Surveillance-based lending techniques developed for the global poor were exported to exploit US families.
Evidence
Such methods were originally developed for markets in Africa to help the “unbanked”—people without established credit—to qualify for loans. One lending group interviewed potential customers in low-income countries and concluded that it would be easy to exploit the already beleaguered poor: “Most said they had no problem sharing personal details in exchange for much-needed funds.” But these app-based lending startups are typically developed and funded in Silicon Valley, and it is therefore not surprising that the same techniques have become part of a wider trend of exploiting American families that have been economically hollowed out by the financial crisis and neoliberalism’s austerity medicine. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 540
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader surveillance-capitalism dispossession thesis and to colonial/extractive economic parallels from other reading. — connects to: Predatory sub-prime lending preyed on America’s poor and racialized communities — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 154; Finance colonizes global South elites and American urban poor via intermediaries — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 153
- SEED: Angle for an essay: the ‘pilot market’ logic, where vulnerable populations are used as testing grounds for invasive techniques later exported to consumers in the global North.
Broader Connections
- Finance colonizes global South elites and American urban poor via intermediaries
#expands(0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 153 - Predatory sub-prime lending preyed on America’s poor and racialized communities
#complicates(0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 154