Speculative Evil
On Speculation as inherent to the Human Condition. And, on EVIL as contingent to speculation
Speculative Evil
What exactly is speculation?
I think the common view of speculation is negative.
Take the figure of the speculator. A rapacious man (usually), unhinged and unethical, focused solely on financial gain.
There is definitely some truth in this. Speculation is associated with projects like the gold rush, colonialism, the oil booms, deforestation of the Amazon, and many other destructive endeavors that accompany the excesses of capitalism.
But, I think this is a narrow view of speculation. I want to propose that speculation is inherent in human existence. It’s part of what makes us different from most other animals.
Actually, I have no idea if other animals are capable of speculation.
But anyway, what exactly do I mean by speculation?
Speculation is a form of risk taking tied to the very act of living and projecting oneself into the future.
At the most basic level of existence, the future is uncertain. Therefore, any action which is oriented to a future outcome is speculative.
The curse or blessing of being a human being is to possess an imagination that projects you into the future, whether you like it or not.
Human speculation involves imagining scenarios detached from immediate experience. That’s the key part of it.
Imagined futures include both negative and positive outcomes. Actions that you take with the aim of projecting yourself into the future are also called decisions. Every real decision to act is a leap of faith.
Herein lies pretty much the heart of the human experience.
Faith and speculation are linked to decisions taken against an expected future outcome.
Roll the bones. Get me an amulet to protect me from harm. Sacrifice the goat.
You understand what I’m giving you here, right?
A vastly upgraded version of Yuval Noah Hariri’s stupid stuff on fiction.
Forget fiction, it’s imagination, speculation, and faith that are important.
Fiction is connected to time. Non fiction is in real-time. Fictive time is when you compress or edit the temporal experience and produce accelerated narrative. PERIOD!
So, this is speculation.
Human beings are, by nature, speculative creatures who constantly imagine possibilities, navigate uncertainties, and take leaps of faith.
This idea links speculation to creativity and the human tendency to think beyond immediate realities.
Speculation is existential, a way of being, where individuals confront the unknown and generate new horizons of meaning.
Speculative Technologies
Devices like playing cards and dice can be considered speculative technologies.
They are tools of probabilistic modeling and for exploring what could happen or determining what should happen when faced with uncertainty.
You can just sit around and roll dice with your friends and speculate on the outcome. If you make bets using actual money, it’s even more exciting.
Dice are a stand-in for chance and random shit happening.
It’s kind of interesting to consider. You can sit around with your friends and just wait for something arbitrary and probabilistic to happen, like a plane crash, or a shooting star, or the possibility of a car on the highway being a yellow VW bug.
But with dice, you are guaranteed that something’s going to happen. You don’t have to wait for it.
Dice also speculate on fairness and balance. Because you can have loaded dice for cheating, and fair dice that must be meticulously designed. In this way, dice interrogate the relationship between chaos and control.
Board games, role-playing games, and gambling are all exciting and fun because they involve both probabilities and randomness. They challenge players to anticipate possible outcomes and devise strategies accordingly.
Which, engages the speculative reasoning facility that we all love so much.
You bet on dice because you’ve imagined a future in which double sixes come up.
This speculative aspect transforms dice into tools for imagining possibilities, worlds, and futures.
Gambling with dice involves speculation in its purest form: a bet on uncertain outcomes. It reflects humanity’s inherent interest in taking calculated risks for potential rewards, an idea that extends to speculative ventures like stock trading, cryptocurrency, and the exploration of new technologies.
The Globe
Consider the globe.
You know, that perfectly round thing that lights up and spins and has the map of the planet earth printed on it.
The globe was an advanced technology of capitalist speculation. Believe it or not.
It’s the 18th century and you are a trend setter in a European city like London. You’ve had a custom globe made for you by one of the few globe makers, probably a guy in Germany. Your globe is a big old thing, a piece of furniture actually. Picture you and a bunch of friends standing around it, speculating.
The globe materializes the geopolitical and scientific knowledge underpinning imperial expansion. The globe in your library might include depictions of trade routes, existing colonies, and "undiscovered" lands.
You can put a finger on your own position, spin the globe a little and point to a new position on the planet. You can speculate about what you will find there. The globe is both calculator and sales tool. You can raise money for an expedition with the globe. Convince a wealthy buddy to put their capital into your venture.
The globe also shows relational data. The current size of the British Empire, in relation to the rest of the planet, for example.
More importantly, this device accelerates the brain’s ability to project itself, not just in time, but into space. The physical representation of the entire known world allows you to understand your self in position. You can HAVE your own position and speculate on future positions.
The globe also accelerated the abstraction of speculation into capital investment and ultimately modern imperial conquest.
If you think about that, you can understand why this kind of speculation is criticized.
What existed before these modern projections was a much more grounded speculative exploration, existential and philosophical. You can call it real, if you like.
This era of early modern globalization expanded the possibilities of imagination from the local to the global - quite literally. From there it became even more abstract.
Financial markets turn speculation into a disembodied, abstract process that disconnects individuals from tangible realities.
Back to dice for a minute.
Obviously, people can waste their lives playing dice with their friends. Gambling their money away. The connection between abstract speculation and alcoholic oblivion is interesting.
At the same time, dice are precursors to modern random number generators (RNGs), foundational to fields like cryptography, statistical modeling, and artificial intelligence.
