Traditional neoliberal market speculation fails to account for uncertainty and traps us in eternal stasis. Speculative fiction acts as the antithesis to financial speculation, allowing us to fully extrapolate elements of the present in order to multiply and open up futures discarded by capitalism

What lurks behind this analysis is the frustrating sense of an impasse. Among its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future. For it turns everything into an eternal present. The highest values of our society—as preached in the business schools—are novelty, innovation, and creativity. And yet these always only result in more of the same. How often have we been told that a minor software update “changes everything”? Our society seems to function, as Ernst Bloch once put it, in a state of “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was.” This is because, in our current state of affairs, the future exists only in order to be colonized and made into an investment opportunity. John Maynard Keynes sought to distinguish between risk and genuine uncertainty. Risk is calculable in terms of probability, but genuine uncertainty is not. Uncertain events are irreducible to probabilistic analysis, because “there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever.” Keynes’s discussion of uncertainty has strong affinities with Quentin Meillassoux’s account of hyperchaos. For Meillassoux, there is no “totality of cases,” no closed set of all possible states of the universe. Therefore, there is no way to assign fixed probabilities to these states. This is not just an empirical matter of insufficient information; uncertainty exists in principle. For Meillassoux and Keynes alike, there comes a point where “we simply do not know.” But today, Keynes’s distinction is entirely ignored. The Black-Scholes Formula and the Efficient Market Hypothesis both conceive the future entirely in probabilistic terms. In these theories, as in the actual financial trading that is guided by them (or at least rationalized by them), the genuine unknowability of the future is transformed into a matter of calculable, manageable risk. True novelty is excluded, because all possible outcomes have already been calculated and paid for in terms of the present. While this belief in the calculability of the future is delusional, it nonetheless determines the way that financial markets actually work. We might therefore say that speculative finance is the inverse—and the complement—of the “affirmative speculation” that takes place in science fiction. Financial speculation seeks to capture, and shut down, the very same extreme potentialities that science fiction explores. Science fiction is the narration of open, unaccountable futures; derivatives trading claims to have accounted for, and discounted, all these futures already. The “market”—nearly deified in neoliberal doctrine—thus works preemptively, as a global practice of what Richard Grusin calls premediation. It seeks to deplete the future in advance. Its relentless functioning makes it nearly impossible for us to conceive of any alternative to the global capitalist world order. Such is the condition that Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism. As Fisher puts it, channeling both Jameson and Žižek, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”