Web3 as a "speculative community"

[H]omo economicus is an isolated individual, while homo speculans, in Komporozos-Athanasiou’s formulation, is a member of a “speculative community.”

Seeing (literal and metaphorical) speculation as an activity that necessarily builds community, and seeing the communities as necessary components of the speculative activity (rather than seeing the communities as a kind of accidental development coasting off of a separate, “real” core) helps us get at the core of the web3 dynamic — both to underst... See more

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.

Komporozos-Athanasiou’s point is not so much that every sphere of life is programmatically ordered as a speculative market, but that we find ourselves assuming—sometimes by choice, sometimes by default—the attitude of speculators in everyday life.

homo speculans: “a politically disoriented, speculative subject who accepts rather than averts the future’s radical uncertainty.”

The basic thesis is that, in the years since the global financial crisis, in response to the weakened legitimacy of global institutions and rising market volatility and political uncertainty, people at all levels of power, and in ever-increasing spheres of life, make use of the logic of financial speculation.

Facebook and Donald Trump are both creatures of speculation in an age of volatility, at once beneficiaries and producers of chaos and uncertainty. It's not (necessarily) that one emerges from the other, but that both are consequences of a particular, financialized approach to the world — one that seeks to profit from, rather than eliminate, chaos.

Taken as a straightforward phrase, "speculative communities" is nicely abbreviated description of web3, tying together as it does many of web3's constitutive qualities: its growth as a market for financial speculation, its supposed potential as an architecture of an internet of the future, its appearance as many overlapping, fiercely committed comm... See more