Daily use of financialized digital platforms instills a speculative mode of being and relating

Evidence

Against this backdrop, the new forms of standardization and simultaneity in speculative communities reflect a changing relationship between economy, society, and politics under financialized capitalism. Our collective exposure to fluctuating housing and mortgage values, the everyday engagement with the abstracting algorithms of social search platforms, imageand video-sharing interfaces, and the data-driven intimacy of dating apps has nursed a more speculative mode of being, of appearing, and thus of relating to others. Our routine experiences of this computational techno-world are not only a new strategic commodity for financial markets but also powerful conveyors of feelings and imaginings, as Anderson would put it. Imagined communities have not quite dissolved. It could be argued that they are formed instead around different types of “awareness,” which may appear to be “detached from the limitations of particular places, neighborhoods, and experiences” (Day 2006, 20), or in groupings that take the form of “virtual communities” (Holmes 2005). But much like late Dutch colonialism’s “unintended consequence” of the Indonesian imagination, financialized capitalism’s own unintended consequence is the triggering of a new shared vernacular. This is a uniquely important insight, and foregrounds one of this book’s central tenets: the socially and politically generative operation of finance; its productive, rather than merely destructive, role in shaping new speculative communities. … Today’s advance of a speculative populist politics presents us with a similar riddle: why do constituencies most affected by years of continuing market deregulation come to endorse finance-driven populists such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi? Why are people seemingly voting “against their interests”? — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 98

Categorization

• XREF: Directly speaks to the reader’s core goal of tracing how speculation migrated from trading floors into dating, politics, and self-presentation. — connects to: Cloud infrastructure shapes social reality by predisposing everyday experience toward datafication. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 173; Viewing everyday life as investment transforms how people act and cooperate. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 61; Finance and everyday social life are converging through speculative technologies — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 327