User:ØverLørd/Project proposal

Project proposal

Construction site! Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited

What do you want to make?

A research project in the form of a fictional cult that manifests itself in different "artifacts" used for "rituals". The cults deities are based on the mythology of financial markets. The project will draw from economics and particular online forums dedicated to high-risk trading, to explore the relation between human psychology and (market)value, and how this is permeated by technological "advancement".

Possible topics that can feed the research can be:
human-technological interfaces that allow for participating in "free" markets.
How macroeconomic systems rely on trust and belief in order to operate.
how value is derived and transformed through artificial contracts.
…

Why do you want to make it?

Market & Value

At the surface something that intrigues me is the fact that the stock value of a company seems to dictate the how it runs. take for example intel, a company that has been leading in the production of semi-conductors due to various factors like losing to competitors overseas and being late to the Intergrated-AI-chip-party, saw a drastic fall in stockprice for the Q2 erarnings anouncment of 2023. In order to combat this, the CEO announced in the beginning of september that there will be "restructuring" - a fancy term for saying that jobs will be cut, parts of the company dissolved and production reduced. It seems like in the case of the big billion-dollar companies the most important thing is to keep the stock-price stable rather than running a company in a "good" way.

The relation between cause and effect seems very blurred. I think this resonates with me as I previously have explored how media controls narrative, or how atleast how these things seems like self feeding systems: like how media protrays a certain (doomsday) reality of this world, and then this narrative is internalized amongst the populus, and becomes reality, which in turn feeds the media… Is similar to how the stock price of a company determines how well the compnay is doing, which in turn affects investors trust in the company, and effectivly how much money is put in to the company, that determines how well the company is doing.

The financial cult of r/wallstreetbets

The financial world seems like an alternative reality, a strange religion with even stranger rites and rituals. buying and selling confusing contracts, betting against each other and the market. A cynical echo-chamber where one persons loss is another ones win. A part of this cult that I have observed is the one found on the subreddit "wallstreetbets" a subreddit that became infamous in the beginning of 2021 for pumping the price of gamestop. Gamestop was steadily stearing towards bankrupcy, leading a lot of investors and the financial mainstream to short it (bet against the company, by borrowing a share and selling it at the current value, "predicting" that share to fall in value). The memelords of reddit managed to organize a socalled short-squeeze, where redditors around the world were encouraged to buy gamestop stocks and hold them (diamond hands), leading to a sharp increase in price, forcing all the short-holders to close their postion at a loss. This hurt some hedge-funds and the short sellers, a truly inspiring action against the biggest fish in the sea.

Today the subreddit is mainly people posting so-called "loss/gain-porn" bragging about how much the made or lost. It is an echo-chamber that celebrates the glorified gambling that mobile-trading platforms have fostered. In the comments you can find heaps of ironic investment advice, that tells you how you can gamble away all of your money, in the quickest way possible. Another ting you will find here is so-call D&D—duediligence on obscure biotech-companies that may strike gold at the end of the next quarter, and why you should gamble all your savings with them. Another macabre artifact of this strange corner of the internet is all the suicide help-resources promoted in this subreddit.

In this cult money becomes completely abstracted, only correlating with lines and numbers. It is completly distached from labour, and becomes its own meta game, hyper-money, hyper-value. leading to the development of some interesting conspiracies, like how certain trends of global indexes like the NASDAQ and S&P500 and combination with the trends of unemployment-rates "are EXACTLY the same as right before the 1929-depression".

Relation to a larger context

"Speculation is at the core of the financial system. (Pater, 2021 p.402)" What this means is that money in financial systems, are made through placing your money in some asset with and expectation that this asset will in the future fetch a higher price. These financial markets are usually secondary, as in the do not directly funnel the money into the production/operation of said asset, but rather entail the exchange of securities and contracts derived from the asset.

This way of anticipating the future based on profits has heavily influenced professional design, in the sense that designer is expected to anticipate trends in order to make something sellable tomorrow.

References/bibliography

CAPS LOCK: Pater, R. (2021). Caps lock : how capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape it. Amsterdam: Valiz.