Finance vocabulary now shapes how people imagine and act on the future generally

Evidence

“To speculate” means increasingly “to connect,” to endorse uncertainty preemptively, and often tactically, as a means of social survival. At the same time, speculating is not just how we relate to the future (by anticipating and imagining it) but how we make it actionable in the present. Futures, securities, bonds—terms once repurposed for the market speculator’s lexicon—return to our everyday social and political vernacular to imbue it with finance’s own ambition. The narratives this new vernacular pursues are more open ended than those of “security” and “control.” If the only certainty in our present is that the future is uncertain, then shorting and hedging the unknowable becomes the zeitgeist of contemporary financialized societies. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 20

Categorization

• DEFINE: Early working definition of the book’s core term: speculating means connecting and endorsing uncertainty for social survival.
• XREF: Parallels Randy Martin’s claim that financial derivatives restructure everyday life and the reader’s reading purpose about speculation migrating off the trading floor. — connects to: Finance has become the primary arbiter of policy and value across daily life — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 32