116 - Between FinTech and Far-Right I: Placing Debt in a New Conjuncture

Living with debt has become a widespread experience that has evolved alongside the housing crisis. Structurally produced by income stagnation, unemployment, rising living costs, prolonged austerity, inflation, and the retrenchment of social benefits, housing financialization exacerbated overindebtedness over the last decade. While access to subprime mortgages for single-family housing indebted lower- and middle-income populations in some cities, elsewhere, the financialization of and speculation with rental housing fostered indebtedness through rising rents and resulting rent arrears. Mortgage debts or rent arrears have developed in conjunction with other forms of formal and informal debt – platforms, credit cards, loan sharks – and in a global conjuncture of national and municipal debt. Our aim in this series is to advance conceptual groundwork on the nexus of technological, political and financial change as it is experienced at the household level. We seek to bring international scholars and activists into a global conversation that places debt in the techno-political conjuncture of our times. While extending financial actors’ influence into intimate domains and over existential needs of debtors, today’s politics of fin-techno-capitalist change plays out in a new political conjuncture defined by the global rise of illiberal and authoritarian forms of governance, the resurgence of far-right movements, and associated forms of financial violence. Scholars have not only witnessed ever more extractive and predatory debt regimes under far-right governments, but they have also traced the entanglement of far-right politics and industry development, a relationship that is especially visible in the emergence of Silicon Valley–driven technocapitalism. In the first episode of our series, Between FinTech and Far-Right: Placing Debt in a New Conjuncture, we ask: How do household debt, technological transformations in the financial sector, and the rise of authoritarian and far-right movements intersect today?