The role of chaos in contemporary political and economic thought
June 11, 2022 3:19 PM   Subscribe

The Crypting Point. Max Read reviews Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (SL Bookforum). "Twitter isn’t a deliberative space, where citizens gather to debate politics and lead society—it’s a speculative market, where traders stake out discursive positions against the value of their brands, and fans and partisans gather to imagine unlikely but not impossible new futures."

Perhaps Musk had no scheme in mind for his initial purchase, no specific plan for owning Twitter, and no ultimate goal he was striving to achieve....Maybe he is simply making a mess, to see what might come out of it—what kinds of pressure he could bring to bear on Twitter, and what kinds of business, cultural, and political opportunities might follow.

Musk, according to this line of thinking, is engaging in what the University College London sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou calls...“speculative politics”: “sowing chaos to reap power.” He hasn’t been pursuing a clear program, laid out from the beginning in the manner of a mergers-and-acquisitions banker, but embracing confusion and volatility and changing circumstances in the manner of a financial speculator. For Komporozos-Athanasiou, this logic—of financial speculation, of engaging, embracing, and even encouraging volatility in the hopes of gain—is the defining logic of our time, a consequence of increasing unpredictability and precarity.

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Maybe most importantly, homo economicus is an isolated individual, while homo speculans, in Komporozos-Athanasiou’s formulation, is a member of a “speculative community.” The delegitimation of neoliberal reason not only increases volatility, it also undermines the previous regime’s insistence on atomized individuals and family units. “Struggles of speculation and insurance,” then, “are experienced more intensely but also more collectively.” Here Speculative Communities draws on Benedict Anderson’s famous study of the origins of nationalism, Imagined Communities, which argued that the collapse of anciens régimes around the world and the rise of print-media capitalism in the wake of the industrial revolution created new uncertainties around which the “imagined communities” of nationalism could coalesce. For Komporozos-Athanasiou, a similar process is at work in the early twenty-first century: the recent collapse of neoliberal legitimacy and the rise of a heavily financialized digital capitalism have produced new uncertainties, out of which grow speculative communities, bound together by shared precarity and a stabilizing account of the future.

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Komporozos-Athanasiou is clear that...“speculative communities” can and do arise well beyond the narrow confines of markets and trading floors. He suggests that France’s gilets jaunes, the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and Black Lives Matter each have aspects of speculative communities....The adoring fan base that has sprung up around Musk and Tesla, vehemently defending him and excusing the absurd faults of its electric cars wherever they are besmirched online, is a kind of speculative community as well.

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Komporozos-Athanasiou quotes Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: for surveillance capital, “there can be no shadow, no darkness. The unknown is intolerable.” But if Facebook or its kindred are speculative technologies, this gets it exactly backward. In fact, Komporozos-Athanasiou writes, “the industry’s greatest strength lies in its successful embedding of uncertainty within its complex and opaque platforms.” It’s the volatility and unpredictability of TikTok or YouTube—the occluded rules of their recommendation algorithms—that offer users the enticing possibility of viral success and the constant thrill of novel stimulation. Even the companies themselves are in the dark. As has been repeatedly demonstrated over the last two decades, Mark Zuckerberg and his peers have almost no clue what is happening on, or because of, the platforms they’ve built. Invasive though they may be, the vast surveillance mechanisms Silicon Valley has put in place offer no real hope of control or even a particular depth of insight. The best analogy for the tranches of data produced by these companies isn’t the police report or the intelligence dossier but the stock ticker: a close, constant measurement of the strength of passions and the direction of sentiments in marketplaces, offering up spot prices to bidders competing for various kinds of attention.
posted by Lyme Drop (16 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
No-one ever went broke shorting grandiloquent verbosity.
posted by lalochezia at 3:20 PM on June 11, 2022 [10 favorites]


No-one ever went broke shorting grandiloquent verbosity.

Although there is a risk of moral bankruptcy.
posted by notoriety public at 3:58 PM on June 11, 2022 [2 favorites]


Much like the numerous thinkpiece's about Trump and Putin's 'grand strategy', I think this an example of ascribing genius to hubris, interpreting a risk-seeking white man of power as having some secret gnosis guiding his actions rather than a toxic combination of immaturity and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

We want Musk and Putin to be Bond villains, because we don't want to admit to being dominated, manipulated, and exploited by mediocre men, and so we hallucinate convoluted phantoms of hyper-strategy. But that's all it is- just another chapter of over-promoted mediocrity.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 5:52 PM on June 11, 2022 [20 favorites]


"Destabilize and grab for what you can get" is the strategy of a mediocre person, though. On a small scale most of us have had a colleague who gets promoted on the basis of destructive shit-stirring.
posted by clew at 5:55 PM on June 11, 2022 [6 favorites]


It’s an ill arson that doesn’t toast somebody’s marshmallow.
posted by jamjam at 6:16 PM on June 11, 2022 [11 favorites]


I find Max Read to be an engaging and insightful chronicler of our weird times. A sort of companion piece to the one here is his latest newsletter post Web3 as a "speculative community"

I think this an example of ascribing genius to hubris, interpreting a risk-seeking white man of power as having some secret gnosis guiding his actions rather than a toxic combination of immaturity and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

These attributes can get you to the level of, say, a Martin Shkreli, but wouldn't quite land you in the position of the richest person on the planet.

