Everyday Debt Relationalities Situating peer-to-peer lending and the rolling jubilee

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, there have been important experiments in alternatives to mainstream financial practices. This paper situates two of these experiments - peer-to-peer (p2p) lending and the Rolling Jubilee - alongside each other. Both these experiments, I argue, attempt a kind of repositioning of 'finance' and the 'everyday' in ways that resist the transformation of debt into abstract or instrumentalized sources of financial value. Over the past number of years, however, p2p lending networks have increasingly become financialized in ways they initially sought to supplant. The Rolling Jubilee, by contrast, offers a unique critical gesture. This gesture stages a creative point of contact and confrontation between the detached technical sophistication of financial arrangements and the intimately painful everyday experience of the debts that populate those arrangements.