Finance, technology, and fascism today
Event Information
With Fabian Muniesa, Professor, Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Mines Paris – PSL
In his book Paranoid Finance, sociologist Fabian Muniesa observes a critical correspondence between the radical fantasies of financial and technological “reset” seen in contemporary conspiratorialist culture (e.g., Nesara, the QAnon syndrome, the sovereign citizen movement) and the extremist imaginaries of currency, information, energy, value, and intelligence detected in dominant innovation milieus (e.g., Silicon Valley ideology, “deep tech” venture capital, Peter Thiel’s eschatology).
At the center of this correspondence lies a complex paradox: a tension linking ideals of liberty (personal sovereignty, private property, voluntary contract, individual strength, unbound energy, acclamatory democracy) to ideals of authority (executive will, implacable decision, charismatic leadership, unmanageable pluralism, access control, summary justice, external menace, internal enemy). The resolution of this tension, Muniesa argues, is best decoded in terms of fascist propensity.
Please join us at BESI as Muniesa illustrates this hypothesis using the case of the “Quantum Financial System.” Originally a fringe millennialist, conspiratorial fantasy, the Quantum Financial System has become mainstream as a popular interpretation of the coming “fintech” miracle.
Following Muniesa’s talk, please join us for a post-talk reception featuring light refreshments.
Co-sponsored by Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy and BESI Technology Network
About the speaker
Fabian Muniesa (born, 1972, Madrid, Spain) is a professor at the École des Mines de Paris (Mines Paris – PSL) and a member of the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI) in Paris, France. His academic work focuses on the anthropological critique of the culture of capitalism and on the study of the troubles of economic meaning. He has worked on topics such as the sociology of algorithms, the paradoxes of performance metrics, the management of public services and administrations, the epistemology of economics, the psychology of business education, the politics of responsible innovation, and the anthropology of financial valuation.
An early contributor to the social studies of finance, his work has been featured in academic outlets such as the Journal of Cultural Economy, Distinktion, and Economy and Society. Major contributions include the development of an approach to economic performativity inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour (The Provoked Economy, Routledge, 2014), and the examination of the paranoid potentials of contemporary notions of financial value (Paranoid Finance, Polity, 2024). In this latest work, he argues that contemporary conspiratorialist, millennialist discourse on money, banking, and wealth (as exemplified by the QAnon syndrome) does not embody a delirious misrepresentation of the logic of finance, but rather exacerbates the deleterious potentials inherent in mainstream financial imagination.