katie
@katiewav
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test driving farcaster long posts with some thoughts on the history of speculation! give it a read and lmk if you have thoughts <3
Speculation, in many ways, feels like a phenomenon that uniquely belongs to the contemporary era—the endless churn of memecoins, Polymarket, the ambient casino of Discord channels and Twitter threads. It’s tempting to see this current moment as a product of the internet age: a world where everyone is a minor-league hedge fund, betting on everything from presidential races to the next celebrity scandal to the next world war. But look a little closer, and it becomes clear that this speculative impulse is less a glitch of modernity and more like the operating system systemic to capitalism since at least the late 1800s.
Let’s look at Chicago, late nineteenth century: the city is a fever dream of grain, railroads, and restless ambition. Here, the first formal futures markets are born: contracts that let you buy or sell wheat, pork, corn, not as physical goods, but as ideas about the future. The innovation is radical: now you can profit (or lose everything) on what you imagine might happen, not just what you can physically store in a warehouse. The markets quickly become a spectacle in themselves, drawing in not just farmers and merchants but a whole new class of urbanites and small-town strivers.
Enter the bucket shops. These were side-street betting parlors where anyone, from a shop clerk to a day laborer, could place a wager on the price movement of commodities or stocks. You didn’t need to own anything; you just needed a hunch and a willingness to risk it all. The bucket shops were proto-prediction markets, as much about social drama as financial gain. There’s this sense of a kind of collective fever—rooms packed with people , reading old newspaper accounts, watching the ticker, rumors swirling, fortunes made and lost in an afternoon. The line between investment and gambling blurs to the point of invisibility.
This democratization of risk was both thrilling and terrifying. Moralists, politicians, and journalists all weighed in. Was this the future—finance as a participatory sport, open to all? Or was it a sign of social decay, the masses seduced by the illusion of easy money? The debates sound eerily familiar: is this a new form of empowerment, or just a more efficient way to separate people from their savings? Courts and legislatures tried to draw lines, legalizing some forms of speculation, banning others. But the categories slipped through their fingers. The same contract could be a hedge for a farmer and a straight-up bet for a city clerk.
Across the political sphere, movements and parties of the era were ambivalent. On one hand, they railed against the forces of finance and the speculators who seemed to profit from everyone else’s volatility. On the other, they sometimes even adopted speculative tools themselves, seeing them as a way for ordinary people to claw back a little agency in a rigged system. Speculation was both a threat and a promise, a collective anxiety and a collective fantasy. Marx called finance a “specter” haunting the real economy, a ghostly force that creates value out of nothing and threatens to destabilize the system. That ghost is still with us, flickering in every meme stock and viral coin.
All of this feels like a prelude to our current moment. A crucial difference, however––back then, the speculation, no matter how fevered, was still tethered to a material good. Even if you never saw a bushel of wheat, the prices on the board reflected a crop somewhere, a train car rolling toward the city. The speculation was anchored, however tenuously, in the physical world. Today, so much of what’s being speculated on—memecoins, influencer drama, the next viral moment—has nothing to do with material goods. We bet on abstractions, social moods, the collective hallucination of value. The commodity has dematerialized; the ticker is just as lively, but what it tracks is often pure narrative, liquid spectacle. The bucket shop is now a Telegram group, the wheat future a memecoin, the feverish crowd now distributed across time zones and metaphysical planes but no less invested in the outcome. The speculative imagination is the connective tissue, less about the asset and more about the story: who gets in early, who gets left holding the bag, what wild thing might happen if there’s just enough collective force.
From Debord: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The old futures market was a spectacle in this sense—rooms full of people watching numbers flicker, each hoping to catch a glimpse of their own future in the movement of the ticker. Today, it’s Discord servers and Twitter timelines, but the social relation—the wager, the collective hope or panic—remains the same.
We like to think that betting on dog coins or the outcome of a Supreme Court case is a product of the digital age, but it’s really just the latest round in a very old game. Speculation is how capitalism metabolizes uncertainty, how people try to make meaning (or at least a quick bag) out of the chaos. Speculation has always been an undercurrent of our inherently social world, always about the hope that if enough of us buy in, we can bend reality, or at least ride the wave for a while.
So when we marvel at the weirdness of Polymarket or the latest memecoin, we’re not witnessing a rupture with history. We’re just playing out the same drama, with new tools and a faster ticker. The interface changes. The urge to speculate, to gather in rooms (physical or digital) and wager on what comes next, is the throughline. 2 replies
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