But I do think that through both Musk's success and his behavior he's become a kind of avatar for the communities that Komporozos-Athanasiou describes.
posted by gwint at 6:18 PM on June 11, 2022


Musk’s success is a product of a collective lack of attention, persistence of thought, simple discernment, and a desperate defeated resignation of a population obsessed with easy answers to complex problems.

Wrapped in an easy willingness to look past rank arrogance, racism and misogyny. The organizations he’s built are morally and environmentally hollow. A reflection of the founder. He’s tall, he’s handsome and fit, he’s mastered the art of turning misanthropy into intimidation, to seem “confident” and “decisive” and any manner of personal attributes those fawning over him mistake for all the things they wish they were but have allowed themselves to be convinced they can’t be.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 7:26 PM on June 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


all the things they wish they were but have allowed themselves to be convinced they can’t be

I kind of know what you mean in terms of the way that the current geist conflates personality traits with economic outcomes. But in other ways, I think it's uncharitable to the large unwashed masses in that they rightfully look at his wealth and power and understand the huge gulf between his and thiers.

They think that any hope they have of approaching this kind of leverage involves the [insert aspect of Jordan Peterson playbook] and while that's wrong, they're right to understand and focus on this asymmetry and that they need to do SOMETHING to try to close the gap.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 9:25 PM on June 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


R.E.H. , that’s a very good point. I agree. My take was fueled by… a number of feelings and opinions about he/those who exploit those on the far side of the asymmetry.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 9:33 PM on June 11, 2022


This book sounds really interesting. Brings to mind some of the more compelling Adam Curtis projects on the intentional chaos sewn by certain power seekers like Putin for example.
posted by latkes at 10:08 PM on June 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


>Komporozos-Athanasiou quotes Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: for surveillance capital, “there can be no shadow, no darkness. The unknown is intolerable.” But if Facebook or its kindred are speculative technologies, this gets it exactly backward. In fact, Komporozos-Athanasiou writes, “the industry’s greatest strength lies in its successful embedding of uncertainty within its complex and opaque platforms.” It’s the volatility and unpredictability of TikTok or YouTube—the occluded rules of their recommendation algorithms—that offer users the enticing possibility of viral success and the constant thrill of novel stimulation.

Let's imagine there's two sides to this coin, split on product or customer from the famous "if you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold, not the customer." Surveillance Captialism is talking about the other side of the coin from Speculative Communities, i.e. the product being sold is eyeball time that turns into political or sales results. Surveillance Capitalism tells us that more data is deemed essential to better predictions of who to best sell that eyeball time to. This side of the coin, in terms of 'not paying for it, so the product not the customer' is where uncertainty is needed. It's where endless scroll and data-driven suggestions (rather than chronological sequence of a timeline) mean a user never can be sure they've seen everything and maybe there's one more great bit of content hiding in the next page refresh. Maybe there's an uptick coming in the memestonks or their gambling on blockchain ledger entries, so HODL on.
posted by k3ninho at 12:06 AM on June 12, 2022 [2 favorites]


lalochezia: No-one ever went broke shorting grandiloquent verbosity.
It's how some people tell themselves they have agency in the world, wrapping uncontrollable things in abstract categorisations. Instead, I keep on doomscrolling.

One abstract categorisation: does "the delegitimising of neoliberalism" refer to the last 20 years: of Iraq/Afghanistan, banks "too big to fail" while people lose their homes, then banks get given more money instead of their leaders going to jail, the anti-vaxx personal liberty then the filter bubble and political shaping done by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica ?? (I have a mug that says "Grifters! Say what you will about the tenets of neoliberalism, at least it's an ethos.")
posted by k3ninho at 12:18 AM on June 12, 2022


They think that any hope they have of approaching this kind of leverage involves the [insert aspect of Jordan Peterson playbook] and while that's wrong, they're right to understand and focus on this asymmetry and that they need to do SOMETHING to try to close the gap.

I am not sure how much is "correct" about seeing someone with an obscene, unsustainable level of wealth that can only be built on the back of the suffering of others, and going "gee, the problem here is that the tyrant king is someone other than me".
posted by Dysk at 12:44 AM on June 12, 2022 [2 favorites]


@Dysk, sure, that's a fair critique. But unlike mssr. Peterson, you have not offered a reform.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 1:13 AM on June 12, 2022


Not in this thread, no. It's hardly a secret that I'm a fan of redistributive policies and aggressively progressive taxation of both wealth and income. This isn't really the thread for that discussion, however.
posted by Dysk at 1:22 AM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]


In a time of chaos lay opportunity. In an Age of Chaos lay ruins. But, like any group that mistakes a little being good means a lot must be better, Komporozos-Athanasiou's Homo speculans are courting ruin for the sake of the ride. Though as I imagine Homo speculans, I see a lot of them being s#!*-stirrers and Internet trolls by nature.

k3ninho nailed it earlier with their assessment that the surveillance and big data are just the flip side of the unpredictability of the Algorithm(s). It is a mirror of the attitude that we should praise the geniuses who made Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, et al. and their creations, but forgive them, for they could never have possibly foreseen the consequences of their actions. Besides, why complain, we get kittehs and TikTok dancers, right? Ignore the anti-vaxxers, Qanon's dangerous fools, and the whole block-chain/cryptocoin/NFT debacle, because what is life if not an infinite opportunity to risk losing everything for the sake of winning big? Maybe, someday, social media will solve climate change. That's worth the risk and damage, right? /sarcasm
posted by Ignorantsavage at 3:07 PM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]


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