A search for the word “speculator” on Google Images still brings up some of the caricatures of bankers that were already popular in the early 19th century: drawings of rotund men with moustaches and waistcoats running around carrying a bag marked with the dollar sign. Meanwhile, in its entry on the verb “speculate,” the Royal Academy Dictionary clarifies that it is often used in a pejorative sense. And yet, as Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, professor of sociology at University College London, argues, speculation has become central to our lives: “We are so immersed in a technological reality in which the modes of social, economic and political interaction and experimentation are so fragmented and unstable that speculation is the only possible response. Speculation is not a choice but an imposition: we speculate to survive.”
Authors like him consider that, since the great financial crisis of 2008, the central figure of our societies, that is, the model of the subject that interacts with the economy and politics, is no longer the one homo economicus characterized by its rationality when making decisions, but a new homo speculans The world is a country that must continually readjust its expectations and forecasts about the future and that uses imagination to deal with the volatility of everything around it. Speculation is no longer just the rapid buying and selling of economic assets based on forecasts of their imminent price, but it is also our way of dealing with uncertainty (work, economic, emotional…) aided by technology. As a result, images of the future emerge that are also unstable, that change and that we can recalculate at any moment, very different from those old utopias, fixed and unattainable, that dominated the horizons of the 20th century. Of course, these two faces of speculation (the financial and the imaginative) are continually intertwined and related, giving rise to communities whose narratives and mythologies are almost as important as the movement of money or the obtaining of benefits. That of the cryptobrosthose men who hang out in the less ventilated corners of the Internet and are libertarian in economic terms but reactionary in social terms, are one of the best examples.
The rise of the small investor
For some years now, browsing the Internet has meant constantly coming across investment offers or gurus of all kinds who advise you on what to do with your money. Cryptocurrencies, online stockbrokers, fixed-term bank deposits, real estate investment… the options are endless and among them there is almost always a scam. The point is that your money – whether you have a lot or hardly any – never stays still. “The investment mentality is growing not only in Europe but throughout the world, in part because of how bad our current monetary system is,” says Juan Pablo Mejía, cryptocurrency expert and director of the documentary Bitcoin Revolution—. People are looking to invest, because their money is losing value every day. If the European Central Bank does its job well, money will lose more or less 2% of its value annually, because that is the inflation they are willing to tolerate and, when it gets out of hand, we know that it can reach double digits or even much worse: in countries like Venezuela or Argentina we have seen triple-digit inflation. The investment boom is out of necessity, it is because people need to invest in order to preserve their savings, the fruit of their work. If they do not do so, they will be worth less and less.”.
The Argentine political scientist Verónica Gago also insists that inflation is key to understanding certain phenomena related to investment and speculation: “Inflation means a brutal devaluation of income and a rapid increase in the price of the basics of life: food, housing, groceries. This loss of control of prices and devaluation of all types of income, ‘forces’ small forms of speculation that try to recover some of the lost income.” In 2014, Gago published The neoliberal reasonan essay in which he explained how the working classes in contexts of dispossession, relocation and crisis caused by the advance of neoliberal policies, end up assuming on a small scale the logics of opportunity capture and informality proposed by capital, and by reproducing the vitalist discourse of the elites. As he sums it up, it is a question of survival: “There is a speculative compulsion in middle and lower sectors linked to forms of survival. In Argentina, on the part of the young sectors, there is a propensity to try small financial businesses (bets, etc.) that seem to yield more than the salaries that are miserable today.”
The data also seem to confirm this in Europe: investment is increasingly becoming an almost desperate way to regain purchasing power. Together with the technological knowledge required to do so, this could explain why it is those under 35 (the social group that has lost the most wealth over the last decade) who invest the most, and the trend seems to be accelerating every year. “The profile of the investor has changed a lot,” explains Laura Hecker, from the online platform flatexDegiro, one of the most popular platforms for entering the world of the stock market. “The Internet has democratized access to information and the rates of online brokers are much lower than traditional ones.” “On our platform,” the executive continues, “74% of our users are between 23 and 49 years old, while, over the last four seasons, the age group that has grown the most is that of those under 29. The percentage of female investors is also growing, from 16% in 2019 to 23% in 2023.”
