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People make music and sing songs together. The ability to capture and reproduce recordings, to isolate and freeze a piece of this practice, made possible the now familiar world of intellectual property in musical compositions and performances. While music is something people just make, and a song or a tune is something people can learn, a recording is something someone can own. The character and scope of that ownership is intrinsically strange for reasons explored in any analysis of the paradoxes of intellectual "property." o It is a kind of enforceable fiction. The partial escape of recorded music back into the commons, and its subsequent recapture by rights holders, illuminates the relationship between the social practice of music and the infrastructure of ownership enabled by technology.

— The Ordinal Society by Kieran Healy, Marion Fourcade (10%)

We are left with a field of oppositions that, even if they do not rise to the level of true paradox, remain at least puzzling. In everyday use, software makes previously impossible things easy but remains riddled with irritations and failures. The industry that produces it is intensely competitive, but large parts of it rest on a foundation of open-source tools. Platforms accumulate users and profits but seem to give away many of their products for free. Surveillance and tracking in the service of monetization is pervasive, but people irrepressibly share things

— The Ordinal Society by Kieran Healy, Marion Fourcade (9%)

Convinced of the transformative potential of their technology, firms capture the commons, disregard the legal rules that structure industries, automate workers away, and commodify everything in their path. Google digitizes entire libraries or sends a fleet of cars out to drive and photograph every road in the world; Uber upends and reconstructs the market for taxis; OpenAI ingests the whole of the web; every major organization tries to collect as much information as it can about any- one who wanders into view, the better to transform them into bundles of comparable, valuable data. During this expansionary phase, the best strategy is simply to see how much you can get away with.

— The Ordinal Society by Kieran Healy, Marion Fourcade (9%)

In this way, social-scientific critiques of information technology can end up as mirror images of the happy talk that comes out of the mouths of pitch-deck pur-veyors. Like a mirror, they reverse left and right, so that Panglossian hype becomes a blanket critique of technology. The world is always being made a worse place, not a better one. But—also like a mirror-these critiques do not reverse up and down. The technology is still assumed to work as claimed, even though in practice it may be buggy or broken most of the time.

— The Ordinal Society by Kieran Healy, Marion Fourcade (8%)