-person or third-person anxieties about the prospects for gaming some familiar system of ranking or evaluation. Would ChatGPT render older modes of grading and assessment obsolete? Could it be exploited in a way that allowed people to pretend to be better than they “really”were?

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The logic of layered sorting through personalization is by now built into economic infrastructures and social expectations.

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Even if, as companies, Meta fails or Uber is despised, no one wants an uncurated news feed or an unrated cab driver anymore.

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Under the banner of social justice, and in the name of excluded groups, progressive elites have rejected standardized testing and called for more informal and narrative modes of assessment once decried for being subjective and arbitrary.

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Public goods and collective goals are being dissolved in the acid bath of individualization and competition, leaving us increasingly alone in a hyperconnected world whose social ordering is precisely metered and, in its factitious way, inarguably “right.” Life in the ordinal society may well be unbearable.

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Notes

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Acknowledgments

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Index

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