Paranoid Finance

Fabian Muniesa (1)

1 CSI i3 - Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation i3

Do your own research! Type “NESARA GESARA” and see what you learn. Or try “OPPT UCC” instead. You will access ideals of sovereignty, emancipation, and wealth, and tutorials about how to restore the foundations of true value and proceed to financial salvation. Mixtures of millennialism, esotericism, conspiratorialism, populism, antisemitism, libertarianism and nationalism can be observed in a number of contemporary movements of economic redemption. These can sometimes afford some troubling expression, as in the case of “sovereign citizen” extremism. Documenting these practices furthers understanding of the financial element at work in the culture of contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse. But it also opens a promising lead for the anthropology of finance, as it exposes the delirious potentials of ordinary conceptions of money, finance, wealth and value. The case of “OPPT” (“One People’s Public Trust”) provides a testbed for a critical inquiry into the demons inherent in financial imagination.

Domains: Sociology; Social Anthropology and ethnology; Economics and Finance; History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences; Business administration

Fabian Muniesa. Paranoid Finance. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 2022, 89 (3), pp.731-756. ⟨10.1353/sor.2022.0041⟩. ⟨halshs-03827920⟩