Speculative communities form through fleeting digital rituals, not shared narratives.
Evidence
Today, finance venerates the instantaneous, calling forth a more transitory social reality marked by immersive rituals of scrolling and swiping. Speculative communities are formed in these rituals, which are social inasmuch as they connect us into a set of shared symbols and values. But what is distinctive about them is that, unlike Anderson’s imagined communities, they are built on more ambiguous and ambivalent forms of belonging. The stream of distorted and opaque images reflects our own convoluted experiences: a dizzying spectacle that feels oddly intimate. In this way, image-hungry technologies like Instagram and Tinder become the mystical devices of our shared entanglement with pervasive uncertainty—our way of orienting ourselves within a fragmented world. Imagined in this state of flux, speculative communities are fluid social constellations that do not always cluster along traditional lines of class. Their boundaries are defined more tentatively by the twin practices of speculation and insurance, which set in motion an open-ended dialectic between real and imagined futures. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 359
Categorization
- DEFINE: Contrasts Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ built on narrative reading with today’s ‘speculative communities’ formed through scrolling and swiping — a key contrast for defining homo speculans.
- XREF: Directly engages Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities; the reader’s whole thesis centers on this contrast between print-nation imagined communities and financialized speculative ones. — connects to: Cults form only within a supportive social network of deviant beliefs and practices — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 171