In recent decades, terms such as “meritocracy” and “equality of opportunities” have gained significant political and social traction, while the globe has experienced recurring economic and social crises that widened the gap between the haves and have-nots. Amid this growing inequality, one must question whether true social mobility still exists. Can today’s youth, regardless of their background, genuinely aspire to climb the economic ladder, or are they bound by the socioeconomic status they were born into?
Digital technologies have woven themselves into every facet of our lives, introducing shifts –sometimes subtle, sometimes quite profound— in the workings of virtually all social institutions. Arguably, the most important of these shifts concerns the link between digital technology, power and social inequality. How have digital capitalism and algorithmic management reshaped the mechanisms that stratify people, now reborn as “users,” into distinct classes and strata? What do these shifts mean for the theoretical frameworks we have inherited from the past? In their important 2017 paper, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argued that the use of digital systems to harvest almost unlimited data about individual users has rendered obsolete many of the core assumptions that have long informed sociological thinking about class, status distinctions and social inequality generally. Now, in their 2024 book, The Ordinal Society, Fourcade and Healy have contributed a more richly developed analysis of the many consequences that flow from the automation of class inequality (see Eubanks’s 2017). The result is a deeply researched, provocative but often frustrating book. It deserves a wide audience for reasons I spell out below.
