Aside from postmodern malaise, what might such an approach offer to our considerations of precariousness and financialization? Its most important lesson is that precariousness is the norm, not the exception. Our current precarious moment, one dominated by market and financial forces and manifesting itself as a violent form of hyper-neoliberal austerity (which is producing ever more and deeper economic precariousness), is only one particularly pernicious manifestation of an underlying ontological condition. It is worse than many such manifestations precisely because it is so successful in privatizing precariousness through the logic of individualism and competition. We come to blame ourselves, rather than the system, for our precariousness, in part because, unlike some rigid caste-based system or a slave society, we are (most of us) legally and technically free to escape precariousness (though, ironically, to escape by embracing precarity, by leveraging ourselves into prosperity). It is a system that works by promising that we can, each of us, alone, escape our existential condition of precariousness by getting rich, by obeying the system’s axiomatic dictates and playing our role. The constant barrage of images and tales of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, of celebrities and of others who have “made it” do not exist (as they did in a previous era) to show us the right social order and the natural superiority of certain sorts of people. Rather, these ubiquitous dream images promise each of us a life without precariousness or, more accurately (if we return to the cinematic depictions of the Wall Street predator) a life where precariousness is mastered and leveraged.