Ordinal citizenship

Abstract

The expansion of social citizenship in the 20th century mitigated the brute effects of economic inequality in people's lives. The institutionalization of social rights and entitlement programs recognized that access to "the life of a civilized being" (to use TH Marshall's (1950, p. 11) quaint phrase) should not depend on wealth only. To be sure, the process was incomplete, stigmatizing, and often brutal, particularly for the poor and for minorities of various kinds. 1 Still, the reliable provision of education, healthcare, housing, and social insurance turned into one of the main raisons d'être and functions of governments throughout the world, while also strengthening their claims to demand sacrifices (e.g., military conscription) and duties (e.g., income taxes) from the newly constituted citizenry in return. These very facts, however, also made social rights suspect. Unlike civil and political rights,

The Society of Algorithms

“…Inclusion into some identification database has long been a prerequisite of modern citizenship (Koopman 2019;Lyon 2009Lyon , 2015, but digitality has magnified the ambition to eliminate fraud and also tailor the terms and benefits of citizenship in ever more fine-grained ways (Fourcade 2021). This trend is global: Informational modernization can look eerily familiar and, at the same time, strikingly different across political and historical contexts.…”

Seeing Like a State, Enacting Like an Algorithm: (Re)assembling Contact Tracing and Risk Assessment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The state’s algorithmic vision poses new questions about how the state recognizes citizens, as well as how citizenship is claimed in the digital age, where a citizen’s position in the state’s algorithmic vision is increasingly critical ( Fourcade 2021 ). In this case, elaborate surveillance citizenship has also emerged: People must be surveilled and datafied by specific platforms to access certain public spaces or services.…”

“…Furthermore, increasingly, state legibility requirements are connected with citizenship and, in many situations, made a prerequisite for people to receive services from the state. As a result, being seen by the state is a status that people, particularly marginalized social groups, aim to achieve rather than to avoid, in contrast to traditional state-centered analysis ( Fourcade 2021 ; Rodríguez-Muñiz 2017 ; Rona-Tas 2020 ). This further promotes the value of a theoretical perspective that includes heterogeneous social actors in the construction and operation of state legibility projects beyond “the state,” as well as the dynamic interactions among these social actors beyond the “see/control–resistance” framework.…”

Algorithms in Action: Reassembling Contact Tracing and Risk Assessment during the COVID-19 Pandemic in China

“…Furthermore, increasingly, state legibility requirements are connected with citizenship and, in many situations, made a prerequisite for people to receive services from the state. As a result, being seen by the state is a status that people, particularly marginalized social groups, aim to achieve rather than to avoid, in contrast to traditional state-centered analysis (Fourcade 2021;Rodríguez-Muñiz 2017;Rona-Tas 2020).…”