A generational issue
Apparently, investing and speculating is the thing of young people with little confidence in traditional politics. And, as Komporozos explains in his book Speculative Communities (Speculative Communities, which will soon be translated into Spanish), this creates bonds and communities for whose members uncertainty is no longer just the main characteristic of financial markets, but of life as a whole. “One of the axes of my book and my work is that I oppose this critical diagnosis that attributes the inconsistency and chaos of our political situation to greater individualism or isolation as individuals. I believe that this diagnosis that presents us as citizens disconnected from political reality, isolated in our homes, is failing,” comments the sociologist and economist. “Instead of that,” he continues, “I argue that we are immersed in a digital present, a scroll either swipe permanent in any application: from Tinder to TikTok or cryptocurrency apps. So all our interactions: how we play, how we work or how we invest money reproduce that chaotic structure. The narrative that emerges from all that, although fragmented, is still collective. Even during that act of scroll We always belong to a collective of people who act the same way. It doesn’t matter if they are TikTok stars or Bitcoin investors, if they are doing the same thing as us at the same time as us, it gives us a strong sense of community and creates a texture.”
Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency with a universe so vast that many of its followers claim it already forms a “digital nation,” has given rise to the largest community of its kind. Just a few days ago, economist Paul Krugman published that these users would be decisive during the next elections in the United States and Mejia recalls that “today Bitcoin is much more than a currency, much more than a financial asset, much more than a technology.” “It has given rise to an ecosystem, a culture, even several cultures, because at the beginning Bitcoin was more represented by the cyberpunkpeople who, at the beginning of the Internet, wanted to use technology to obtain greater privacy, to free themselves from the yoke of the state, but suddenly those interested in freedom issues or libertarians began to arrive, later the anarcho-capitalists, then the capitalists, and today we see how large institutions and Wall Street are already taking an interest.”
None of this would have come so far if we weren’t “noticing the disconnect between the promises of neoliberal capitalism and what is happening in so many areas: with property ownership, job security and with all these forms of intimacy that are faltering,” according to Komporozos. “The frustration caused by broken promises has given rise to new forms of political right that seem strange, disconcerting, because they contain a strange mix of conspiracy theories, self-help and even religious narratives. This kind of potpourri that Labour calls “diagonal politics” so unstable and difficult to fit into the borders of the old parties, expresses frustration, but it also has a collective aspect: it expresses the need to belong to something bigger or to imagine a shared narrative, even if it is regressive. It is a form of imagination. There are certain mythologies circulating in the crypto world or in these forums that reveal the need to imagine together. We have a picture of the cryptobro as someone asocial, celibate, hidden in a basement next to his computer, who lives through video games and his investments. This stereotype is not entirely misguided, because a good part of the crypto world does look like that. But not everything, because even at that point, almost parodic and dark, all of it has something of a game, of connection between equals.
While its defenders tend to focus only on its technological or economic aspects, as a cultural phenomenon Bitcoin reproduces and captures, much more accurately than stock market investment, a good part of the anxieties of the generation millennial And again according to the Greek professor: “The narrative of cryptocurrencies offers a certain consolation, and relief because it reproduces, for example, through its volatility, the great volatility of our connections through Instagram, Tinder or Tiktok. Each of these apps satisfy us in different ways, but there is something familiar between them.” So more and more economists and sociologists are discovering a collective impulse behind this apparently selfish obsession with investing, even behind all the strident content that proliferates on YouTube. Much of this discontent would be, until now, wasted by progressive political forces and the big question, then, is what can be done to prevent anger against neoliberalism from continuing, paradoxically, to feed new markets that help inequality continue to grow. “From ecofeminism we are disputing the imagination, the future and those propensities to speculate to link them to other types of experiences, promises and struggles,” Gago answers. “The only way to avoid the catastrophic consequences of precariousness is for speculation to cease to be a thing of the past in economic markets and become a collective endeavour that consists of finding progressive connections and responses,” Komporozos concludes.
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