Real Fake: An intellectual history of distortion
(under advance contract with MIT Press)
What is the relationship between magic and finance?
How did alchemy become a defining feature of our financialized world?
And how does market-driven distortion produce the elusive realities,
cosmologies and conspiracies of modern capitalism?
Image of ‘financial alchemy’ generated by Aris K-A through Open AI
My current book project, Real Fake, is the first in-depth treatment of the phenomenon of distortion in the history of capitalism. The book offers an alternative account of our present ‘crisis of truth’ by unearthing new and compelling connections between the enchanted world of finance and our political technologies of truth. It unravels how the denizens of financial markets distort factual reality to produce what I describe as the ‘real fake’ of capitalism: new and vertiginous worlds that blur boundaries between fact and fiction, and, in so doing, challenge time-honoured classificatory systems of truth and falsehood. This becomes strikingly apparent in our age of AI chatbots, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the Metaverse, as the digital platforms through which we work, trade and play become increasingly untethered from real-world referents.
Real Fake, however, argues that market-driven distortion has been with us for longer than we usually think. The book traces the progenitors of such augmented realities in the dawn of finance capitalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, when market technologies of prognostication and forecasting were deployed alongside occult cosmologies and forms of mystical foreknowledge to arbitrate truth claims in society writ large. This innovation allows the book to provide fresh perspectives to the pervading elusiveness of our current political reality and explain the growing traction of popular conspiracy movements and the sustained advance of the simulated worlds dreamed up in Silicon Valley.
Provisional table of contents
Introduction: From fake news to the Real Fake
PART I: MARKETS
Chapter 1: Myths of disenchanted capitalism
Chapter 2: Market alchemists
Chapter 3: Technologies of distortion
PART II: POLITICS
Chapter 4: Conspiracy vibes
Chapter 5: Tech-populist simulations
Chapter 6: A critical theory of reality
Conclusions: Winning in the Real Fake
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