ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a number of affective socialities forged via micronarratives, manifesting in the Kiva community at large, in virtual connections between lenders and borrowers and in lending teams. It shows that Kiva's affective effectiveness lies in its fit into the daily lives of its users, thereby providing ordinary recipes for and capitalizing on the ordinary affects of everyday humanitarians. Bob Harris is a Kiva executive's dream. Kiva is a quintessential Silicon Valley social enterprise, and its co-founders embody the marriage of Silicon Valley technology, Matt Flannery was a computer programmer at Tivo, and business, Jessica Jackley has an MBA from the Stanford Business School. Kiva stories do not mobilize affective investments in and of themselves, but because today, after 200 years of humanitarian narratives, people expect to be presented with moral claims in the form of stories.
