Review of Lauer's Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

Abstract

In September 2017, Equifax, a leading credit reporting agency, announced a security breach that may have jeopardized the personal information, including Social Security Numbers, of nearly half the American population. In the wake of the breach, the government’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) awarded a nowsuspended $7.2 million contract, perhaps ironically, to Equifax to verify taxpayer identity. In Creditworthy, Josh Lauer offers many insights that help contextualize that headline: he provides a history of credit that puts the spotlight on the hitherto largely undocumented development of credit institutions to link 19th Century surveillance regimes to 21st Century financialization; he traces the development of how credit reporting agencies use capitalist surveillance as a tool that now gathers information about millions of consumers; he shows how the textualizing of bodies (such as with Social Security Numbers) for the purposes of social monitoring has commercial rather than state origins; and he shows how government agencies—including the Department of Justice, FBI, IRS, and police—have depended on consumer data from credit institutions since at least World War I.