The unbelievable truth
In Hal Hartley's film The Unbelievable Truth, the main protagonist, Audry Hugo, offers a succinct summation of credit-score ethics: "People are only as good as the deals they make and keep."
Equifax didn't even renege on a deal it had made with us; it did something worse. It made us the bill of goods in someone else's deal gone wrong. As many pointed out after the company finally made public the fact that the personal information of more than 140 million people had been stolen from its servers, Equifax was not in business with the people it gathered information on, and it had made no deals with them. As Mike Konczal put it on Twitter, "Equifax is a surveillance company where you are the product, not a customer. It not protecting data and making people vulnerable follows." Equifax not only converted our reputations into a product, it aggregated them so that they could be indiscriminately compromised in bulk.
Presumably, Equifax's defenders would argue that it and other credit-scoring agencies make it possible for the contemporary economy to function more efficiently, in the absence of such institutions as debtors' prisons. It allows for more exchanges among people who have no particular reason beyond the credit-scoring system to trust one another. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy's paper "Seeing Like a Market" explain this well:
Cash exchanges create problems of trust and malfeasance that people manage through direct social ties, norms of exchange, and reputational or moral economies ... But electronic systems transmute these interactional processes into quantitative data. The well-situated consumer feels the benefits directly. Her reputation is no longer confined to a local community of peers. The trust she feels confident extending is no longer circumscribed by her social network. Instead, she carries it with her in her handbag.
Deals and the data about them become the medium of trust. "Direct social ties," not so much.
The intention of scoring, as Fourcade and Healy explain, is not to bar people from markets but to compel their inclusion.
As in the credit market, a person with a ‘bad’ score on some dimension might nevertheless be valuable for that very reason to a particular kind of company. In a system of classification situations, no one is in principle outside the market. Everyone should be able to obtain service, if the terms are right for the servicer. As long as individuals are visible, measures of risk can be calculated and the terms of a profitable exchange established. The better the data, the better firms can predict whether a person is likely to be well served by their product, even if that in effect means predicting who is most likely to be tempted by a bad or exploitative deal.
As long as you can be watched, you can be "trusted," though this seems like a peculiar usage of the word trust. Nobody tells a babysitter, "We've hidden cameras throughout the house because we trust you." But the point is that the retail industry has cameras, beacons, and trackers implanted throughout the world and in our phones, so our shopping behavior is being thoroughly, almost inescapably surveilled. The goal isn't to democratize market participation but to stratify it, to make sure everyone must not only constantly make deals but the worst ones they can be lured into.
One might think of trust as making verification superfluous; companies like Equifax think it is a matter of making verification ubiquitous. Equifax points toward the culmination of capitalism's obliteration of all noneconomic relations, supplanting them with the "cash nexus," a process Marx and Engels eloquently describe in The Communist Manifesto:
[The bourgeousie] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
I feel like I've been bathing in that "icy water of egotistical calculation" for a long time. In many ways I have been successfully socialized into consumer society, which depends on individuals who are deeply invested in expressing their individualism through goods yet also skeptical of forms of belonging that don't involve market mediation. You're supposed to participate in trends while thinking oneself above them.
I'm often preoccupied with that sort of "resistance," which speaks mainly to how trends and brands exert control over me. More generally, I am uncomfortable with virtually all forms of collective participation and emotionality — they feel like "conformity" to me — and therefore tend to be suspicious of such occasions. I'm often beholden to a zero-sum view of affect, where a shared emotion is a diminished one, as if others are stealing the feeling's potency by feeling it with me, as if an emotion's power comes from its being singular, unique to my sensibility. You have to listen to this song, only I can appreciate how great it is!
Despite myself, I usually imagine social participation to occur within marketized space; if I can't buy something somewhere, I have the feeling that there is nothing to do. In most situations, I find not having to interact with other people to be far more convenient than interaction, and I'm comforted by scenarios where my engagement with other people is mediated and rendered programmatic. For instance, at Wawa — time for some David Brooks–style hoagie theory! — I am much happier inputing my sandwich order through a touchscreen than trying to explain what I want to the person who will actually make the sandwich. The new startup Bodega, which promises a convenience store without clerks where you can shop without human interaction, is designed with people like me in mind. I am more at ease playing chess online with a stranger or, better, a computer opponent than I am sitting across a board from someone I know. I'd rather send a picture than be looked at. I'd rather write this newsletter than talk to you.
