Financial Narratives in Crisis

Review of Amin Samman, "History in Financial Times" (Stanford University Press, 2019). Amin Samman’s History in Financial Times addresses the need to develop more nuanced ways to account for history, given that succession, as a model of making history, so clearly falls short. His emphasis on narrative throughout the book is hugely important at a moment of widespread narrative dysfunctionality in which the distinction between fact and fiction comes to be widely contested

Pavillon levé (dix jours à vaincre les mortes-eaux)

Exhibition review of Pavillon levé (dix jours à vaincre les mortes-eaux) Alexandre Jimenez and Maud Marique, Francis O’Shaughnessy and Karina Pawlikowski, Guillaume Adjutor Provost, Guy Van Houtte Cyr, Kesso-Line Saulnier, Khadija Baker, Louis-Philippe Côté, Mathieu Lévesque, Maude Bernier-Chabot, Mélanie Martin, Michelle Lacombe, Mona Sharma, Nicolas Lachance, Philippe Caron Lefebvre, Pierre-Luc Gagnon, Sara Lucas, Simon Gaudreau, Sheena Hoszko Circa Gallery, Montreal July 29 – August 7, 201

Cloud Relationality

catalogue essay for Cloud by Donna Szoke Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Brock University October 10, 2015 – January 17, 201

Platformed Personality Capitalism: Twitter, Tiered Status and Assetized Selves

In spring 2022, Tesla/SpaceX tycoon and world’s richest man Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion USD, and take it private after its near-decade as a publicly traded company. Musk is not only Twitter’s aspirant buyer. He is also one of its platformed personalities among others: a prominent, verified account holder, with some 95.6 million followers. Musk tweets memes, company updates, misleading covid-19 claims, and anti-union messages breaching labour laws, among other things. Critics fear that his extreme, libertarian reverence for ‘free speech’ could counteract prior efforts to curb some of Twitter’s most recalcitrant problems: propagating fake news, harassment, and hate speech, the latter two of which disproportionately affect marginalized groups. In this privatized public sphere, platformed personalities are the medium of exchange, in two senses. On the platform, user profiles exchange tweets, seeking conversation, connection, publicity or status – while all the while, their activities feed machine learning algorithms, and generate the company’s advertising revenue. Meanwhile, in the boardroom, a prominent public figure worth$230.1 billion USD easily outbids the Twitter board’s poison pill – its attempt to prevent Musk’s hostile takeover, by making itself a less attractive investment. What does Musk’s Twitter bid say about the nexus of financial and representational investments in personality, in a moment of both extreme dispersion of capitalist logic (insofar as anything, including online personalities, can be assetized, or rendered rent-bearing) and extreme wealth concentration (via the rise of the super-rich)? Prior studies of Twitter have critiqued the tiered status the platform offers, via features such as the verified check mark for high-profile users. A separate body of research has charted the recent rise of privately owned companies in “family capitalism,” throwing the presumed predominance of shareholder value into question. This paper posits the need for an account of platformed personality capitalism, which explores the links between billionaire public figures executing social media hostile takeovers, and an online profiled proletariat, generating platform revenue while seeking to actualize elusive returns on their human capital. Platformed personality capitalism is a financial-representational logic that enacts an extreme inequality of means to assetize personality: from the billionaire buyer to the low-profile or widely-shamed user, whose social media presence fuels little more than platform accumulation by reputational dispossession

In the Realm of the Weak Tie: Social Networks, Turning Points and Serendipitous Desire

