Credit-score surveillance shifted all rectification costs onto individuals, not firms.

Evidence

Even though the Panopticon was conveniently privatized, neither Fair Isaac nor the credit raters were held to be responsible for “risk” created by their own activities offloaded onto their subjects, unlike the neoliberal selves that they kept under close surveillance. This again illustrates the sharp asymmetry of neoliberal concepts of “risk.” Should the chains of identification be breached in FICO, say, by “identity theft” or “data errors” or “computer glitches,” these firms did not bear the responsibility of making the person whole; no, that devolved to the frantic individual in extremis to somehow “correct” or otherwise rectify their deviance from the imperatives of actuarial accuracy. It should be noted that the credit raters did not make rectification easy. An elaborate secondary market grew up in service providers who themselves charge the agents to monitor the records of the consumer credit-rating firms, in order to flag any divergence of the surveillance dossiers from the notional identity that the entrepreneurial self entertained about his own autobiography. This nicely illustrated the key neoliberal precept that any “problems” generated by neoliberalism could be adequately addressed by a redoubled bout of entrepreneurial innovation and further market activity. Unfortunately, that particular neoliberal precept was embarrassed by the further breakdown of the whole credit-scoring edifice in the crisis of 2008. And yet, just as in so many other instances, the entrenched character of FICO scores in everything from credit cards to background checks, plus their purported “convenience,” prompts them to live on, unfazed by their tenuous connection to reality. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 361

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘asymmetry of risk’ theme throughout the book and to Foucault’s Panopticon; also parallels the diamond-trade chapter’s information-controller dynamics.
• SEED: Could seed an essay on how the credit-score edifice survived 2008’s demonstrated failure — institutional stickiness overriding falsifiability.
• DEFINE: Concretely defines the neoliberal asymmetry of risk by showing who bears the cost of surveillance errors.