“All Data is Credit Data”

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines new means of measuring creditworthiness, reputation and character online and briefly considers the implications for contemporary art. New technologies for determining creditworthiness abound; for instance, companies in the so-called fintech (financial technology) industry, provide new methods for granting credit to the underbanked, using big data analytics and psychometric testing. Similarly, Rachel Botsman and others envision a future in which reputation becomes a kind of currency, following its bearers from platform to platform. Together, the world of consciously projected reputation-images online and the fintech industry’s inconspicuous measurement of creditworthiness form a conscious/ unconscious couplet of character measurement apparatuses. Character, in these data analytic worlds, acts as a lived fiction, a representation of futurity online that determines in advance one’s level of access to markets and social spheres. How might these emerging conditions change the ways in which artworks understand – and perhaps resist – the demand to be “good” characters online? Some possible artistic responses to this world of character measurement include questioning the correlative logics of measurement itself and testing the limits of creditworthy character traits, in order to demonstrate that credit must always rely on a set of locally shared assumptions as to what might be considered “desirable” behaviour.