Privacy, privation, and person: Data, debt, and infrastructured personhood

Anthropologists have long examined how debt builds upon and occasions interpersonal relations. The recent rise of digital lending in Kenya suggests the necessarily relational dynamics of digital data as well. Despite promises of borrowing unencumbered by social forces, decisions regarding sums lent, tactics to ensure repayment, and profits, are all secured through discerning the relational social dynamics that undergird everyday life. Drawing on these insights, this chapter examines a notion that we call infrastructured personhood through the case of digital data and debt, foregrounding the tensions between attachment and detachment-among and between persons and infrastructures. These anxieties must be understood in terms distinct from the liberal emphasis on individual privacy, seeing digital debt in the context of local ideas of personhood and ongoing histories of privation. This analysis cuts against much of the literature on neoliberalism which argues that, today, we are witnessing the emergence of novel forms of subjectification as people are moulded to operate as autonomous mini-firms; entrepreneurs of the self guided by the same logic as the corporation. By contrast, we foreground how peoples' social relations and their lifeworlds are not being replaced by forms of autonomy but reconfigured as they are filtered through digital databases, infrastructures, and algorithms.