“Into Human Flesh and the Human Heart”: On Promotionalism and the Long Con of Fintech Credit-Scoring

Abstract

Fintech start-ups, such as Zest AI and LenddoEFL, promise enhanced levels of financial inclusion via the creation of “re-socialized” credit profiles derived from accessing clients’ online banking habits and social media accounts. As our social data becomes credit data, the performance of “appropriate” online selfhood can now, quite literally, become money. This article explores the reputational demands, disciplines, and contradictions of ostensibly alternative computational/platformed credit scoring. It argues that the world of “surveillance capitalism” involves the maintenance of a relentlessly promotional value chain. As we are summoned to assiduously self-promote online in pursuit of a creditable reputation and financial inclusion, the self-reflexive promotional logics of the platforms themselves work to remake the world in their own image, paradoxically undermining the productive economic assumptions upon which they are predicated.