Capitalism focuses on calculating risks, transforming uncertainties into financial calculations, which creates a future that is uncertain and continually emerging from present financial strategies, leading to a paradoxical state of both accelerated progress and potential collapse.

To propose the infinite ecstatic progress (of capital) as the only horizon is the same as inviting everyone to wait for Godot. Since we are modern, we live in times of the end or according to Baudrillard even after the end. Not that history has come to an end, but that it has no end in the sense of a finality, is up for debate in the course of eliminating an expectation horizon. The absence of a new future, which radically differs from the present, configures an end time of present, past, and future in contiguity.4 We live for tomorrow and know that there is no new tomorrow. We want to move, always and everywhere, to charge ourselves with energies, to become faster and faster and to grow ecstatically into the infinite, yes to multiply our human capital congenially. That's probably why the enslaving robot is waiting for us. And there will always be someone, even if he has been locked up in his robotized bunker for 200 years and feeds on jelly and virtual sex, who will then say: “This is freedom”. But even such end-time dreams, which the disaster porn fabulates around the clock today, are nothing more than simulacra. Even the apocalypse is over, says Baudrillard, it is today the precession of the neutral and the indifference (Baudrillard, 1994: 160). One should add, but also the precession of ecstasy (of more and less): Nothing is possible anymore, because nothing is impossible anymore. This shows the retreat of an unpredictable, black, and new future, but at the same time points to the abundance of a risk-future. The operative condition of the speculative present seems to be the inherent uncertainty of the future. Any extrapolations into the future through calculation and financial speculation mean that strategies and designs that are made in the present, the unpredictability and uncertainty in calculable risks are transforming, and these risks continue to increase with the disintegration of the new future. The accelerating speculation and concentration of capital and the irreversible climate collapse reduce a truly new future to a null point and/or to the continuation of the already existing dynamics of a risk future. The historically founded formations and systems themselves pose risks for the future (for example, extreme inequalities in access to income and wealth, food insecurity, combustion of carbon dioxide, etc.). The future present that actually occurs remains unknown, but is determined in the present by the iterative calculation of a series of mainly financial risks, which in turn must remain subordinate to incalculable eventualities. In contrast to the time schemes of the linear chronology of progressive modernity (past → present → future) or the thesis of an infinitely extended present without a future (dystopias), the future present that will occur proliferates in the scheme of a present future that financially calculates the future as a risk. Nevertheless, for the speculative present future (of capital), which tries to include the future present, the premise of every historically realized future remains the unknown future present, which, however, by virtue of the present future, which is that of financial risk production, should at least be calculated. The fact that the present future, which calculates the future, wants to include the historical future present, but itself must assume an unknown new future that has not yet taken place, leads to a speculative time complex that displaces the time orders of both the forward movement of progressive modernity and the metastable present without a future, which each prioritize positive and negative semantic overdeterminations of the future present. The recurring calculations of the risk exposures of financial capital are an explicit operationalization of contingency. The exposure of the present to the future qua risk is on the one hand a retroaction of the unknown future on the present, on the other hand the risk exposure is the way in which the historical future present is generated according to the calculations of the present future, even if the latter is configured by the unknown future. The permanent calculation of risks in the future (speculation) is then a settlement and limitation of the abundance of future that affects the composition and semantics of the historical present, including a new and black future.5 At the same time, however, what Baudrillard calls the “spiraling cadaver of humanism” continues to proliferate: Even in the (always hypothetical) succession of humanity, the future will be human in posthuman discourses. Most current posthuman narratives, even those that refer to the development of a radical otherness of AI as an intended or unintended consequence of human strategies, are still modern versions of extinction fables that are rooted in the foundations of human rationality. No future is still a future—often a very specific one, fantasized to retroactively determine the current system. Thus, most narratives of posthumanism remain merely mutations of traditional Western religious narratives, intersected by modern progress mythologies in which humanity becomes the creator of the machine to which it develops itself: the DNA of what Baudrillard calls “the metaphysics of the code”. The stochastic movement of evolution is coupled to the project of biotechnological control. Such evolution is, as Baudrillard says, indistinguishable from a socially and historically determined program. Indeed, world capitalism seems to have entered a paradoxical, accelerating, and at the same time exhausting panic mode or a deadly excess in which the ecstasy of the Over as over-accumulation and over-speculation meet the destructive activities of capital, especially with regard to the capitalization of nature and the creation of a global surplus population. In the course of its expansive capitalization, the capital economy possesses a strangely phagic drive, as it prefers to always feed and over inflate itself further, insofar as finiteness is conceived as a limit that can be exceeded per se; the capitalist economy, in its omnipresent excess, seems to be driven by a desire for dissolution at the same time, which is an expression of a latent death wish that at least suspects the nullity of the self-generated void (in order to finally find a “redemptive” fusion with infinity).6 In restricted economies (Bataille), where the generation of surplus value and financial returns dominate, however, the over can only be consumed in catastrophic events such as wars, devalued as capital in crises (or expropriated) or calculated. An economy that is filled with ever more demands and promises of payment for the future, which probably cannot be fulfilled, is a grotesquely inflated economy that will not be able to waste or unload the accumulated abundance and garbage within it. The current economic, social, and geopolitical disturbances, tensions, and conflicts, for which the term “poly-crisis” is used, point to a catastrophic capitalism, think for example of global financial capital and its bubble formations, the debt and inflation, Russia's invasion into Ukraine, which must be read against the backdrop of the conflict between the USA and China,7 the Covid-19 pandemic, or also climate change. Even the term “disaster capitalism” (Callinicos) is now coming up. Nouriel Roubini has listed a whole series of factors that could trigger catastrophic dynamics in world capitalism beyond poly-crises: an inflation surge that forces central banks to a draconian tightening of monetary policy, leading to an unsustainable rise in interest rates; pandemics that are worse than COVID-19; a corporate debt crisis resulting from a credit crunch when interest rates rise; a new real estate bubble that bursts; a geopolitical shock like the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, which escalates and intensifies, leading to a further increase in commodity prices and inflation; the rising risk of another global recession and a return to protectionism or an economic and political decoupling between the USA and China, steering the two countries towards a geopolitical collision (Roubini, 2022). Currently, tensions between China and the USA in the Taiwan conflict are intensifying. An attack by China on Taiwan would be the beginning of a long crisis. The world would divide even more into blocks that are for or against China. The West would have to impose further sanctions, supply chains would collapse. It would be the beginning of a qualitatively new form of a highly technologized war. Not to be left unmentioned regarding these diverse polycrisis processes is the tendency towards new forms of state fascization and a new fascism.8 And finally, climate change could lead to new wars over water and unforeseen waves of migration.