(2024-05-24) Davies To The Vector Belong The Spoils

Dan Davies: to the vector belong the spoils. I’ve nearly finished reading “The Ordinal Society” by Kieran Healy and Marion Fourcade. It’s a great book.

One of the big concepts is that of “eigencapital”. This is a sort of metaphor that isn’t quite a metaphor.

a huge matrix made up of all the random bits of data that Big Online (BigTech) collects about you. Your “eigencapital” is the eigenvalue of that matrix associated with an eigenvector that is (in a sense) pointing in the direction of things that Big Online likes.

A big theme of the book is that eigencapital is something that people create, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Think of the common online exchange which goes “Your social media timeline (algorithmic feed) is curated by you” / “that’s easy for a middle class white man to say”) and you’ve got the two halves of what’s problematic about the Ordinal Society

The book describes the development of these kinds of measuring systems and how they are changing things in ways that need to be managed.

I obviously want to relate it to my personal hobbyhorses, but I think I’m on quite strong ground doing so – the ordinal society is an attempt to do variety engineering, to use systems of variety attenuation (measurement systems and categories) and amplification (automated decision making) to handle the challenge of trying to match the wild chaos of modern life to The System’s ability to manage it.

I loved this book. It’s an academic work, higher of brow (and price) than mine but if you liked The Unaccountability Machine you will also like The Ordinal Society. I feel like there’s something approaching a coherent general response to modernity somewhere in here.