Selling Abstraction—Asterisk

What global financial markets have in common with necromancers.

Everything has a price. It’s a warning you might receive from a hedge fund trader, along with your “welcome to the firm” fleece vest. Or you might hear it from a skeleton, with flaming eyes, holding you by the cloak and ready to drop you into a pit. For “lawpunk” author Max Gladstone, the parallels between finance and fantasy sparked his Craft Sequence of novels (nine books and counting). While Tolkien and Lewis created their otherworlds under the shadow of their service in World War I, Gladstone’s books are his attempt to make sense of the global financial crisis.<br>Gladstone returned home from a stint teaching in China in 2008, just as the bottom fell out at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Part of what captured his attention was that so much value could vanish without leaving a physical mark on the world. “There was no smoking crater that was AIG,” he told Locus in 2015. So his books gave physical stakes to the abstractions of financialization.<br>His first Craft Sequence novel, Three Parts Dead, could sound like an ordinary fantasy: A god has been murdered. A necromancer comes to town to find the culprit and reassemble the god as best she can. But the plot has a lenticular quality — turn it the other way, and it’s the story of a corporate bankruptcy. Gladstone drew on his mother-in-law’s experience as a bankruptcy lawyer, translating it into epic. Something huge and ineffable, which once animated the city, can’t go on as it was. Something will have to be reassembled from the pieces by hard-minded men and women who work in a somewhat disreputable profession. A god — or a bank — is too big to be allowed to fail. Everything has a price.<br>Fantasy is a genre where readers expect to encounter hyperobjects, philosopher Timothy Morton’s term for objects that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” Hyperobjects exist out of human scale and confound human patterns of thought. Morton found his way into this language through his concern for environmental philosophy and the specter of climate change. The idea of hyperobjects helped him talk about why people flinch away from thinking about climate change — it’s too big to hold in your mind, it feels too big to address. In contrast, finance can feel like a too-big idea that someone else does have mastery of, and they’re wielding that ineffable power against the rest of us. But those working in finance are more prone to the language of mystery and supplication of strange gods than you might expect from the outside.<br>Hyperobjects provoke the painful awe of the sublime — they remind us of our littleness and “make this fragility conspicuous.” In response, Morton thinks, human beings need to be able to sit with the terror of our smallness. Morton proposes an “iterative, circling style of thought” in order to reason well about phenomena that dwarf us. He reaches for object-oriented philosophy to build up the habits we require, but this kind of problem isn’t as alien to the reader who haunts the genre fiction shelves.

Peter Fischli & David Weiss, The Roped Mountaineers, 1984. ©Peter Fischli and David Weiss, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

You must not pick up the palantir to set your strength against Sauron. You must not call up what you cannot put down. There is a worm at the heart of the tower, there are armed hunters in the dark forest, there is always the option to go mad from the revelation. Thus, Gladstone found, “I could talk about this stuff with magic: In fact, it was easiest to talk about it with magic.” Within a novel, the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” doesn’t have to be a metaphor at all.<br>A story that can only be told slant, if you want to tell the truth. A powerful, inhuman force you can harness, but mustn’t look directly at and whose name must be kept secret. What sounds like the novelist’s specialty isn’t so far from how the finance bros might describe their own work, once they’re several shots or bumps into the night. Four times a week, Bloomberg’s Matt Levine tells the stories of the latest (mis)adventures in finance in terms that don’t sound too different from those of Gladstone’s novels.<br>In 2021, Levine coined the “Elon Markets Hypothesis,” a principle of what he called “postmodern finance.” As he put it: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk.” A meme like Doge (the cryptocoin, not the liquidation of AIDS infrastructure in Africa) didn’t trade based on anticipation of future cash flows (none were anticipated). It rose or fell the way a plant follows the sun, depending on Musk’s fleeting attention.<br>If Musk’s attention is valuable, there’s a trade to be made. But you won’t learn these black arts from your business school professor. Per Levine:

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