[Commlist] TOPIA CFP--Zero Credit: Countering the Dreams of Techno-Finance

Call for Proposals

“Zero Credit: Countering the Dreams of Techno-Finance”

Special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
Issue 44, Spring 2021

Edited by: Enda Brophy, Max Haiven and Benjamin Anderson

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: 
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfGGglfMmktB5LjHxx0Ka2-xo5EcSDKlpcY0GvJXbd72_3XRA/viewform?usp=sf_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

Works cited
“The Bali Fintech Agenda : Chapeau Paper.” The International Monetary 
Fund and the World Bank Group, September 19, 2018. 
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/390701539097118625/The-Bali-Fintech-Agenda-Chapeau-Paper%20.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los 
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.
Bernards, Nick. “Tracing Mutations of Neoliberal Development Governance: 
‘Fintech’, Failure and the Politics of Marketization.” Environment and 
Planning A: Economy and Space 51, no. 7 (October 2019): 1442–59.
Chakravartty, Paula, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Accumulation, 
Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An 
Introduction.” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 361–385.
Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital 
Vortex. London: Pluto, 2015.
Federici, Silvia. “Women, Money and Debt: Notes for a Feminist 
Reappropriation Movement.” Australian Feminist Studies 33, no. 96 (April 
3, 2018): 178–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2018.1517249.
Gabor, Daniela, and Sally Brooks. “The Digital Revolution in Financial 
Inclusion: International Development in the Fintech Era.” New Political 
Economy 22, no. 4 (July 4, 2017): 423–36.
Gago, Verónica. “Financialization of Popular Life and the Extractive 
Operations of Capital: A Perspective from Argentina.” South Atlantic 
Quarterly 114, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 11–28. 
https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2831257.
Haiven, Max. “The Uses of Financial Literacy: Financialization, the 
Radical Imagination, and the Unpayable Debts of Settler-Colonialism.” 
Cultural Politics 13, no. 3 (2017): 348–69.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & 
Black Study. Wivenhoe, New York and Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013.
Kamuf, Peggy. “Accounterability,” Textual Practice 21, no. 2 (June 
2007): 251–66.
Kish, Zenia, and Justin Leroy. “Bonded Life: Technologies of Racial 
Finance from Slave Insurance to Philanthrocapital.” Cultural Studies 29, 
no. 5–6 (2015): 630–51.
Klein, Naomi. The Battle for Paradise. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018.
Mader, Philip. “Card Crusaders, Cash Infidels and the Holy Grails of 
Digital Financial Inclusion.” BEHEMOTH - A Journal on Civilisation 9, 
no. 2 (December 2016): 59–81.
Martin, Randy. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial 
Logic of Risk Management. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Manyika, James, Susan Lund, Marc Singer, Olivia White, and Chris Berry. 
“Digital Finance for All: Powering Inclusive Growth in Emerging 
Economies.” McKinsey Global Institute, September 2016. Pérez-Rosario, 
Vanessa. “Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy 
An Interview with Frances Negrón-Muntaner.” Small Axe (blog), June 18, 
2018. 
http://smallaxe.net/sxlive/unpayable-debt-capital-violence-and-new-global-economy-interview-frances-negron-muntaner.
Roy, Ananya. “Subjects of Risk: Technologies of Gender in the Making of 
Millennial Modernity.” Public Culture 24, no. 1 66 (April 16, 2012): 131–55.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate 
Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill NC: University of 
North Carolina Press, 2019.
Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public 
Affairs, 2019.

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