The value of Pokémon cards is clearly imaginary. Even in their initial, commodified form, a slip of mass-produced, coloured cardboard is by no stretch of the imagination “worth” the money children wish to pay for them. Within most economistic analyzes, and many Marxist ones, it would simply be assumed that the “use-value” of the cards is worth the extra price, and that this “use” is basically enjoyment or distraction (whether interpreted positively or negatively). But the “use-value” of the cards is really the way they serve as a medium for the negotiation of value, which is highly imaginative, remarkably collaborative (if sometimes coercive) and largely autonomous. However, it is an imagination, collaboration and autonomy achieved through and predicated on access to the Pokémon card commodity. And that commodity carries with it its own logic and constraints. While it is possible that children might make radically different use of Pokémon cards than the basic theme of collection/battle/nurture/train/accumulate, these tendencies repeat in children’s play with Pokémon cards through a combination of the cards’ own material logic (they are highly collectable and suggest themselves for these purposes) and intertextual reinforcement, not only from other Pokémon media (films, comic books, etc.) but from a whole society in which values of acquisition, competitiveness, accumulation and hierarchy are privileged in uncountable subtle ways. So, while children may exercise their agency and imagination in their play with Pokémon cards, and while they may use them to negotiate their own social values and reproduce (and transform) their social circles, they do so in conditions not of their own choosing.

So understanding Pokémon cards as a financialized practice, one in which children internalize, play with and rearticulate the ambient codes and cultural thematics of the financialized societies in which they live, should not lead us to the conclusion that they are purely hegemonic in a reductionist sense of that term (a one-way, rulingclass effort to re-educate subalterns and, thus, reproduce dominant social relations). Yet it is equally important to note that, like money, Pokémon cards do not exist in a vacuum where their value is purely a matter of interpersonal negotiation and convivial play. More accurately, Pokémon is a site where we can see multiple frames of value at work. Like an ocean gyre, it is a meeting-point of multiple, conflicting and complex currents, within which material debris ebbs and flows. In children’s Pokémon card play we can find a key example of the way financialization is articulated in daily life, but also the way that articulation enjoys and, indeed, depends on an interval of play, autonomy and creativity that cannot simply be reduced to superstructural ephemera.

[...] virtuosity, for Virno, is our capacity to create value, and, in an age of cognitive capitalism, it is that capacity that is ever more at stake. Financialization, I suggest, is a key means of capturing, shaping and enclosing virtuosity. What is Wall Street except a massive “machine” (in the Deleuzian sense of the term) for harnessing and putting to work the incredible creative and cognitive energies of a massive pool of financial workers? And what is debt (finance’s key product) except a complicated means of disciplining virtuosity, of creating a situation in which one must apply one’s creativity, ingenuity and social and cultural capacities towards capitalist ends (Lazzarato 2012)? [...]

[...] Pokémon is a site where children “learn to learn” (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004, 30) to develop financialized subjecthood and a sense of agency germane to a world without guarantees where social values are bartered, where the individual is an isolated economic agent and where society is merely the sum of its people’s economic decisions. This learning is clearly not the intention of the Nintendo Corporation, but the brand works and takes such a hold of children’s imagination because they, on a deep existential level, recognize what Pokémon can offer them: it affirms a world they see all around them, from observing their parents’ increasingly episodic careers and financial woes to the sorts of narratives they witness on television and the media. Pokémon’s success stems from its resonance within and reproduction of the ethos of financialization.