Paper presented at Libidinal Economies of Contemporary Capitalism City, University of London, 15-16 April 2021 In a widely viewed 2013 TED talk, clinical psychologist Meg Jay implores listeners to make the most of their twenties: to work on relationships, social networks and ‘identity capital’ now, rather than procrastinating on major life decisions. “Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west,” she explains. “Right after take-off, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.” Echoing Mark Granovetter’s hugely influential 1973 paper ‘The Strength of Weak Ties,’ she advises twentysomethings to explore their connections with acquaintances and friends of friends – those who tend to be the richest sources of new opportunities (such as jobs and romantic partnerships), since they bring new information from outside our primary social circles. Transforming Granovetter’s sociology into self-help, Jay’s talk typifies a neoliberal stylization of desire, in which self-actualization is recast as navigating the serendipitous horizons of possibility at the edges of our social networks, in order to change course in life. In parallel, financialized surveillance apparatuses (from U.S. retailer Target’s early 2000s ‘pregnancy prediction scores’ to social impact bond evaluations) perform acute interest in identifying (and intervening in) life’s turning points. Informed by ‘nudging,’ ‘neuroliberal’ or ‘social physics’ approaches, such apparatuses model life changes by mapping (and manipulating) the spread of behaviours through neural and social networks. How does Jay’s stylization of neoliberal desire – which places luck and chance within the realm of the weak tie – relate to the widespread, instrumentalized mapping of turning points in lives and social networks? How might this pervasive mapping reshape desire itself? Drawing from Wendy Chun’s work on networks and neoliberalism, as well as debates on data colonialism and the social logic of the derivative, I argue that the extensive instrumentalization of social networks newly aligns the desire for life-changing, chance encounters with financial practices of hedging investment portfolios. Further, this effectively enables the expropriation of serendipity – such that the desire for life-changing, chance encounters itself acts as a source of value for those who can effectively control the mapping of social networks, and regulate the predictive terrains in which serendipity newly operates

Race and Risk: Exploring Online Responses to the Euro 2020 Final

In July, 2021, England lost the Euro 2020 football final to Italy. Following the loss, Black England players were widely racially abused online; Twitter alone took down over 1900 offensive posts directed at the players. In response, many commentators condemned the online racism and sent messages of support to players. How might online platforms such as Twitter reconfigure racism, according to a late-neoliberal logic of assetized identity? How might the football game, as a widely-publicized symbolic site which stages a relation between competition, chance, and nationhood, inflect this expression of online racism? In this paper, I analyze a range of online responses to the 2020 Euro finals, paying particular attention to narratives that express levels of expectation about posters’ and platforms’ roles in propagating online racism. I analyze how online responses to the Euro final express conflicts over race in reputational terms. Reading the football final’s online aftermath as a distributed event suggests the need to extend insights from W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, and Cheryl Harris, to arrive at an account of assetized, late-neoliberal racial capitalism, which recodes racism as the uneven distribution of reputational risk. Such an understanding has the potential to nuance debates on data colonialism, by detailing how online racism sits within a continually shifting expression of multiple colonial temporalities, both on- and offline

Critical Finance Studies: Approaching the Field

An informal talk on Critical Finance Studies, introducing the field, followed by an open discussion

Thinking the Future of Money in the Humanities Workshop

University of Edinburgh, 20th-21st February 202

Character Capital: Social Impact Bonds and the Financialization of Behaviour

Since 2010, social impact bonds (SIBs) have taken hold in numerous countries. Given shortfalls in governmental social welfare spending, SIBs invite investors to ‘do well by doing good,’ injecting start-up capital into charities’ social welfare projects, and gaining returns from governments, based on successful attainment of those projects’ targeted impacts (for instance, a 7.5% reduction in recidivism among short-term prisoners at Peterborough Prison, UK, over a seven-year period). Many SIBs target behavioural reform in ‘at-risk’ populations: transforming aberrant into assimilated daily life practices, purportedly for the benefit of both beneficiaries and investors. How does this financialization of behavioural modification put pressure on human capital-inflected theories of assetized selfhood? Seen in terms of human capital theory, SIBs align different stakes in the same project: at-risk populations’ human capital (as they receive career training, counseling and support); investors’ profit and portfolio diversification; and governments’ risk mitigation. However, SIBs instantiate tensions between beneficiaries’ human capital and investors’ profits; and between the lifespan and the limited timespan of the SIB term, that exacerbate latent contradictions within human capital theory to a breaking point. Thus, SIBs demand an alternate theory of the financialization of behavioural modification, focused not on human capital as such, but instead on financial intermediaries’ construction of images of beneficiaries’ increased human capital. Drawing from recent literary theories of character and analyzing SIB promotional material, I argue that SIBs require a theory of character capital, pertaining to the discursive construction, through narration and measurement, of overall ‘improvements in character’ in a target population, within the limited ‘plot’ of an investment term. Character capital best conveys the alignment between investor and beneficiary interests in behavioural modification that SIBs aim to produce, through investment term ‘plots’ in which changes in ‘character’ can be staged, produced, measured, and speculated on