2
Credit, Characterization, Personification
A 2010 ad campaign for FreeScore.com, a website selling credit reports and credit monitoring, presents a sequence of strange but resonant images.1 Titled “The Three Score Guys,” the series emphasizes the importance of getting one’s score from all three major credit bureaus. The ads in the campaign all feature a variation on a theme: A young, male consumer is seeking credit to make a major purchase. Suddenly he finds himself shadowed by personifications of all three of his credit scores. Two are good (in the upper 700s, of a possible 850) and are represented by attractive, athletic white men in black bodysuits emblazoned with the score being personified. But when a third, lower score of 583 appears in the form of a shorter, balding guy with a paunch and wearing a hockey mask, his presence threatens to prevent the young man from getting credit for his purchase (Figure 2.1). By ad’s end, the low score has been replaced with another high-700s score, now represented by a third athletic white guy. In one sense, the ideology behind these images is not surprising. As the previous chapter made clear, contemporary behavioralist thought insists on a link between personal behavior and economic rationality. Here, the idea of “fitness”—implied by the youthful athleticism of the high-score figurations and contrasted to the apparently older, weaker, fatter physique of the low score— registers the association between personal responsibility and fiscal credibility. Being obese and being in debt are linked, by “The Three Score Guys,” within what Lauren Berlant calls the “shaming sickness of sovereignty,” as “cris[es] of choosing and antiwill.” These ads suggest that much as a seemingly objective, impartial piece of biophysical data like the Body Mass Index can become the site of biopolitical norms—regulating and managing both the individual body and the species body of the population—the credit score makes it possible, as Berlant puts it, to “link the political administration of life to . . . the care of the monadic self.”2 55