On the one hand, the financial sector is incredibly creative. Some of the finest and most refined minds of each successive generation are cherry-picked from elite universities hedge-funds, investment banks and their institutional periphery to dream up ever more rapid, cunning and diabolical ways to make money out of money. The development of new derivative financial products, new avenues of inter-market arbitrage, new revenue streams to capitalize, new technologies of high-frequency trading and new ways of reading, visualizing and interpreting the market have seduced not only the graduates of elite business programs, but also PhDs in fluid dynamics, astrophysics, cellular biology and computer engineering. To be sure, the vast majority of what goes on in the financial sector is deeply uncreative (endless number-crunching and paper-pushing, scrupulous research on economic sectors and investments, meticulous computer programming, hectic digital trading and ruthless power-brokering). Taken as a whole, however, the financial sector is a staggering reactor of human creativity, a playground of the mind where the unfathomable pressure of intense competition creates a remorseless ecosystem of constrained innovation, which, no less strange than the uncanny depths of the ocean, is populated with monsters at the very limits of the imagination

Still, for all that intelligence and innovation, the sector mostly produces immaterial financial assets or metaphoric wealth – in other words, practically nothing of tangible or lasting value. From one angle, in fact, it destroys value: liquidating public assets by privatizing services, foreclosing on homes and businesses, and imposing austerity measures that funnel social wealth upwards to an apparently lawless global oligarchy. Financial forces also superintend a global economic system that is characterized by a massively unfair global division of creative labour, where creative opportunities are reserved for a fraction of the world’s population (mostly in Northern cities). The remainder spend longer days and shorter lives in fields, factories and kitchens, with little opportunity to practise creativity and even less to have it recognized or valued. Most of the wealth “created” by the financial sector is, in a sense, derivative – it derives its value as a reflection or means of representing real-world labour and wealth. Finance, at least at first blush, appears to be a glitzy simulacrum of value that nonetheless disciplines and (dis)orients the economic and social world. In this sense, finance is, a form of class war, which synthesizes, aggregates and puts to work the creativity of the financial “industry” in the interests of perpetuating and, indeed, more deeply entrenching reigning inequalities and forms of exploitation.

[...] Claustrophobic cultural norms and parochial markets were to be swept away by the free movement of capital around the world, as were inefficient and unfair labour practices and corrupt governments. This rhetoric reached a fevered pitch during the dot.com boom at the turn of the millennium, when our old friend Bill Gates was among those CEOs leading the choir in praise of a borderless digital economy that would sweep away lumbering corporate dinosaurs, open up bold new markets and allow the spirit of the creative entrepreneur latent in each individual to shine through (Gates 1995; 1999). Indeed, so much opportunity was said to abound that individuals who failed to seize it had only themselves to blame, an impression which lent itself to the drive to privatize and to cut social services lest they inhibit such creative zeal. Even meagre forms of economic redistribution, it was feared, would create dependent individuals unwilling to embrace the risks and rewards of the new economy. The appearance of “creativity” as the partner of “destruction” here is no accident, or, more accurately, it is no accident that Schumpeter’s initially pessimistic and academic term became a crucial element in the reproduction of financialization. In much the same way as discourses of innovation, progress, science and ingenuity were applied to the technological development of nuclear bombs, the slippery language of creativity offers an unaccountable rhetoric that both excuses and facilitates financial speculation’s destructive practices towards the reproduction of the ruling paradigm. By linking the vicissitudes of the deregulated free market to the idea of creativity, which is held to be the dynamic and unique element of the human spirit, financialized capitalism’s drives and effects are disguised as the natural and inevitable articulations of human nature itself, rather than as historically contingent and entirely avoidable.

At one level, creativity’s move from the margin to the centre of capitalist ideology is linked to the financialization of the system. Financialization is driven, ultimately, by a speculative ethos with a voracious appetite for the production of newness (see Marazzi 2008, 64–68). To demonstrate their quality to investors, firms need to prove not merely profitability but also innovation, a capacity to stay ahead of the curve, to constantly revolutionize their means of production (and distribution, and sales). Financialization, then, drives and is driven by an economy pathologically addicted to the performance of creativity. Creativity’s particular woolliness as a concept is here an asset: it is precisely because it is not fully quantifiable (in part because it is a nebulous term, in part because it is always relative to someone else’s lack) that it can operate as a disciplinary idiom, one that polices economic actors who could always be just a little more creative, and may not be creative enough. In a world where capital insists on measuring and quantifying almost every social process (de Angelis 2007) there is a particular economic and cultural utility to be found in ideas and ideals like creativity precisely to the extent they refuse or elude such conscription: they hold open a horizon or a promise in whose name all manner of otherwise dubious, short-sighted or irrational actions might be justified. Creativity, unburdened from any requirement to prove its purpose or measure its success, becomes a cruel aspiration whose absence can be cited as the justification for the restructuring of an enterprise, a government program or an individual’s career or economic outlook.

