So... Is This It?

A conversation with the author of “Speculative Communities,” Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

Mar 20, 2025

Sociologist and author Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou has been working for several years with the concept of speculation, and is one of the world-leading experts on what has become, without our necessarily realizing it, a dominant way of being in our lives: the more uncertainty we face, the more speculation drives our decisions. Aris is the author of Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World, Founding Director of the Centre for Capitalism Studies at University College London, Director of UCL’s Sociology Programme, and Research Chair of the Futures of Capitalism program at The New Institute in Hamburg—and he will be one of the speakers at The Berlin Salon, the first in-person gathering of our PolyOpportunity series, this Friday to Saturday. As an amuse-bouche, we spoke with Aris via Zoom this week.

Financial speculation, political speculation, speculation in the social and intimate realm—what does speculation, the word, mean to you?

Speculation is a word that has multiple meanings, and that’s why I have stayed with it as a concept for the last several years. It has this immediate association with finance and markets, and how markets influence the way we live our lives, the way we form relationships. But it refers to something broader than that. So while traders speculate in the stock exchange, philosophers speculate when they devise their theories, artists speculate when they create new work. And from there you open myriad other ways of understanding how speculation exists within religion, science, or innovation—all things that arise from, or respond to, what we don’t know.

Still, speculation carries a negative connotation in the mind of most of the public.

Yes, and that’s why I started with finance, where the first response to the word speculation—related as it is to greed, endless profit seeking, the parasitic nature of financial markets—is negative. I wouldn’t want to absolve the term of its negative connotations, because they’re part and parcel of what makes it interesting. They reflect our reality, and the conundrums and anxieties around engaging with uncertainty and unpredictability. But I would also draw the word outside of finance, where speculation is not necessarily parasitic, or negative. It entails creativity and imagination. It’s a major part of the digital world. Speculation is a two-sided coin, and I’m interested in both sides.

I can see, then, how speculation as a response to the unknown or the possible has always been with us. At what point, though, did it become a rampant, or seemingly rampant, part of our daily life?

I would say it happened along two axes. One is the prominence, in the twentieth century, of financial markets over traditional, material economic relations. As complex financial products come to multiply value, they have created more and more distance between the physical material world of goods and the kinds of products that are traded on Wall Street and the Chicago board of trade and Paris. Finance has the capacity to monetize all kinds of uncertainty and create markets that trade on planetary tipping points. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the opportunity—and the bigger and more tenacious these financial markets become. The other demarcation point, which runs parallel, is the growth of technological forces, for example the digital infrastructures that mediate our social relations. They not only create the physical or real distance we were talking about, but also, in my view, function as multi-spreaders of speculative logic in society. It’s along these lines that people seek connections and try to build bridges, but what these technologies end up doing is reflecting back to us our own conditions of uncertainty.

This brings me to your book, Speculative Communities, in which you argue that “to speculate is to connect.” Leaving aside those negative, anxiety-inducing connotations of the word that we talk about, when I think of speculation as a term, I think of it as a necessarily visual, and therefore superficial, form of engagement. What kind of connection does this make for?

An example I write about in the book is how we exist on dating apps, which are a gamified experience where you articulate your desire. What I wanted to point out is that these infrastructures have become vehicles of speculation just as finance has become more speculative in the economy. In the case of dating apps, they’re speculative in the way they are deliberately partial and we project something graspable onto what’s missing or hidden. And yes, the experience is almost entirely focused on the visual element. Whether people are happy or not happy about this, the fact is we have come to accept that these gamified and speculative experiences fulfill a function and we just get on with them.

Uncertainty is the leading motif of political life at this precise moment—not to mention the theme of our year-long journey at the House. There is the presumption that this tide of chaos comes directly from the new leadership in Washington, though it seems to me that while the President is the maidenhead on the ship, he’s not the ship. What he certainly is doing is giving everyone that follows him, whatever their political stripe, more tools to work with, and they are not going to go unused.

No, I don't think so. I mean, one can hope to arrive somewhere that is not as depressing and not as . . . I don’t know if I can curse here . . .

