Knowledge/Seizure: Debt and Data in Kenya's Zero Balance Economy
Knowledge/Seizure: Debt and Data in Kenya's Zero Balance Economy
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知识/扣押：肯尼亚零余额经济中的债务和数据
作者：
Donovan K
本文探讨了肯尼亚基于手机的贷款的增长情况，目前有数百万人通过将数字数据转化为信用评分的服务借款。由于持续的紧缩和市场化，许多人发现自己转向昂贵的短期信贷来“争取时间”。我们背离了数字经济的精算方法，这种方法将数据的技术分析放在首位，以强调种族征用和食利资本主义的重要性。我们重点关注位于数字数据和债务行业中心的 Safaricom 公司，展示其基础设施实力和缺乏监管如何使其能够从用户那里攫取价值。 Safaricom 不仅服务于其自身的积累，还服务于肯尼亚国家的财政需求，而肯尼亚国家和其公民一样，都在无法承担的债务下呻吟。公民和国家都在流动性不足和波动性的双重约束下运作，我们将这种情况称为“零平衡经济”。通过将大众债务危机与主权债务危机联系起来，我们探讨了掠夺性包容性的半国营形式——既不是市场也不是国家，而是两者的笨拙合并。
This article examines the growth in mobile phone‐based lending in Kenya, where millions now borrow from services that translate digital data into credit scores. Reeling from ongoing retrenchment and marketisation, many find themselves turning to expensive, short‐term credit to “buy time”. We depart from actuarial approaches to the digital economy that foreground the technical analysis of data in order to emphasise the importance of racialised expropriation and rentier capitalism. We focus on Safaricom, the corporation at the centre of the digital data and debt industry, showing how its infrastructural power and absent regulation permit it to seize value from users. Safaricom serves not only its own accumulation, but the fiscal imperatives of a Kenyan state that is, like its citizens, groaning under untenable debt. Citizens and state alike operate within the twinned constraints of illiquidity and volatility, a situation we call the “zero balance economy”. By linking the popular and sovereign debt crises we explore parastatal formations of predatory inclusion—neither market nor state, but an unwieldy amalgamation of the two.