Distinktion Special Issue proposal

Silicon Valley, Imaginative Speculations, and Financialization

Ali Rıza Taşkale

Introduction

Silicon Valley has long been regarded as a symbol of innovation and progress, shaped by the fusion of countercultural ideals from the 1960s and free-market optimism. Emerging from this historical ethos is a narrative of entrepreneurial individualism and technological utopianism, where the Valley is imagined as a site of creativity and transformative potential. In recent years, however, Silicon Valley has transcended its geographical roots, becoming a powerful conceptual framework that signifies the intersections of technology,...

Keynote Speaker: Sherryl Vint, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of English at UC Riverside

Workshop rationale

While social thinkers have begun to explore the role of speculative fiction in understanding financial abstractions and employing it as a tool for social diagnosis, its potential applications within social and cultural theory—particularly in examining the role of speculative finance in contemporary society—remain curiously under-explored. Highlighting this gap is essential, given the widespread presence of speculative finance in the realms of economics (Durand, 2017), urbanism (Goldman, 2023), culture (Bahng, 2018), climate (Bracking, 2019), and society (Haiven & Berland, 2014; Shonkwiler, 2017; Vint, 2019; Komporozos, 2022). However, the inherently abstract nature of...

This panel begins from the critical position that the hegemony of speculative finance demands new avenues for collective resistances created by its conditions, and that speculative fiction has the capacity to address this problem. The three papers are thus concerned with how speculative fiction mediates speculative finance. That is, rather than offering mere homologies – speculative finance is like magic, or time travel is like speculative finance – they instead argue that speculative fiction’s formal properties and narrative tropes offer unique ways for both representing and critically interrogating the abstract and virtual aspects of finance alongside their material instantiations and consequences. As such, it is organized around a series of related questions: What is the logical and structural relationship between speculative fiction and speculative finance? What new conceptual tools are necessary to combat the financialization of everyday life? If...

Speculative Fiction in the Anthropocene

From an International Relations (IR) perspective, it is interesting to observe how speculative fiction deals with “cognitive estrangement” when it comes to the Anthropocene and classical concepts in world politics such as global governance. Speculative fiction helps us recognise the ways in which global governance takes effect and, from that vantage point, reveals the contradictions and the possibilities in light of the negative effects of the Anthropocene. In this way, speculative fiction can be best understood as a tool to help us better read and understand global governance and the modalities of the Anthropocene. Thus, it becomes not only a way of probing the limits and central contradictions of global governance today, but also as the starting point for exploring the possibilities within it.

As part of my Marie Curie project on speculative finance and speculative fiction, I’m organising another event on the 18th of April. Sherryl Vint, one of the leading scholars of Science Fiction in the world today, will come to RUC to talk about the nested narrative of Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust as a motif by which the novel engages with the form of the financialized economy, in parallel with how its plot reflects on the lives of New York’s financial elite. By reframing the story of the 1929 crash through several mediations from the ‘reality’ this narrative relates—a novel-with-the-novel, notes for a biography, reflections on this process by the ghost writer of said biography, and finally a personal journal—Trust draws our attention to the financialized economy as an exercise of substituting models for the thing itself, with inevitable distortions and lost data. Then, I will engage in a dialogue with Sherryl Vint in the debate around the importance...

The news is pretty bleak these days with fascism, climate change and late-stage capitalism on the rise. People keep repeating “This is the bad place”. The panel discussed if we have slipped into an actual dystopia without noticing.
Seb Doubinsky, Ali Riza Taskale, Simon Zander, Anita Simonsen & Ian Sales (M)

As part of my Marie Curie project on speculative finance and speculative fiction, I’m organising another event on the 18th of April. Sherryl Vint, one of the leading scholars of Science Fiction in the world today, will come to RUC to talk about the nested narrative of Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust as a motif by which the novel engages with the form of the financialized economy, in parallel with how its plot reflects on the lives of New York’s financial elite. By reframing the story of the 1929 crash through several mediations from the ‘reality’ this narrative relates—a novel-with-the-novel, notes for a biography, reflections on this process by the ghost writer of said biography, and finally a personal journal—Trust draws our attention to the financialized economy as an exercise of substituting models for the thing itself, with inevitable distortions and lost data. Then, I will engage in a dialogue with Sherryl Vint in the debate around the importance...