Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226713274)

Speculative Communities investigates the financial world's influence on the social imagination, unraveling its radical effects on our personal and political lives.

In Speculative Communities, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.

For Komporozos-Athanasiou, "to speculate" means increasingly "to connect," to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance's opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society.

Author: Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou
ISBN-10: 022671327X
ISBN-13: 9780226713274
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 01/17/2022
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.99lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2022