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Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World
Speculative Communities investigates the financial world’s influence on the social imagination, unraveling its radical effects on our personal and political lives.
In Speculative Communities , Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.
For Komporozos-Athanasiou, “to speculate” means increasingly “to connect,” to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance’s opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society.
In Speculative Communities , Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.
For Komporozos-Athanasiou, “to speculate” means increasingly “to connect,” to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance’s opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society.
208 pages, Paperback
Published January 17, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 30, 2021
If economics and political science weren't convoluted enough, along comes Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou to beef them up. In Speculative Communities, he revives the long-discredited Homo economicus, if ony to knock it down and replace it with the festering Homo speculans (HS). He then spends the rest of the book trying to make HS relevant, valid and valuable by incorporating it into imaginary communities. What could possibly go wrong?
To pull this scheme off, he must of course go back through history, particularly the history of financial markets. He shows that various inventions have been critical to democratizing market speculation. Print disseminated information or data previously unavailable to all but insiders. The Chicago trading pits allowed commodities to be traded by non-farmers, purely to speculate. The telegraph allowed the invention of the ticker tape - real time quotes that enabled bucket shops, with their massive scoreboards and near real-time quotes, to spring up everywhere. Financial speculation zoomed. Today, it is the basis of the economy.
One of the ironies is that futures contracts were developed precisely to smooth out the rough ride of raising crops and animals for sale. If farmers didn't have to deal with the price volatility, they could live longer. But once speculators entered the fray, the goal became to increase volatility: the bigger the swing, the better the payoff. Stabilizing the price of corn was of no interest to them whatsoever. Fortunes are made and lost during every day in the commodities markets. They have "created new uncertainties and added to old ones," Athanasiou observes. If anything, they "transfer (the) risk and responsibilities from the powerful to the powerless."
Today, derivatives have become so complex, so removed from real products and assets, and so common, that tens of trillions of dollars have been created out of thin air from them. Financialization and speculation have become foundational to neoliberal economies.
But that's not enough for Athanasiou. He ties speculation to not merely neoliberalism but to nationalism. The rise of the Trumps, Orbans, and Bolsonaros of the world is in no small part a function of speculative communities, Athanasiou proffers. "Today's ominous surge of a galvanized nationalism is predicated, I will contend, on the rise of speculative communities in financialized societies."
But speculative communities themselves may or may not exist, he admits. The word community is iffy to apply here, as speculators generally have no knowledge of others who are speculating, for example. They certainly have no idea about others' strategies or rationales for buying or selling when they do. Worse, Athanasiou has a very dense style, where simplification is called for: "Speculative communities...can be understood through the evolution of each of these three core elements: financialized relations between speculative subjects, digital and computational media technologies, and new radical uncertainties precipitated by the stagnation of neoliberal promises." (Athanasiou's italics) In other words, he has set himself a high bar.
Athanasiou has done the research. He cities innumerable others from whom he can take a quote that reinforces some small aspect of his ideas. But there is no overall major discovery here. Is HS something new in the world? Speculators have always been with us. Every civilizations has and has had people looking for an angle to get ahead. Creativity has always played a major role in how finance, as well as technology, culture and everything in society move along. Today's speculators have been enabled by high tech. Far more information and systems are available to individual investors than has ever been the case. So are we all speculators now, or have we always been - just with fewer tools, relying on creativity and smarts? Athanasiou doesn't say. But that is just one level of his argument.
I found the least connection to be the one with nationalism. In neoliberal democracies, nationalists are a recent phenomenon. Speculation is not. To say that Donald Trump acceded to the top in a single attempt is not a reflection of his voters' passionate desire for more speculation. If Trump voters are a speculative community, they don't know it or show it. Rather, they are characterized as least likely to make their lives or careers out of speculation. If anything,
Trump promoted a return to the days before financialization, when life was cheaper, simpler and whiter. They were not speculating, and they did not want a speculator as president. They wanted the certainty of a move backward. Athanasiou says nothing to dissuade me from that view.
For all Athanasiou's efforts, the reader comes away with essentially nothing. There does not appear to be any practical use for the rise of speculative communities. Even if they aren't rising, but are merely existing and waiting to be discovered. The same goes for HS - it cannot be leveraged for anything that Athanasiou knows of. They cannot be credited or blamed for anything that he has uncovered. They are not agents of anything.
There does not appear to be anything a speculator can do with this book. No new scams are forthcoming from it. No new strategies. No new defenses. No new insights. No new shortcuts to riches. Economists and social scientists might add them to the toolbox of obscure or unproven concepts, and cite them in their own papers until they become accepted truths about mankind. But neither readers nor speculators will be better off for having read Speculative Communities.
David Wineberg
To pull this scheme off, he must of course go back through history, particularly the history of financial markets. He shows that various inventions have been critical to democratizing market speculation. Print disseminated information or data previously unavailable to all but insiders. The Chicago trading pits allowed commodities to be traded by non-farmers, purely to speculate. The telegraph allowed the invention of the ticker tape - real time quotes that enabled bucket shops, with their massive scoreboards and near real-time quotes, to spring up everywhere. Financial speculation zoomed. Today, it is the basis of the economy.
One of the ironies is that futures contracts were developed precisely to smooth out the rough ride of raising crops and animals for sale. If farmers didn't have to deal with the price volatility, they could live longer. But once speculators entered the fray, the goal became to increase volatility: the bigger the swing, the better the payoff. Stabilizing the price of corn was of no interest to them whatsoever. Fortunes are made and lost during every day in the commodities markets. They have "created new uncertainties and added to old ones," Athanasiou observes. If anything, they "transfer (the) risk and responsibilities from the powerful to the powerless."