[...] Cognitive capitalism, then, is characterized by the expansion and proliferation of capital’s technologies and techniques for capturing living labour beyond the factory (Dyer-Witheford 1999; Vercellone 2007). As Marazzi (2008) illustrates, the financial sector itself is foundational to the development, sustainability and measurement of these new technologies. Drawing on the example of the dot.com bubble of the early 2000s, he argues that finance offers liquid capital to a whole variety of attempts to marketize and commodify the creative energies of workers and consumers. While perhaps only 1% of firms succeed (paying for the other 99% that end in failure), finance effectively widens and pluralizes capitalism’s social factory. For other Autonomist thinkers, including Federici (2005; 2012) and De Angelis (2007), this represents less a new paradigm and more the continuation and intensification of capitalism’s historic trajectory to enclose the commons. They borrow the concept from Marx’s writings on the origins of capitalism in the “primitive accumulation” of common lands, and then they extend it to illuminate the ways that common spaces of autonomy, solidarity and social experimentation are successively incorporated into and subsumed within capitalism’s overarching paradigm (see also Caffentzis 2013; The Midnight Notes Collective 1990).

Second, finance allows long-term profiteering by offering capitalists credit, to pursue projects that may take years to come to profitable fruition. For instance, while ultimately extremely profitable, the construction of a mine, or the development of new communication or industrial technologies, takes time and does not afford returns quickly enough to entice most capitalist investors. Finance allows the capitalist class as a whole to advance money to individual capitalists whose ventures will, eventually, benefit the system as a whole and commodify another aspect of the world or of social relations (in terms of new resource “inputs” derived from the mine, or new technologies of exploitation). Through the magic of interest, lending institutions and individual investors can afford to provide many more capitalists with funds than will ever succeed: the interest (at least theoretically) covers the costs of the failure of some enterprises and provides an incentive for investment. Hence, finance allows a much more dynamic capitalist economy and encourages the expansion of capitalist accumulation into new spheres of social life as “entrepreneurs” seek to commodify ever-more dimensions of human existence. For instance, the frantic (and ultimately successful) rush to commodify the internet was facilitated by the rise of the so-called dot.com bubble, which saw financial markets make speculative investments in a multitude of tiny, fly-by-night firms with “good ideas” (Marazzi 2010). While most of these ideas would never actually generate meaningful revenue, the sphere of finance afforded the possibility for capital to attempt tens of thousands of strategies of commodification, knowing full well that only a handful (Amazon, Yahoo, etc.) would succeed, but that this success would make up for the capital invested in the legions of failures. [...]

[...] Because capitalism is fundamentally based on contradictions, financial crises, in a way, regulate the inherent systemic crisis by limiting its effects to the particular sphere of finance. In the aftermath of such crises, capital has the opportunity redraw or renegotiate the lines of regulation. The Keynesian solution to the Great Depression, or the disastrous austerity solution to our own “Great Recession”, are means by which the lines of policy and practice can be redrawn to afford the perpetuation of capital accumulation, at least until the contradictions once again accumulate to such an extent that crisis is inevitable. To this we might add that, given that crises are cyclical and systemic, they can offer tremendous opportunities to financial firms who can hedge their bets correctly. The staggering success of Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan in profiting from the 2007/2008 crisis and its aftermath, as well as their central role in fomenting that crisis (both pushing and betting against securitized sub-prime loans), bears witness to the reality that crises are not some sort of neutral storm from heaven, but, rather, the “internal exception,” the routine, if brutal, “state of emergency” that is key to the sovereignty of capital.