On the Political Economy of Digitality

The deployment of algorithms –computer code paired with massive datasets– has reshaped the basic rules of social life: how people communicate, exchange and associate; how they relate to each other, themselves and the world around them, down to the most ordinary and intimate aspects; how institutions, both public and private, think about and pursue their social mission and economic purpose; and how they sort and slot populations and individuals accordingly.

This Lucerne Master Class will analyze the political economy of digital capitalism, paying attention to continuities and ruptures with antecedent forms of capital accumulation. It will revisit classical questions of social scientific theory –including the search for economic profit, the production of social formations and inequalities, and the nature of politics and government– in light of specific implementations of digital technologies across a range of domains and geographical settings.

Marion Fourcade | University of California, Berkeley

Marion Fourcade is a Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix at UC Berkeley. She grew up and studied in France and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University (2000). Fourcade specializes in the comparative history and sociology of the social sciences and, more recently, in the study of classification and valuation processes in domains as varied as natural resources, credit, computing, and wine. Most relevant to this masterclass, Fourcade is the author of Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009) and of a series of articles on the political economy of digitality. A co-authored book on this last topic, titled The Ordinal Society, is in process.