Sophie Sparham, 'The Accountant' (2022)
A nice campy hardboiled vignette exploring the intersection of digital cash, surveillance, and disciplinarity. There are shades of Zhima / Sesame Credit, the Social Credit System, ration books, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton.
The basic idea is: all expenditures are tagged with a category ('sex', 'alcohol', 'transportation', 'home' etc.), and this data can be accessed by third parties. The analogy seems to be with a credit report, so we might assume that all it takes is a fee to gain access to anyone's spending data. The story gives the examples of a job interview candidate and a candidate for public office. Of course, it turns out that skilled accountant-hackers can also edit this data for a fee, so any argument on the basis of transparency is on shaky ground.
It's from the Cybersalon collection 22 Ideas About the Future, and very much in the futurist space -- just a flash of an idea, with enough atmosphere, character and incident to bring it to life -- and then it's over, hopefully leaving a interesting questions in its wake. I'm interested, for example, in (a) how different expenditures are categorised in the first place, (b) who might have access to the more granular data ('sex' can mean a lot of different things), (c) the kind of second order socio-financial engineering this might enable, e.g. discounts at point-of-sale based on credit profile, and (d) the impact on moral beliefs -- the unfortunate job interview candidate might be in a bad place right now, but might the long term record across society as a whole demonstrate that nobody is as perfect as they pretend? Could we imagine a parallel version where he doesn't get his record changed, and gets the job anyway on the basis of the bigger picture, including an onboarding process that will help him turn his life around? (And perhaps also, some strict clauses around his probationary period ...)
Further reading: Brett Scott's Cloudmoney (2022).
