“Invest your lunch money and feed your future”: Micro-investing apps, consumer responsibilisation and the frontiers of ‘asset-fare’

Abstract

Digital ‘micro-investing’ platforms have gone from fringe to mainstream within a decade. Focusing on Sharesies, a popular New Zealand-based digital app, this paper examines the construction of the ‘micro-investor’. It makes three main contributions. First, the paper responds to an absence of critical analysis of micro-investing in consumer finance literature. Second, informed by calls to examine ‘downstream’ or specific market contexts of consumer responsibilisation, the paper shows how the construction of the micro-investor happens through discursive–technological work to shape understandings of the nature and benefits of micro-investing, as well as material–technological work to build attentive habits or routines among micro-investing app users. Finally, foregrounding the often under-acknowledged importance of asset acquisition and appreciation to consumer responsibilisation, the paper argues that micro-investment platforms operate at the expansionary frontier of asset-fare regimes.