All that is to say I am more comfortable with ubiquitous systematic surveillance than with the frank scrutiny of a single other person. I've been socialized to be wary of other people (and the "naked self-interest" I must prudently assume drives them) and take joy when possible in goods and market exchanges instead, if not in the efficiency of exchange itself. Accordingly I tend to take pleasure in the "content" other people produce rather than in those people themselves. This lets me experience them on my terms. And I don't have to expend any attention on consuming this content, just acknowledging it is often enough.
This ingrained preference for convenience and unilateral, shopping-style decisionmaking over the uncertain demands of social interaction means I should be pretty comfortable in the world according to Equifax. I should be happy to have my reputation managed as a product, happy to view it as something that is produced through surveillance of my market behaviors and not through my personal relationships or my civic participation — judged not by how well I get along with people but how I uphold bargains with strangers and corporations.
I should even appreciate how social media companies promise to extend this process, tracking a wider range of behavior and overlaying an interface over sociality that makes it appear more convenient, more transactional. They promise more ways of keeping score and more elaborate opportunities for me to read that score (and the algorithmically driven targeting derived from it) as a proxy for my social participation. These seem like eminently believable truths. Under total surveillance, reputation becomes a pure product of data; these emerging social credit systems, as Fourcade and Healy put it, will have "bypassed the problem of the agent's inner life altogether." I can then read the absence of an inner life as evidence of my trustability.
These systems also promise the "seamless satisfaction of particular wants," coalescing algorithmic verification and anticipation into a "personalized presence that is so embedded in daily routines that it becomes second nature." But this "personalized presence" may not be enough to keep us company in the long run. It brings into relief its own inadequacies, the limits to the emotional gratifications of avoidance. Convenience itself may become too convenient, and we may start to fetishize inconvenience as somehow more authentic, the indicator of "real" sociality.
In Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tufekci interprets horizontalist, occupation-style protests in this light: They produce a sense of community — an important goal in its own right for many protests — in part through their arduous inconvenience, which translates as a kind of proof of altruism when efficiency has come to stand for an economistic ruthlessness. "Many people are drawn to protest camps because of the alienation they feel in their ordinary lives as consumers. Exchanging products without money is like reverse commodity fetishism: for many, the point is not the product being exchanged but the relationship that is created, one that is an expression of their belief that money is not necessary to care for one another." Tufekci points to the fact that protest camps often establish libraries, despite their having very little pragmatic purpose. These libraries, in her view, "encapsulated the spirit of the protest: that people can and should interact with one another and exchange ideas in a relationship not mediated by money."
It's probably a sign of my misguidedness, but the thought of these strictly symbolic libraries depresses me. My optimum protest would be sitting and reading all those books, not chanting slogans and blocking traffic and having meetings. That is, I would want to participate in the community generated by a protest by withdrawing from it. I am wary of a community that would have a pile of books around to symbolize the exchange of ideas while, in practice, subordinated ideas to elaborate debating protocols. But then again, I am used to being favored by such protocols, to being heard when I want to be heard.
Still, I want the books to matter. That feels more visceral to me than the ideal social relations evoked by procedures designed to assure every opinion is heard. That's just another way of saying I want interactions to be about products, not relations. Then, at least, I can pretend that the relationships themselves haven't become the product.
Tufekci describes how in the protest camps she visited or was told about, "there was always a surplus of donated food, clothes, blankets, and raincoats because people wanted to give. This affirmation of belonging outside money relationships and of the intimacy of caring for people is the core of what motivates many to participate in protests." But this seems to conflate giving things with caring about people, with participating — they aren't mutually exclusive but they aren't commensurate either. It seems plausible that camps acquired a surplus of things because people wanted the things to stand in for them; there were more people willing to give things then there were willing to hang around and use them. Giving feels like belonging, even though it is unilateral. I usually end up giving to cause as a way of not having to participate in other ways: I buy my way out, and the cash nexus wins again.
Occupation-style protests are often interpreted as prefigurative, modeling the world participants want to live in, the kinds of social relations that should be normative. This makes me think about how my relation to myself is prefigured in everyday life, in all my opaque encounters with entities like Equifax and the social media algorithms that are trying to harness my attention — in all the ways I can know myself without recourse to other people. These are the things that seem to render me trustable in the world, they become the way I learn to trust myself.
Several years ago it was reported that Facebook created ghost profiles for people who hadn't signed up, based on data gathered from other sources. Now it is clear those ghost profiles are also the "personalized presence" that Fourcade and Healy describe, a presence taking material shape in "digital assistants" like Alexa and Siri, false names for these shadow selves that increasingly do our desiring for us. Such ghosts haunt the profiles of active users, driving the algorithms that shape their feeds, determining what experiences they should have, who they should know, what they are supposed to like.
If I want to know who I am supposed to be, at least I know where I can go and how I can participate.