The 1AC is an act of counter-speculation that opens up space for radical transformation

(Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Sociology at University College London https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-world-speculation-made/)

This world is one we can still recognize as ours. Following a period of unbridled financialization during the later part of the twentieth century (heralded by the momentous repeal of the Glass-Steagall legislation allowing commercial banks to act as financial traders), contemporary economies and societies are once again steeped in the whirlpool of speculation. In today’s turbocharged financial markets, speculation is even more opaque because of the highly complex technologies on which it relies: machine learning, algorithmically powered, superfast trading systems whose inner workings are often indiscernible even to traders themselves. High-frequency automated trading takes place in virtual pits, with data scientists and coders quietly monitoring a ceaseless search for patterns through stacks of data, including predictive analysis of social media content that informs trading decisions (not all that different from the practices of yesteryear’s financial astrologists). On the most obscure end of these markets, speculators submerge themselves in “dark pools,” which are exclusive forums for block trading securities that evade transparency requirements of formal exchanges, where dealings appear even more detached from reality. The complexity of this kind of trading means that it is often impossible to tell whether a product like the derivative will be used to hedge an uncertain event or derive profit from it. At the same time, speculative wagers are now placed not merely on the uncertainty of the future, but also on the volatility of uncertainty itself. At Chicago’s CBOE, a spinoff of the CBOT and the largest modern options exchange in the United States, volatility has its own index commonly called the VIX or “fear index”—a measure of expected price swings in the S&P options market. CBOE’s virtual pit even trades volatility as an “asset class” with its own “index futures.” The denizens of these new temples of finance continue to fire up the public imagination. On first blush, we may intuitively recall the greedy yet charming hedge funders—immortalized by Leonardo DiCaprio’s gregarious performance as Jordan Belfort in the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street—as the exemplary speculators of our time. But on closer inspection, a new and more tragic figure is emerging to usurp the suave megatrader of financialized capitalism from its throne. The modern-day speculator resembles Dr. Alexander Hoffmann, the tragic high-tech Frankenstein protagonist of Robert Harris’s 2011 bestseller The Fear Index: a tormented physicist-cum-financier confronted with VIXAL-4, an omniscient AI algorithm with the power to predict fear—including Dr Hoffmann’s own fear of losing himself entirely in a battle with the mercurial forces of finance. The novel was adapted to a TV series with actor Josh Hartnett rummaging the streets of Geneva injured, haunted, limping, and sweating while searching for clues to his own past and future, plunged into a nightmare reality where it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. Yet beyond this dreamlike world of hyper-technologized finance, contemporary markets’ thirst for volatility is reminiscent of our own immersion in the gamified reality of financialized digital media, where speculation breaks out of the organized digital pits to become a mass spectacle. With retail trading of highly volatile assets exploding in the post-2008 crisis era, meme stocks and crypto trading platforms, decentralized finance (“defi”) and decentralized applications (“dApps”) provide the online bucket shops for our time’s virtual punters. Mass “shorting” events such as the GameStop saga—a grassroots short squeeze on the price of the iconic video game retailer organized via social media and making headlines in January 2021—betray a world where volatility is treated as an opportunity in society writ large, with ordinary people sowing (rather than averting) uncertainty to reap profit. Following a long trail of speculators for whom the worlds of wizardry and reason were never too far apart, today’s short-sellers care little about untangling reality and fiction in their “augmented” everyday lives, from the Metaverse and Web 3.0 to the in-game trading of nonfungible tokens. They are drawn to strange narratives, increasingly untethered from material reality and woven into the mainstream. Perhaps most alarmingly, the confusion sown by this radical fragmentation of everyday experiences promotes right-wing conspiracy fantasies and regressive movements such as QAnon, which are moving rapidly from the fringes of political discourse to center stage. Under such conditions speculation once again emerges as an apt and imaginative response to the chaotic volatility wrought by financialized life—importantly, as a collective rather than merely individual act. The kind of speculation involved in these gamified worlds evokes a yearning for community and imagined connectivity, a joint “hedging” of uncertainty. Wagers across the economy and politics—from “crypto bros” coordinating their short sells around meme stocks to profit from destabilized prices to voters in Middle England sowing Brexit chaos in the hope of disrupting the liberal-technocratic status quo—are oriented toward new solidarities and often confusing political alliances. Such speculations place demands on the future in ways that encompass (rather than redress) doubt, ambivalence, and cynicism. Speculation is a definitive feature of contemporary life across the spheres of economy and politics. Since the early stages of nineteenth-century financialized capitalism, it has often been understood as a phantasmatic or parasitic logic driving the financial markets’ rapacious pursuits. But under the increasingly uncontrollable uncertainty of our financialized world, speculation also becomes a more productive mechanism to imagine community and collective coping with disorienting volatility. Speculation, in this sense, is not merely a symptom (as mainstream critiques in both economic and political theory often suggest) but a structure, something more foundational and generative. Therefore, it may also contain valuable answers to the financialization of modern life: if the only certainty about our future is its inherent indeterminacy, another future will always be possible, and fighting for it will never be futile. But how do economies and societies take up this challenge? This proposition has implications for how we might rethink the political use of speculation. Speculation can be a weapon mobilized not only against (neo)liberal democracy (for example, in the case of nativist conspiracists and right-wing populists), but against finance itself: as an instrument for orienting a radical collective imagination toward more inclusive myths and future narratives that help those in the margins of capitalist society resist the logic of capital. As such, speculation should also be understood as a field of action that may enable movements to challenge the paradigm from which they emerge, by encouraging us to figuring out who we are and who we can be in the face of radical uncertainty. How can we envision resistance in the sense of genuinely alternative life patterns, capable of defeating the oppressive forces of finance capitalism? What are forms of struggle and subjectivity that exceed the set menus of political choices offered by neoliberal risk management? How can the communities formed under the fog enveloping homo speculans nurture such alternatives? And, finally, how can the necessity of imagining the future without access to adequate resources become an instrument for overturning the conditions producing financialization in the first place? We may call these types of radical and progressive speculation “counter-speculation”: collective political action to pursue solidarity amid uncertainty. Today we find the traces of counter-speculation when groups that are traditionally subjected to the speculative violence of finance (women, racialized, and queer people) rise to wage their own bets on the future. In doing so, they reimagine that future. As new speculative communities emerge from the allegedly invincible “There Is No Alternative” doctrine, the challenge for progressive movements will be learning to occupy this new uncharted territory of possibility. We can expose the nefarious forces of exclusionary ignorance while finding ways to retain trust in a shared reality. Better yet, we can acknowledge that such a shared reality contains the myths of our own making.