Idle and the Responsible
Take the credit associated with the aforementioned categories of playing video games and buying diapers. There are many ways to parse the values embedded in the distinction between the “idle” and the “responsible” citizen so that it lowers the scores of gamers and increases the scores of diaper changers. There is the ableist logic, which labels people who spend a lot of time at home as “unproductive,” whether they play video games or deal with a chronic illness; the conflation of economic productivity and upright citizenship is ubiquitous across many societies.
Consider, too, how gender norms are encoded in the value accorded to buying diapers, together with the presumption that parenthood varnishes (and, by extension, childlessness tarnishes) one’s character. But one may wonder about the consequences of purchasing too many diapers. Does reproductive excess lower one’s credit? Do assumptions about sex and morality, often fashioned by racist and classist views, shape the interpretation of having children and of purchasing diapers? In the United States, for instance, one could imagine the eugenic sensibility that stigmatizes Black women’s fertility and celebrates White women’s fecundity getting codified through a system that awards points for diapers purchased in suburban zip codes and deducts points for the same item when purchased in not yet gentrified parts of the city – the geography of social worth serving as a proxy for gendered racism and the New Jim Code. In these various scenarios, top-down reproductive policies could give way to a social credit system in which the consequences of low scores are so far-reaching that they could serve as a veritable digital birth control.