In a sense, dice are literally built into these technologies.
Recall what I said earlier about how dice stand-in for something actually happening in the real world. This is important, because while things are happening all the time, it’s not that easy to capture this kind of dynamism in a controllable way.
A roll of the dice is an event. Something truly occurs each time the dice are rolled.
You cannot build a system that uses probability without the ability to generate some form of randomness, some form of dice rolling. How would you test the functions of such a system if you had to wait around for shit to happen?
Speculative Goods
We can argue about the inherent good of technologies like AI, or Crypto, or other collective speculative projects. Maybe we’d be better off if this stuff just hadn’t been invented.
I don’t know.
When the outcome of a project is uncertain, involving yourself in it is purely speculative. The more uncertainty, the greater the speculation. And, as everyone knows, where there’s high risk, there’s often high reward.
In the 19th century, railroad networks were built in the industrializing countries like Britain and the USA. Many of those projects were speculative.
Essentially, some guy would secure land rights to build a railroad line and raise money to construct it. Sometimes it worked and the project was successfully completed, other times it failed and everyone got reckt.
In the 1830s the Liverpool - Manchester line was an example of an amazing success. These two cities were literally the inner burning plutonic core of industrial capitalism. The L&M line was initially projected as a freight service. Few imagined that the passenger service element would fucking crush it. But crush it it did.
During the 1840s, Britain experienced a speculative bubble in railway shares, fueled by overconfidence in the profitability of railroads. The bubble was called The Railroad Mania. Some got rich, others got reckt. Not every project was like the L&M line.
Lines and tunnels were literally abandoned. A railroad going nowhere, just ending in some forest somewhere.
If you ever find yourself hiking an old railroad line that’s been turned into a nature trail, you might be walking on one of these legacy speculations.
It’s easy to see how a successful railroad line can bring insane rewards to early investors.
Many people just couldn’t imagine what was so great about a railroad connection between two random places, so the value of the eventual thing was severely underestimated, or not
Good capitalists are visionaries right?
On the other hand, some are false visionaries. It’s a roll of the dice.
High risk, high reward.
The weird thing about the railroads bubble is this intersection of speculation, technical development, and capital.
Britain was a first mover in the railroad tech space. The scene in the mid 19th century was a cut throat speculative mess of private companies killing each other in the race to lay track and grab land rights. It was only later that standardization was mandated by the government.
By then, most of the work had been done and non-standard lines with weird gauge specs had to be retrofitted to compliance.
First mover advantage meant that Britain solidified its place as the leading industrial country of the world. France built railroad as well, but it was a slower, more centralized affair that involved government planning from the beginning. Just look at a railroad map of France today and you can see that all roads still lead to Paris.
Developments in blockchain technology and crypto seem at least to be an echo of the 19th century railroad story. No standardization, massive capital investment, high risk - high reward. Visionaries and weirdoes and scam artists and first movers, all inhabiting the same strange speculative space.
Will the United States have a first mover advantage over other countries?
Can we even still think about countries in the way we might have in the 19th century?
Dunno.
Evil
It strikes me, intuitively, that the idea of evil is deeply connected to speculation.
This is just food for thought so take it with a pinch of salt (to ward off the evil).
Think about evil and how it is incarnated.
Speculation, especially in economic or ideological contexts, represents a detachment from immediate human realities. When speculation prioritizes abstract systems—like financial markets, utopian ideologies, or technological fantasies—over concrete human welfare, it risks fostering dehumanization and ethical blindness.
In fact, any ambition to out pace out perform, or extend human limitations is speculative hubris, leading to unintended consequences, in other words, EVIL.
Shared spaces, the home, the family, the community, the village, are essential to human existence. Speculation, when untethered from these shared realities, easily betrays the trust and cohesion that hold societies together. EVIL.
Speculation is inherently greedy. EVIL.
Utopian Ideologies like Universal Human Rights, Communism, and Nazism are inherently speculative. EVIL.
Of course, I’m EVIL too… EVIL’s ok with me.
On Spec
Consider the concept of something being done “On Spec”.
This has disappeared from the language, at least as far as I can tell. But, even in the 90s and early 2000s you could talk about a speculative writing project or film project as being done “On Spec.”
It just meant that the project didn’t have a major backer. It was “on spec”.
People simply didn’t do things On Spec, it was too risky.
When a freelance journalist submits a piece to a publication she’s written it “on spec”.
I made quite a few films “on spec” before breaking into the industry. If I hadn’t done the speculative work, I wouldn’t have worked as a film director. It cost me quite a bit of investment.
Later on I was making 20 grand a day on commercial film projects.
Now I write my novels on spec as well, since there’s no guaranteed buyer. I don’t have a publishing contract with an advance. At the same time, I don’t have to give up 80% of my royalties.
High Risk, high reward.
I suppose this means that I’ve got a personal stake in the story of speculation. Perhaps we can say that degrees of speculation correspond to degrees of conservatism, at least when it comes to the productive and actionable aspects of the Human Condition.
Heavy speculation requires a high degree of disinhibition.
A more conservative approach to life fosters risk adverse inhibition.
Now we can understand the relation of alcoholic degeneracy to speculation.
Here’s to all my fellow degenerates. You know who you are!
This is a very cool article. Dice and computers and crazy finance people...