Financialized digital life deepens confusion yet undermines neoliberalism’s legitimacy

Evidence

To demonstrate the breadth and depth of these transformations, I discuss a diverse set of prominent speculative technologies: imageand video-sharing apps TikTok and Instagram, astrology apps like Co-Star, mobile dating apps Tinder and Bumble, and Netflix television shows like Love Is Blind. While much of my discussion to this point has focused on the conflict between passions and interests, in part 2 my attention shifts to an additional set of struggles experienced with unprecedented intensity in our current techno-world. Specifically, I unravel the tensions between reality and fiction and between that which is (hyper)visible and what remains invisible in modern social life. In doing so, I probe the underlying social and cultural dispositions of homo speculans—its new collective bonds, rituals, anxieties, desires, and aspirations. The line of my argument is this: the growing convergence between the world of finance and our everyday digital lives has deepened the sense of confusion for homo speculans and has exacerbated its lack of control in forming durable connections. But these contemporary transformations have not entirely hollowed out relations in speculative communities. They have reoriented our pursuits of sociality and intimacy toward more open-ended navigations of the present’s uncertainty and, in doing so, they have poked even greater holes in neoliberalism’s fading legitimacy. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 164

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete catalogue of domains — dating apps, astrology, reality TV — matches the reader’s cross-domain migration claim (trading floors to dating and self-presentation). — connects to: The digital economy functions as legitimating hegemonic ideology for capitalism — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 16; Daily use of financialized digital platforms instills a speculative mode of being and relating — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 98; Neoliberal legitimacy is secured by lifestyle knowhow rather than profit itself — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 755 (+8 more)
• QUESTION: The claim that open-ended uncertainty navigation ‘pokes holes in neoliberalism’s legitimacy’ is what the reader must test against the counter-speculations chapter.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The digital economy functions as legitimating hegemonic ideology for capitalism — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 16; Daily use of financialized digital platforms instills a speculative mode of being and relating — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 98; Neoliberal legitimacy is secured by lifestyle knowhow rather than profit itself — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 755 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism’s deliberate epistemic inconsistencies enabled its long-term success #complicates (0.76)
• A humane third-modernity digital capitalism remains a genuine future possibility #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 166