Not as fucked up?

That’s exactly what I wanted to say. Notwithstanding social relations and the current political landscape, I’m critical of the ways the political order was organized for a number of years before Trumpism came about. Because it didn’t just emerge in a vacuum, right? It emerged from an effort to galvanize and harness and manipulate frustrations and uncertainties. The neoliberal financialized economy had been around for decades previous, people’s frustrations and disappointment had come to a head with the handling of the financial crisis—the government’s subsidization of recklessness—and we were not going to put that genie back into the bottle. If I want to be thinking critically about how we can do better, I think it’s about how one needs to go into this increasingly chaotic and uncertain realm in a more daring way. And here’s where speculation can be useful, because it’s where we create less rigid thinking, where we can be more playful, and work with uncertainty in a way that is productive and generative. I think there is room to do that.

How?

It’s already happening. Let’s take, instead of a theory, an actual activity that’s bubbling up right now among my students, who are about twenty years old. I would say most don’t vote, or engage in conventional politics, but that doesn’t mean they are apolitical. I think there is a craving for community and forming bonds—not traditional ones like parties or unions—but other kinds of collectives. Fandom communities are one kind. One example is K-pop fandom communities, which became indirectly politicized in the previous American elections. These are kids playfully engaging with K-pop memes, then feeding them into conservative fora, trying to confuse algorithms and disrupt the flow of information so as to diffuse their opponent’s messages. I’m not saying they’re giving us the answer, but I would say I’m someone who looks at that and has a degree of hope.

The conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bureaucracy

By Tim Leberecht

I was invited to give a dinner speech this Tuesday at the Digital State conference in Berlin, a gathering for digital government workers in Germany. In the before times, I wouldn’t have thought this the most exciting venue to address, but we’re in the present, and in light of Musk’s chainsaw massacre on government, it was an opportunity to question the reigning article of faith: a more efficient government is a better, more desirable government.

But is it?

For starters, it is important to note that efficiency per se is not a valuable goal. What matters is the goal that efficiency serves.

Bureaucracy is often (and rightly) regarded as overbearing and dehumanizing—just ask Kafka’s Josef K. One can gasp at the dismal customer experiences associated with bloated structures and inert mindsets, the abundance of good intentions that have been muffled by administrative grind, and the countless deaths by a thousand cuts.

And this is not to mention how bureaucratic thinking has pervaded so many other—some would argue all—aspects of our lives, including even our feelings. Referring to the work of the late David Graeber, João Sevilhano calls this “emotional bureaucracy,” and observes that “the emotional bureaucrat lives not just in organizations but within ourselves.” This leads him to conclude that “bureaucracy isn’t merely an organizational problem—it’s an existential one.”

Yes—except, bureaucracy is not an existential problem. It is existential.

And the antidote to the bureaucratization of emotions is not to abolish bureaucracy; it is to emotionalize bureaucracy and make bureaucrats and citizens fall in love with it.

To do that, we must start by distinguishing bureaucracy from a purely mechanistic mindset, appreciating that “rule by the desk” (bureaucracy), if serving democratic goals, is far superior to the crude mix of “rule by one” (autocracy) and “rule by tech” (technocracy).

Bureaucracy is designed to apply rules and processes to facilitate certain legal outcomes. It is not meant to have any discretion or mercy. It is not supposed to care. But what if it did? What if it took the freedom to deviate from perfectionism? What if it cultivated what psychologists call “tolerance for ambiguity”?

A perfect, unambiguous bureaucracy is indistinguishable from the merciless, AI-based total surveillance machine of the kind Musk & Co. dream. Bureaucracy that can afford to be imperfect, ambiguous, and useless, however, is bureaucracy that can be humane.

When the last line of defense against dictatorship is a “lazy bureaucrat,” as Charlie Tyson writes in The New Yorker, when red tape is the last red light on the way to tyranny, then bureaucracy, with all its flaws and shortcomings, is something we must learn to cherish.

In fact, government bureaucracy is precisely the arena where the battle against the myopic efficiency regime can be fought. If we can beat it there, we can beat it anywhere.