6 - Digital subprime: tracking the credit trackers

Summary

Sure, there is money in credit. But there is so much more growing besides. (Maurer, 2014: 517)

This chapter introduces a particularly ragged edge of debt involving companies seeking to exploit sets of social and technical relations that often, on the face of it, appear to bear quite little connection to finance. I call this assortment of socio-economic practices ‘digital subprime’. In introducing this phenomenon, I hope to provide a window into how a small but expanding set of startup businesses, in competition with both each other and the wider credit market, are attempting to refashion monetary ontologies, and in particular the relationship between money and credit.

In the study of money and credit, there is, as Bill Maurer notes in the opening quote, now something perhaps a little quaint about dwelling on their interdependence – that, on the one hand, all money is dependent on relations of credit and, on the other, that there is money to be made in and from credit. This mutually reinforcing relationship is of course not unimportant. Given the degree to which recent histories have been twisted around the relations and obligations of debt, it is hopefully no longer necessary to outline in too much detail its impact on a variety of registers of contemporary life, ranging across the most intimate and embodied to the most global and abstract. Suffice it to say that, alongside their self-evident role in amplifying a diversity of forms of material deprivation and, for far fewer, profit, relations of credit and debt are: pervasive and utterly everyday (Allon, 2010; Deville and Seigworth, 2015; Langley, 2008); powerful, historically deep-rooted and far reaching (Graeber, 2011; Lazzarato, 2012), playing a direct role in destabilising nation states and democratic processes (as recent Greek history has vividly demonstrated; see also Streeck (2011)), undeniably implicated in the amplification of a range of kinds uncertainty and anguish (Davies et al, 2015; Fitch et al, 2011) as well as cruelly misdirected optimism (Berlant, 2011), at least partly responsible for the routine invocation of particular modes of individualised, entrepreneurial subjectivity (Langley, 2008; Marron, 2009), while at the same time, in part through the quasi-alchemy of securitisation and leverage (Allon, 2015a; Montgomerie, 2009), exacerbating social cleavages of various kinds.