Retail loyalty schemes: a practical theological response to surveillance capitalism and its construction of the flawed prosumer

This paper argues that retail loyalty schemes lie at the intersection of three sites of struggle: datafication, competitiveness, and commodification. It is where these overlap that the production of data-doubles (inferred categories into which individuals are placed), digital self-interest, and neoliberal (finance-dominated) economics, coalesce in surveillance capitalism. By re-deploying Bauman’s notion of the flawed consumer, a category of ‘flawed prosumer’ is used in relation to Stoddart’s analytical device of the common gaze, a preferential optic for those who are digitally poor. It is proposed that Christians contribute to public debate three theological themes: solidarity, the universal destination of goods, and the shadow of the cross cast from the future upon the present. It draws upon Kathryn Tanner’s theological critique of financed-dominated economics, Roman Catholic Social Teaching, and Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope to contribute to the public debates promoted by Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism, Christian Fuchs on digital humanism, and George Monbiot on ‘the commons’. The aim is not to adjudicate a ‘Christian position’ on retail loyalty schemes but rather to argue that by giving attention to those who are excluded, better, more humane, digital societies may be imagined in which ‘flawed prosumer’ is a token of honourable subversion.