Credit Reporting and Consumer Surveillance

Abstract

During the course of the twentieth century, consumer credit expanded and intensified across the United States, incorporating specialized financial capital to create and invent new possibilities for the ongoing fulfillment of a continuously regenerated, increasingly heightened process of consumer desire. Credit, as a commercialized contractual agreement to pay for goods or repay money borrowed in the present against some temporal conception of the future, has always presented lenders with uncertainty: the possibility of profit from interest or other charges balanced against the threat or hazard of loss from nonrepayment, default or delinquency. Since the 1960s, as we have seen, most particularly with the entry of banks into direct consumer lending and the development of new forms of credit like the credit card, the process of lending and borrowing money becomes abstracted from specific sites of consumption. In doing so, it has increasingly come to rely upon the self-governing capacities of individuals, their potential to regulate and control both their use of, and their repayment to, a personalized, instantly deployable, temporally unbounded form of credit.