Stanford University Press

Currency of Nihilism - Amin Samman

What happens to economic life when meaning and value come apart? Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, E.M. Cioran, and Jean Baudrillard, this book shows how the latest trends in digital finance restage the dilemmas of nihilism in new ways. From cryptocurrencies and meme stocks to Silicon Valley venture capital and the global boom in artificial intelligence, economic life today thrives on the ambiguous allure of nothingness, annihilation, and disappearance. Samman brings the financial status of contemporary nihilism into focus, connecting its signal moods and sentiments to the system-logics of world finance. All the historical moods of nihilism now circulate through the financial system, he argues, and each further wave of technological advance provides yet more means of speculating on these moods. The result is a lucrative new culture of financial nihilism with no end in sight. For readers interested in philosophy and the history of capitalism, Currency of Nihilism offers an unsettling perspective on the nihilistic structures of feeling that underwrite the contemporary financial system.

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