For decades under neoliberalism the circuits of finance have been
converging with those of information and communication technologies (ICTs).
High-tech and big money are leading poles of capitalist accumulation as they
restructure or eliminate other industries, capture and transform a vast gamut
of social relations, and generate frenetic activity in the industrial expanse
between them—a speculative and unfettered field of development known as
“fintech.”
The rise of techno-finance in the first two decades of the twenty-first
century presents a paradox. On the one hand, the commanding heights of the
financialized, digital economy have come crashing down to earth at regular
intervals. The dotcom bubble of 2000, the global financial crisis of 2007/2008,
and the widespread revelations regarding surveillance capitalists’ models of
data capture in the 2010s have discredited these sectors and their elites.
Techno-utopian schemes of “financial inclusion” and the promises of a digitally
networked public sphere have increasingly appeared morally, politically and
economically dubious, if not bankrupt, when considered next to the social
disintegration such models have wreaked on a wide scale.
But if the history of capitalism has taught us anything, it is that
crises are hardly a barrier to new frontiers of accumulation. Across the vast
industrial intersection of finance and tech, the forging of business plans,
technologies, and dreams has been white hot. Mobile lending apps have expanded
their reach into the global south, crypto-currency capitalists plan tax-free
societies run on blockchain principles, platform companies like Facebook dream
up digital currencies beyond state control, and the latest “development”
schemes of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (2018) rely on the
possibilities of fintech. If the myth that better integration into capitalist
markets through the spread of ICTs will ameliorate the ills of that system
increasingly rings hollow (see Bernards 2019, Gabor and Brooks 2017, Mader
2016, Manyika 2016), it still proves more than functional in raising capital,
marshalling labour, and providing the ideological accelerant for new extractive
schemes.
The fields of finance and tech converge in the notion of credit. On the
one hand, the financial apparatus is a capitalist system for producing and
allocating credit, a system that, today, as Randy Martin (2007) observed,
increasingly divides global populations into the celebrated (and creditworthy)
“risk-takers” and the discreditable and abject “at risk” populations whose
“financial illiteracy” must be policed and contained (see also Haiven 2017). On
the other, the notion of “credits” and “accounts” has been borrowed from
finance within the infrastructure by which corporate technologies integrate
“users” into their digital empires. Here, as Nick Dyer-Witheford (2015)
illustrates, labour and life are increasingly disciplined and shaped by one’s
accounts within the hyper-securitized micro-economies of a handful of leading
ICT corporations. In both cases, the seemingly neutral, benign, or technocratic
notion of credit, its actuarial banality, serves to hide or normalize the
neocolonial forms of power and violence at work in our financialized society of
control. Each form of credit actualizes our enrollment (and the expropriation
of our data) within what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls “behavioural futures
markets.”
Moreover, with the integration of the spheres of finance and digital
technology we are witnessing the proliferation of modes of what Jackie Wang
(2018) calls “exclusion through financial inclusion” which, as Paula
Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva (2012) note, aim to integrate the
wretched of the earth into a sabotaged system (see also Taylor 2019). These and
other authors note that we must see this as a continuation of the means by
which capitalism has, throughout its history, seen the poor, the colonized, and
the racialized as vectors for new experiments in financial technology, debt and
economic power (Kish and Leroy 2015, Roy 2012). Meanwhile, as Veronica Gago
(2015) and Silvia Federici (2018) point out, the expansion of digitalized
global debt, both national and personal, represents a capitalist seizure of the
sphere of social reproduction with particularly disastrous impacts on women.
We propose the theme of “Zero Credit” to designate two overlapping
conditions which are the starting point of this collection’s focus. First, the
familiar situation of having run out of credit, of being cast out from, yet
still enmeshed within, the digital circuits of tech/finance. Second, we refer
to the emergent situation of the collective calling in of the ‘debts’ of global
capitalism in the form of people’s movement against and beyond financialization
and the growing demand for radical alternatives to the global financial order:
our credit may be at zero but so is our patience. As Frances Negron-Muntaner
(Pérez-Rosario 2018) notes, we are in an era marked by the power of unpayable
debts, as shown by the imposition of financially-led disaster capitalism in
Puerto Rico (see also Klein 2018). The increasingly common condition of
perpetual insolvency, of permanent bankruptcy, has become the staging ground
for a new moment of anti-capitalist politics (Berardi 2012). What are the
possibilities of what Peggy Kamuf (2007) called “accounterability” in the
present moment? What are the methods for countering the dominant measurements
of accounts or of recounting value, life, the economy or the possibilities of
technology otherwise?
For this special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies,
we seek to map the convergence of ICTs and the debt/finance system, as well as
to bring in to view the forces counteracting and organizing alternatives the
dreams of fintech. The editors welcome short proposals (250-300 words) for
contributions interrogating the intersections of (1) emergent digital
frameworks of power; (2) debt regimes, new and old; and (3) the collective
resistance of social movements. We are particularly interested in critical
examinations of interventions with the following themes:
- Social media scoring and credit-worthiness
- The end of the cryptodream?
- Algorithmic discipline - real and virtual
- “Third World debts” in a digital age
- Racialized subjects of risk
- Subjectivities of default
- Digital currencies from below
- Reparations in a digital context
- Genealogies of digital technology in debt
- Colonial debt/colonial technology
- (Technologies of) mobility and debt
- Social credit and governmental debt/credit systems
- Credit and social power
- Utopian/dystopian credit economies
- Credit and social reproduction
- Credit, belief, faith
- Tax havens and digital offshore
- History of credit ratings
- Migration and debt
- Policy proposals and their dangers
- The temporal debts of extraction
Interested contributors should submit proposals by following this link.
The publication timeline is as follows:
Deadline for abstracts: March 16, 2020
Decision notification: April 3, 2020
First drafts due: June 12, 2020
Revisions due: October 13, 2020
Anticipated publication date: Spring 2021
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