More‐Than‐Debt: Affective Topologies of Buy‐Now‐Pay‐Later ( BNPL ) Platforms in Singapore

ABSTRACT Buy‐now‐pay‐later (BNPL) services have rapidly expanded consumer credit access by enabling immediate consumption with interest‐free instalment payments. This paper argues that BNPL platforms operate as topological‐affective infrastructures that reconfigure indebtedness by simultaneously modulating spatial relations and felt intensities. Drawing on diaries and interviews with BNPL users in Singapore, the analysis reveals how platform mechanisms—automated deductions, instalment schedules, notifications—dynamically reorganise debt's proximity, stretching obligations across time while compressing distance through alerts that pull obligations into immediate affective presence. BNPL generates recursive movements across four affective registers: empowerment, anxiety, dissociation and ambivalence. Initial control gives way to vigilance as obligations accumulate, prompting dissociative strategies, yet ambivalence pervades the cycle. These dynamics are experienced unevenly: users with stable incomes frame BNPL as flexible budgeting, while those with tighter budgets describe heightened emotional labour and acute stress. These divergent experiences reveal how BNPL operates as ‘more‐than‐debt’—payment method, budgeting tool and controlled spending device. By synthesising geographical scholarship on affect and topology, the paper demonstrates these dimensions must be analysed together to understand platform‐mediated finance. BNPL exemplifies how digital infrastructures recalibrate financial life by folding, stretching and compressing relational proximities, producing differentiated affective topologies that are conditioned by socio‐economic position.