Fourcade 2017 – The fly and the cookie

In brief

A presidential address to the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) in 2016, on the entanglement of morality and capitalism (p. 661) [U]. Fourcade argues that moral sentiments – the sense of propriety, of merit and of justice – play a productive role in extracting economic value (p. 661) [U]. Digital capitalism extracts profit through two processes: ‘alignment’, where people are drawn into record-keeping systems, and ‘unhingement’, where value lies in tracking their unpredictable movements and differences (pp. 661, 668, 674) [U]. This produces new ‘economic moralities’ (pp. 661, 675) [U].

Research question and main claim

• The lecture proposes an expanded reading of ‘moral economy’: the circulation and exchange of moral intuitions, feelings and discourses (p. 664) [U].
• All economies are moral economies; the market economy is no exception (p. 665) [U].
• Main claim: economic value is produced both when individuals are morally aligned with capitalism's goals and when they deviate from the moral standard (p. 661) [U].
• Modern digital capitalism builds new economic moralities through opaque but powerful forms of behavioural fine-tuning, surveillance and manipulation (p. 661) [U].

Theoretical perspective

• E. P. Thompson's ‘moral economy’, Polanyi, Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics and Bourdieu (pp. 662–664) [U].
• Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments: the sense of propriety, merit and justice (pp. 666–667) [U].
• Daston's definition of the moral economy as ‘a web of affect-saturated values’ (p. 666) [U].
• Durkheimian and constructivist view of morality: what people categorise as moral (p. 664) [U].
• Callon on performativity, which she partly agrees and partly disagrees with (p. 672) [U].
• Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge, Zuboff's ‘surveillance assets’, Schüll on addiction by design (pp. 671, 673, 675) [U].

Empirical material and context

• No systematic empirical study. Examples: Instagram likes, Strava, Google Scholar citations, Schiphol's urinal fly, slot machines in Las Vegas, urinal gaming consoles, the browser extension Stackup (pp. 668, 671, 673–674) [U].
• Interviews the author has been conducting in Silicon Valley with engineers and marketers (p. 670) [U].
• Context: a SASE presidential address at UC Berkeley in 2016 (p. 661) [U].

Method

• Theoretical lecture/essay that develops concepts with historical and contemporary examples [T – characterisation].

Key concepts

Concept	How the source defines or uses it	Page	U/T
moral economy (Thompson)	Deeply held convictions guiding ordinary people's perception of economic interactions	662	U
moral economies (plural)	The circulation and exchange of moral intuitions, feelings, opinions and discourses	664–665	U
sense of propriety / merit / justice	Smith's three moral sentiments: what is proper, who deserves what, and the gap between merit and outcomes	666–667	U
alignment	Drawing subjectivities into record-keeping and knowledge-making systems on the market's terms	668, 670	U
unhingement	Value from following the unhinged movement of desire and habit online, and from differentiating people	668, 674	U
economic morality	A source of morality and sense of worth crafted for economic purposes	675	U
choice architecture / nudge	Designs that frame behaviour without changing preferences, like the urinal fly	671–672	U

How privacy and private data are understood

• Not discussed as privacy, but data collection is central: alignment depends on a vast machine that harvests and circulates data (browsers, cookies, APIs, data warehouses) (p. 670) [U].
• Personal data are a source of value: our sense of worth and our market value become tied to the data we produce about ourselves (p. 669) [U].
• Phones have become ‘a vast personality questionnaire’ that gives companies personal data and the ability to classify and differentiate (p. 673) [U].
• Trackers that follow people around are ‘essentially how Facebook and Google work’ (p. 674) [U].
• Records collected by start-ups become assets even if the company fails, with reference to Zuboff's ‘surveillance assets’ (pp. 674–675) [U].

Arguments and findings

• The economy is ‘morally thick’ and must be analysed as such (p. 662) [U].
• The poor are especially vulnerable to moral blame and regulation, and stigmatised groups are charged higher prices (p. 668) [U].
• Self-tracking makes us more productive and valuable for the system (p. 669) [U].
• Silicon Valley insiders publicly praise big data while closely monitoring their own children's online lives (p. 670) [U].
• The most effective data infrastructure is ‘baked into the background’; people contribute because it is there (p. 672) [U].
• Callon is wrong that market devices only produce calculating agents: profitability also requires exploiting irrationality, addiction and emotion (p. 672) [U].
• In modern capitalism, people are more profitable as ‘unhinged deviations’ than as formatted clones (p. 673) [U].

Limitations the source itself mentions

• The urinal example is ‘a bit far-fetched’ and used mostly as a metaphor (p. 674, n. 10) [U].
• Otherwise: Not found in the text.

What the source does not cover

• The state's own data use; the focus is companies and markets [T].
• Privacy regulation [T].
• Norway [T].

Possible relevance for the thesis

• Offers a vocabulary for how data collection is morally framed and made to seem natural (‘baked into the background’) [T].
• If Norwegian documents justify data use with moral language (responsibility, health, efficiency), the concept of economic morality may be useful [T].
• The examples are from the private sector, so transfer to the state's data use must be argued [T].

Connections to other sources

• Asdal et al. 2023 – cites this article on the moral as the economy's outside (Asdal et al. pp. 5, 22) [T – from the Asdal card]. Both use Thompson, Foucault and the idea of the good/moral in the economy [T].
• Foucault 2008 – Fourcade cites The Birth of Biopolitics (p. 663), not the panopticism text [U].
• Fairfield & Engel 2015 – thematic: behavioural models and value extraction from consumers [T].
• Marres 2025 – thematic: data infrastructure embedded in everyday life [T].
• Alegre 2022 – thematic: attention economy and manipulation [T].

Key quotes

“Economic value is produced both when individuals are morally aligned with the rational goals of capitalism, and when they perform unhinged deviations from the moral standard.” (p. 661)

“The economy is morally thick, and it must be analyzed as such.” (p. 662)

“If our sense of worth becomes increasingly tied to the stream of data we produce about ourselves, so is our value on the market.” (p. 669)

“Likewise, the most effective data infrastructure is fully institutionalized, as if baked into the background.” (p. 672)

“in modern capitalism, people are much more profitable as unhinged deviations than as formatted clones.” (p. 673)

Open questions for Rebekka

• Is ‘moral economy’ a concept you want to use, or is the article mainly background on digital capitalism?
• Do Norwegian documents present data collection as something that is simply ‘there’, baked into the background?
• Do the documents use moral language (responsibility, deservingness) when discussing citizens' data?
• How do you relate the commercial examples to the state's use of data?