Dark Side Anthropology & the Art of Financial Culturehacking
LUNAR ECLIPSE Note: This essay originally appeared in the book Supramarkt: How to Frack the Fatal Forces of the Capitalocene . Available for republishing under CreativeCommons I worked as a financial derivatives broker in London from 2008 to 2010, at a company clinging on for life in the midst of the financial crisis. That is not a particularly long time to work as a broker, but I was never aspiring to it as a career. I was a left-wing activist steeped in the tradition of Marxian political economy and deep-ecology environmentalism, and with a background in anthropology and international development. I was on a quasi-anthropological adventure on the ‘dark side’, immersing myself in the culture of high finance in an act of subversive exploration. HIGH FINANCE I say ‘quasi-anthropological’ because it is not exactly like I approached it with a formal academic mindset, and I was never attached to an academic institution. There are professional anthropologists like Karen Ho and Caitlin Za...