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ABSTRACT
This paper explores the force of automation and its contradictions and resistances within (and beyond) the financial sector, with a specific focus on computational practices of credit-scoring and lending. It examines the operations and promotional discourses of fintech start-ups LendUp.com and Elevate.com that offer small loans to the sub-prime consumers in exchange for access to their online social media and mobile data, and Zest AI and LenddoEFL that sell automated decision-making tools to verify identity and assess risk. Reviewing their disciplinary reputational demands and impacts on users and communities, especially women and people of colour, the paper argues that the automated reimagination of credit and creditability disavows the formative design of its AI and redefines moral imperatives about character to align with the interests of digital capitalism. The economic, social and cultural crises precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic have only underscored the internal contradictions of these developments, and a variety of debt resistance initiatives have emerged, aligned with broader movements for social, economic, and climate justice around the globe. Cooperative lending circles such as the Mission Asset Fund, activist groups like #NotMyDebt, and Debt Collective, a radical debt abolition movement, are examples of collective attempts to rehumanize credit and debt and resist the appropriative practices of contemporary digital finance capitalism in general. Running the gamut from accommodationist to entirely radical, these experiments in mutual aid, debt refusal, and community-building provide us with roadmaps for challenging capitalism and re-thinking credit, debt, power, and personhood within and beyond the current crises.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The assessment of personal credit predicated on character also informed the rise of public banking and finance capitalism in the 18th century - practices that were, in turn, based almost entirely on the appropriation and dehumanization of black and indigenous people. Colonial exploits, the slave trade chief among them, comprised, as Marx writes in Capital (Marx Citation1990, p.991), the ‘forcing house for the credit system.' From the ways the slave trade ‘consolidated and ‘credited’ an abstract fiction of value' (Baucom Citation2005, p. 16) for human bodies via its maritime insurance policies, to the ‘feminization’ of financial speculation in discourse but simultaneous barring of women from actual investment practices (Ingrassia, Citation1998); from the weaponization of English property law and credit and debt mechanisms in order to seize Indigenous land (Park Citation2016), to the continued exclusion and marginalization of women and people of colour in the banking and credit system (Baradaran Citation2017, Taylor Citation2019, Roy Citation2012), finance capitalism has always been a racist and patriarchal project.
2 As of December 2021, LendUp had been forced out of business by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and its websites are no longer active. LendUp was found guilty of repeatedly lying about its services and cheating its customers, and was forced to pay a $100,000 fine, stop issuing new loans, and collecting on old ones. The company will be closed completely by early 2022 (Johnson Citation2021).
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Alison Hearn
Alison Hearn is a scholar and activist whose research focuses on digital labour, culture and politics, specifically the intersections of digital media, self-presentation, reputation and creditability. She also writes about the university as a cultural and political site. She has published widely on these issues in such journals as Social Media + Society, Journal of Consumer Culture, and the International Journal of Communication, and in edited volumes including The Media and Social Theory, Blowing Up the Brand, and Commodity Activism. She is co-author, with Liora Salter, of Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Organizing Equality: Dispatches from a Global Struggle. She currently serves as Chair of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).