“ My Story Has No Strings Attached ” : Credit Cards , Market Devices , and a Stone Guest

In the retail industry, consumer credit is sometimes seen as a dangerous parasite that can become bigger than its host. Credit cards are marketing devices that aim at easing the attachment between consumers and goods. Credit cards are also value meters that trace every single transaction. Credit cards can even be “gardening” tools. Sowing is the name used in Chile’s retail industry to call the data management strategy that consists of extending the credit limit of low income customers depending on their payment behavior. Data on previous transactions and behavior replaces collateral. Credit cards are not only used by the persons whose names are on the cards; People borrow and loan their cards, or, more precisely, their cards’ credit limits. Credit cards do not trace behavior but hidden networks. Can social relations act as parasites on credit – uninvited guests whose host is already a parasite? This article tells the story of a study that started in the middle – credit cards – and slowly became a Serresian economic anthropology. 1 IMTFI Working Paper 2014-3 Credit Cards, Market Devices, and a Stone Guest Introduction: Seeing Like a Credit Card The title of this article comes from an advertisement I first encountered a couple of years ago outside a store located on the campus of the University of California at Irvine (Figure 1). The text of the campaign was: “My story has no strings attached. With no late fees and no penalty rate, the Citi Simplicity Card keeps life simple.” This slogan connects the two main conceptual and methodological challenges the paper tries to unfold. First, “Citi Simplicity Card keeps life simple.” This sentence informs potential customers that they can relax because there are no late fees or penalty rates that they should be concerned about. But, at the same time, by highlighting that what makes this product unique is its simplicity, the campaign seems to imply that customers should not necessarily expect pleasant surprises when dealing with credit cards. The starting point seems to be that credit cards are opaque economic goods. And, no doubt, they are. Credit cards are certainly opaque for consumers trying to understand interest rates and fees, not to mention the complicated markets where their personal data and debt are securitized and exchanged. At the same time, although credit issuers certainly get a better grasp of fees, interest rates, and the secondary markets of data and debt, cards are not simply transparent objects for them. Credit issuers gather massive amounts of data, but this data is limited to what can be digitally traced. As will be explained with some detail in the next section, credit cards also play crucial parts in secondary economies that cannot be observed by the credit issuers’ data collection devices. It is difficult to see through credit cards and this paper grapples with this opaqueness. To do so, it combines stories gathered at two different fieldwork sites. On the one hand, using credit card invoices as financial diaries and in-depth interviews, the paper reconstructs and maps credit transactions carried out by the inhabitants of thirteen households in low income areas in Santiago de Chile. On the other hand, based on forty in-depth interviews with senior executives and regulators (most of them risk managers of department stores and banks and executives from other institutions, such as debt collection companies, regulatory bodies, and industry associations) I point to the particular risk and marketing strategies of consumer credit lenders in Chile.1 These two different kinds of material are not combined to get a privileged, panoramic point of view. Rather, it is only through the study of the practices of credit card users that I can observe the blindness of data managers and, vice versa, through the study of data management that I can see what the 1 Interviews with executives were conducted in two stages: between October 2010 and January 2011, and between September and December 2011. The information collected in the interviews has been complemented with a review of secondary documents and participant observation during the main annual convention of the credit and debt collection industry in 2010. This work was funded by Chile’s National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (Project 11090375). Felipe González, Camila Peralta, and Felipe Ubeira provided important assistance in the process of collecting the information. Fieldwork with users of credit cards was carried out in 2011 and 2012 and it was funded by The Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine. The research team of this latter project was led by the author of the current chapter with collaboration from Tomás Ariztía, Macarena Barros, and Camila Peralta. Further information about the methods and results of each project can be found in Ossandón (2014c) and Ossandón et al (manuscript). 