Subprime loans aren’t just for homes: A quarter of people who took out auto loans last year are considered subprime, meaning they have bad credit scores, typically lower than 640. And like defaulting homeowners, life’s not getting easier for them. In a recent report, The New York Times revealed that many borrowers with low credit ratings have to endure more than just sky-high interest rates if they want to drive a car off the lot. Now they must also allow the repo man to ride with them at all times. This repo man isn’t a flesh-and-blood person occupying one of the car’s seats, though. He’s a technological extension of the lender — called a starter interrupt device —installed in the vehicles of subprime borrowers. The device allows lenders to track and monitor the location of the vehicle — both in real time and over time — and provides them with the ability to remotely shut off vehicles if, say, the borrower falls behind on payments (sometimes by just a few days) or drives outside an approved area. There is no escaping debt collectors who can, with the push of a button on their smartphones, disable your car until you cough up payment. As one collector told the Times, “I have disabled a car while I was shopping at Walmart.” The Times provided a number of stories from people who had their cars surprisingly stop working because lenders switched them off for one reason or another. They range from startling — one woman was temporarily stranded at a gas station with her children — to mind-boggling: Another woman’s car shut off while she was driving, “sending her careening across a three-lane Las Vegas highway.” The danger the starter interrupter poses to borrowers and other drivers is problematic in its own right. But these technologies of control are more than just instruments of aggressive lenders that want to ensure they get the expected return on their investment; they are also a natural product of our terribly exploitative financial system, which is always churning out innovative ways to squeeze the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Decelerate now

The political climate has clearly shifted in favor of creditors, which can demand near absolute certainty that they can extract payment from debtors. As starter-disabling devices proliferate, that certainty is becoming more important than your certainty that the car in front of you isn’t going to suddenly decelerate and veer off the road. Or that a once mobile vehicle idling at a stoplight won’t become an immobile hunk of metal blocking the road. The goal is to cut out those spots of inefficiency where the disadvantaged might have been able to momentarily enjoy a brief respite from the usual struggles of life — whether it’s floating a check for a few days or having some wiggle room with a loan payment’s due date. We know, abstractly, that wealth is the shadow side of debt. The car starter interrupter heightens the tension, making the lender’s life more secure by making the borrower’s life more precarious. Naturally, this is not how the lenders would frame their ever-expanding powers. As the Times reports, “Lenders and manufacturers of the technology say borrowers consent to having these devices installed in their cars. And without them, they say, millions of Americans might not qualify for a car loan at all.” So everything is rosy, because borrowers give their consent as a term of the loan and in exchange they get access to a vehicle — granted at an exorbitant cost when you factor in principal plus interest. The basic rationalization here is the logic of unintended consequences. Reformers may help current subprime borrowers by limiting digital repossession strategies, lenders say, but future ones will be hurt, because lenders will charge more to make up for defaults they could have avoided if only they could disable cars remotely. Ordinarily, an abuser who argues, “If you limit my options now, I’ll just be more brutal in the future,” wouldn’t be persuasive. But somehow, among a prominent subset of free-market economists, it’s a winner.

Our transition toward living in societies of control is well underway. The consequences raise fundamental issues of justice.

Unintended consequences

Let’s take that unintended-consequences logic seriously, in the other direction. What happens if remote monitoring and disabling become a deeply rooted practice in car lending? And what if the repossessed cars are worth less than the value of the loan on them? Should we allow further contingency planning for lenders — say, automatic garnishment of wages? Electric shock devices implanted in the skin for gentle reminders to pay your bill and not drive outside the approved area? These might really cheapen the cost of credit. Those possibilities will, of course, be dismissed as a slippery slope — even though a new gadget called the Pavlok wristband already offers worrywarts the chance to be shocked if they miss deadlines. And the auto lenders’ defenders will treat their predictions of rising credit costs due to regulation as infallible science — even though mortgage rates appear to be affected little, if at all, by certain state laws declaring mortgage debt nonrecourse. So it’s hard not think of the libertarian tough-love stance here as a rhetorical veneer, rationalizing and exacerbating an exploitative system that strips away privacy, autonomy and dignity. An early version of these devices was used to help pet owners track and manage their animals, and its origins speak volumes about the power dynamics implicit in its deployment. Paternalism propels tracking of people as well as pets. Lenders and collectors cynically marshal the language of fairness, equality and opportunity to cast these technologies — which ensnare and control those who are already marginalized — as necessary tradeoffs if (poor) people want to gain the privilege of freedom (i.e., a vehicle).

Intrusive systems