The present-focused economy of volatility has displaced deferred-gratification sacrifice.

Evidence

Relations and transactions alike are underpinned by a compulsion for instant gratification in an economy that rewards speed, reveres immersion in the present, and endorses volatility. What is more, with the contraction of mortgage credit, average households are today less tightly involved in the risk and debt imaginaries of home ownership and more conscious of their own present precarity in the face of uncontrollable uncertainty. It is against this background that finance’s speculative dynamics emerges triumphant over neoliberal reason. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 77

Categorization

• XREF: This shift from Weber’s deferred gratification to present-focused, volatility-endorsing immediacy is the core of ‘homo speculans’ — directly serves the reader’s primary goal of defining and explaining that figure. — connects to: Financial bubbles burst when current production cannot repay loans borrowed from the future. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 825; Neoliberal values have displaced academic vocation’s traditional disinterest in money. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 688; Austerity calls for sacrifice to the economy as an unreturned offering. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 426
• DEFINE: Ties the speculative subject to a temporal orientation — present immersion and volatility endorsement rather than future-deferred reward — which is the defining feature of homo speculans.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘deferred gratification’ paradigm being displaced resonates with the reader’s sacrifice article, where sacrificial futures are now given over to present-tense speculative immediacy.