2 IMTFI Working Paper 2014-3 Credit Cards, Market Devices, and a Stone Guest card users cannot see. Mine, therefore, is a second order observation (Esposito 2014, Frankel 2014, Ossandón 2014a, Stark 2014, Rodríguez 2014) of observations performed from two different positions in domestic finance. But, perhaps more importantly, it is by combining the information collected in these different sites that I, as a researcher, can deal with the opaqueness of credit cards as economic objects. The methodological approach followed here, in this sense, might fit with the type of anthropology recently defended by Bill Maurer and colleagues. In their words: This kind of anthropological analysis stands in relation to its objects not as sign to signifier (in which the goal is an adequate description of the world), but as itself a channel that brings other relations into focus as ‘objects of joint attention' (Maurer et al. 2013:56, discussing Kockelman 2010). In this case, the objects of joint attention are credit cards. However, cards are not observed only from one point of view, but rather from different sites. From each site, different relations are brought forward, calling also for different questions and concepts.2 The sections of this paper address the different questions encountered in this process of joint attention. Second, “the strings attached.” The Wiktionary page connects the expression “No strings attached” with this strange story: In ancient times, documents that were written on parchment had strings that were used to tie them shut, after they were rolled up. The Babylonian Talmud in Tractate Bava Metzi'a[2] mentions an example of a man who gives his wife a get (bill of divorce) with a string attached, but holds on to the string, so that he can snatch it back (apparently because he is unwilling to actually give her a divorce). According to Jewish law, this is not a valid divorce, because the man has not properly delivered the get, by freely giving it to his wife. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/no_strings_attached Now, note the next quotation taken from Michel Serres’ The Natural Contract: The bond is doubtless the first quasi-object suited to making our relations visible and concrete; the real chains of obligation, which are light and unburdensome within a space, weigh us down at its edges [...] All in all, its triple tress links me to forms, to things, and to others, and thus initiates me into abstraction, the world, and society. Through its channel pass information, forces, and laws. In a cord can be found all the objective and collective attributes of Hermes (Serres 1995: 107-108). The story from the Talmud does not refer only to hidden conditions in a particular contract, nor does it refer to the particular relations with those goods that captivate (Latour 2013) or even capture us (Deville 2014) associated with the term ‘attachment’ in the recent social studies of markets. Strings or bonds or cords, as Serres explains, connect things and people; they produce collectives. The same, or so it is argued here, can be said about credit cards. Cards are not only opaque, technically black boxed ‘market devices’ (Muniesa et al. 2007), but are also economic objects that assemble new, though not always easy to grasp, collectives. This chapter uses the metaphor of strings attached to refer to the collectives assembled with credit cards. 2 To say this in other terms, the approach followed here is neither inductive or deductive but closer to what Gilbert Simondon called transductive (Simondon 2009). As Yuk Hui explains: “Transduction comes from the prefix trans(across) and ducere (to lead), meaning ‘lead along or across, transfer.’ Transduction signifies a process or an action that leads to the transformation across different domains [...] Furthermore, he [Simondon] identifies transduction as the third way that juxtaposes induction and deduction, and provides a type of thinking that doesn't move uni-directionally from inside to outside, outside to inside, individual to collective, collective to individuals, but rather presents itself as the empirical process of the transformation of forms and structures” (Hui manuscript, 7). 3 IMTFI Working Paper 2014-3 Credit Cards, Market Devices, and a Stone Guest Another language explored by Serres (2007), which fits nicely with the issues here analyzed, is that of the parasite. The Parasite is about observation and observation of observations. The host cannot see the uninvited guests. But the guests cannot see if they have been observed by someone else. Only an ‘excluded third’ part can observe their relation. But the excluded part can also become a parasite, and so on. The parasite is also the logic of money and finance (Serres 2007). Money (and credit cards) are the typical quasi-objects. They mediate and can be exchanged by almost everything. But using these cards usually comes with a cost. They transform what they touch. They separate, making things and people objects of calculation, but they also connect, producing new circuits, populations, collectives. Thanks to Serres, we already know that. This chapter describes how this happens. It narrates a journey that followed some of the hidden strings attached to credit cards, and, by doing so mapped some of the parts played by cards in the multiple collectives that they have been helping to assemble.3