Today, derivatives have become so complex, so removed from real products and assets, and so common, that tens of trillions of dollars have been created out of thin air from them. Financialization and speculation have become foundational to neoliberal economies.
But that's not enough for Athanasiou. He ties speculation to not merely neoliberalism but to nationalism. The rise of the Trumps, Orbans, and Bolsonaros of the world is in no small part a function of speculative communities, Athanasiou proffers. "Today's ominous surge of a galvanized nationalism is predicated, I will contend, on the rise of speculative communities in financialized societies."
But speculative communities themselves may or may not exist, he admits. The word community is iffy to apply here, as speculators generally have no knowledge of others who are speculating, for example. They certainly have no idea about others' strategies or rationales for buying or selling when they do. Worse, Athanasiou has a very dense style, where simplification is called for: "Speculative communities...can be understood through the evolution of each of these three core elements: financialized relations between speculative subjects, digital and computational media technologies, and new radical uncertainties precipitated by the stagnation of neoliberal promises." (Athanasiou's italics) In other words, he has set himself a high bar.
Athanasiou has done the research. He cities innumerable others from whom he can take a quote that reinforces some small aspect of his ideas. But there is no overall major discovery here. Is HS something new in the world? Speculators have always been with us. Every civilizations has and has had people looking for an angle to get ahead. Creativity has always played a major role in how finance, as well as technology, culture and everything in society move along. Today's speculators have been enabled by high tech. Far more information and systems are available to individual investors than has ever been the case. So are we all speculators now, or have we always been - just with fewer tools, relying on creativity and smarts? Athanasiou doesn't say. But that is just one level of his argument.
I found the least connection to be the one with nationalism. In neoliberal democracies, nationalists are a recent phenomenon. Speculation is not. To say that Donald Trump acceded to the top in a single attempt is not a reflection of his voters' passionate desire for more speculation. If Trump voters are a speculative community, they don't know it or show it. Rather, they are characterized as least likely to make their lives or careers out of speculation. If anything,
Trump promoted a return to the days before financialization, when life was cheaper, simpler and whiter. They were not speculating, and they did not want a speculator as president. They wanted the certainty of a move backward. Athanasiou says nothing to dissuade me from that view.
For all Athanasiou's efforts, the reader comes away with essentially nothing. There does not appear to be any practical use for the rise of speculative communities. Even if they aren't rising, but are merely existing and waiting to be discovered. The same goes for HS - it cannot be leveraged for anything that Athanasiou knows of. They cannot be credited or blamed for anything that he has uncovered. They are not agents of anything.
There does not appear to be anything a speculator can do with this book. No new scams are forthcoming from it. No new strategies. No new defenses. No new insights. No new shortcuts to riches. Economists and social scientists might add them to the toolbox of obscure or unproven concepts, and cite them in their own papers until they become accepted truths about mankind. But neither readers nor speculators will be better off for having read Speculative Communities.
David Wineberg
March 4, 2022
'In our radically uncertain and financialized times, Walter Benjamin's assertion rings perhaps truer than ever before: we are surrounded by the debris of the past and the obscurity of the future. Counter-speculations work as a homeopathic strategy, a cure for finance's deleterious speculation on our lives, the placement of small everyday stakes on more equitable futures. We administer small doses of speculation to give speculators a taste of their own medicine and thus speak directly to the clouded future in front of us - even if we can only see it from the corners of our vision.'
##
'Collective ignorance - rather than collective wisdom - drives market equilibrium and social order. Nonetheless, not everyone is 'equally ignorant.' Exposing the unequal distributions of nonknowledge is important for understanding uneven experiences of uncertainty in the face of financialization, and this our speculative responses to it, not to mention our ability to garner capital from speculation.'
##
'Conspiracy can be 'the extreme resort of the powerless', a longing to be seen and rise above the haze of uncertainty enveloping financialized life.'
##
How far will financialized neopopulists and new nationalists go in providing no-limit risk protections for the wealthiest, while reserving nationalism's symbolic insurance to the downwardly mobile?
##
'Collective ignorance - rather than collective wisdom - drives market equilibrium and social order. Nonetheless, not everyone is 'equally ignorant.' Exposing the unequal distributions of nonknowledge is important for understanding uneven experiences of uncertainty in the face of financialization, and this our speculative responses to it, not to mention our ability to garner capital from speculation.'
##
'Conspiracy can be 'the extreme resort of the powerless', a longing to be seen and rise above the haze of uncertainty enveloping financialized life.'
##
How far will financialized neopopulists and new nationalists go in providing no-limit risk protections for the wealthiest, while reserving nationalism's symbolic insurance to the downwardly mobile?
February 7, 2022
Unprecedented compilation of sociological thought.
The book discusses how we can understand ourselves as political subjects - what it frames as 'Homo Speculans' (against the mainstream framings of 'homo economicus') and counter prevalent systems of oppression and fear of uncertainty by stepping into the power of speculation.
Gorgeously written, Liberating without being neoliberal, fun and radically abiding.
Would recommend for philosophers/sociologists/cultural workers/economists alike.
Imagine something new - this is it !
The book discusses how we can understand ourselves as political subjects - what it frames as 'Homo Speculans' (against the mainstream framings of 'homo economicus') and counter prevalent systems of oppression and fear of uncertainty by stepping into the power of speculation.
Gorgeously written, Liberating without being neoliberal, fun and radically abiding.
Would recommend for philosophers/sociologists/cultural workers/economists alike.
Imagine something new - this is it !
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews