Reading Notes: Prisoner of the Present Future
Some rambling thoughts about the work of Elena Esposito and how it can link in with Land and Fisher
Esposito's work is necessary reading because it is a sobering look at the way time in our current economic-political arrangement flows: hyperfinancialized and mediated through opaque instruments beyond the grasp and understanding of the general public. Financial instruments being the main constraint for entropic destruction seems to be a common theme in the post-truth populist era - strongmen like Padishah Trump are ultimately unable to follow through because they are punished by treasury or bond markets. Wars and supposed multipolarity fracturing is ultimately stopped because the market deems it so. Finance is the main feedback loop through which the post-WWII cybernetic capital order keeps on track, giving rise to the all-popular terminally online meme of "Nothing Ever Happens". In a way, Esposito's argument could be read as follows: Due to the ubiquitous explosion of hyperfinancial instruments that mediate risk but also absorb obscene amounts of capital this is what ultimately constrains political elites, even populists into behaving in certain almost preconfigured ways - hence "Nothing Ever Happens".
Esposito’s work revolves around futures and derivatives. What are these things? Simply put, they are financial instruments that:
deal with the future. They settle in the present the buying or selling of something (which may be anything) that will take place at a future date. That is, they are contracts that deal today with tomorrow’s decisions. As we shall see, they allow the build-up of a very complex way of trading future constraints. In this way, we speak of the future of futures first in terms of how derivatives see and shape the future, as a technical and formalized way of dealing with time and its use, having consequences for society as a whole. This is not to say that derivatives claim to foresee the true course of things. On the contrary, they are tools that react to the uncertainty and instability of the world, to the growth of risk and the resulting alarm. Derivatives turn to the future, a future that they know they don’t know, and promise to protect against risks. They promise to deal in the present with the fear of the unpredictable future (which remains unpredictable).
In short, think of a derivative as a ticket that lets the market bet on how something will change like the future price of wheat, oil or indeed a stock market index without ever touching the wheat or dealing with the underlying stock itself. In Esposito’s terms, it’s a way of buying and selling slices of future time today, turning tomorrow’s uncertainty into a tradable object right now.
The shadow of 2008 as I have often argued looms large is ultimately responsible for widespread civilizational fatigue because it creates unopposed financial nihilism. Our understanding of that moment is still shrouded in ignorance, because as a species we are distracted by the 24/7 slop factories of post-truth populism that have waged unending war in cyberspace to the point it now has a complete monopoly over the attention economy. Esposito though argues that the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) was not merely a technical failure but the logical outcome of a fundamental shift in how our economic system understands and operates in time. For Esposito, modern finance particularly through the esoteric instruments known as derivatives has become a machine for producing and consuming the future in the present. The result is a self-referential, inherently unstable system that in a moment of crisis, discovers it has "already used its own future".
Esposito’s central thesis begins with a radical rethinking of money itself. Classical economics she notes, has long adhered to a "spatial conception of time," treating it as a reversible, neutral medium. Money is simply a veil over the real economy of goods and services. Esposito, drawing on thinkers like Keynes, argues this is fundamentally wrong. Money is not for satisfying present needs; if they were satisfied, we'd have no money left. Instead, its essential function is temporal: it is a tool to secure ourselves "in the present of the indistinct nebula of possible future needs". Money in its essence is time.
Financial markets and derivatives in particular, represent the apotheosis of this principle. They are tools designed to "deal with and trade in tomorrow's uncertainty today". A derivative contract, say a future, option, or swap does not trade a thing; it trades a possibility. It is a contract that "deals today with tomorrow's decisions".
This creates a profound shift. The economy is no longer primarily about managing the scarcity of goods, but about managing time in the form of risk. The object of value is no longer the underlying asset but its volatility, its potential for change. In this new reality, finance becomes a second-order system: it doesn't observe the world, it observes observers. The market is not a window onto the "real economy," but a mirror in which operators see only the reflections of other operators' expectations - hyperrealism in this sense could be understood as a the end result of hyperfinancialism. Demographic fatigue, financial nihilism, the collapse of affordable housing can all be seen as the social consequences of adopting such an economic system.
Esposito's work needs wider reading, because there is something compelling here. I believe her work offers us a concrete realisation of the abstractions of accelerationist theorists like Fisher and Land, who for all their insights were never able to translate theory into how it all functions and behaves in the real world. To start very fundamentally I want to bring in two distinct conceptual tools Fisher and Land introduce that I think enhance Esposito’s work. Fisher felt it was important to discuss a feeling of pervasive cultural malaise that he ultimately ended up terming “hauntology”: a state of being haunted not by the past but by the “lost futures” that the 20th century promised but failed to deliver. The future, Fisher argued had been cancelled leaving us in an endless loop of nostalgic pastiche. For Nick Land, there is endless rumination about accelerating, inhuman cybernetics - a runaway capitalism that operates as a self-reinforcing feedback system relentlessly optimizing for its own expansion. This though suffers from severe practical problems because it neglects the role of nation-states, the rules-based transnational institutional framework that permits capital to properly function. It is an incomplete and deficient reading.
While Fisher diagnosed the cultural symptoms and Land described the terrifying teleology, it is Esposito that provides the concrete political-economic mechanism driving both conditions. Esposito’s detailed analysis of money, risk, and derivatives reveals that modern finance is not merely about allocating capital, but is a vast and complex machine for mediating, constraining, and ultimately consuming time itself. It has constructed a temporal prison, a “present future” that holds radical potentiality hostage to the ceaseless, circular logic of risk management. By synthesizing Esposito's work with that of Fisher and Land, we can see how this hyperfinancialized time creates the tyrannical feedback loop that keeps cybernetic capitalism chugging along while simultaneously cancelling the possibility of any future that is not a risk-adjusted continuation of the present.
How does the architecture of such a prison look like? Esposito’s core insight is that finance is the ultimate expression of money’s true function: to manage the uncertainty of the future. Derivatives she argues, are a new form of money that abstracts this function to its purest form. They do not trade goods or even stocks; they trade possibilities, volatility, and uncertainty itself.
This creates a crucial temporal distinction that underpins everything: the difference between the “present future” and the “future present”:
The future present is the actual, unknowable, and open future that will eventually arrive.
The present future is today’s model of tomorrow — a projection based on current data, expectations and most importantly risk calculations.
Financial markets operate almost entirely within the “present future.” Sophisticated tools like the Black-Scholes formula are of course not crystal balls; they are techniques for giving an "apparently objective price" to today's uncertainty. They work by assuming that future risk will behave predictably, based on past data. This is what Esposito calls a “technique of de-futurization”: the messy, open, and radical potential of the “future present” is tamed, quantified, and reduced to a set of manageable risk parameters. The future is colonized before it even has a chance to arrive. Here, Fisher's Hauntology can be given a financialised understanding. The nagging sense that the 21st century has produced no truly new aesthetic forms, only endless retro-remixes, stems from this temporal foreclosure. Esposito potentially provides the causal mechanism. If the future is relentlessly being “used in the present” to generate liquidity and manage risk, it ceases to be an open horizon of possibility. It becomes just another asset class, a resource to be collateralized and traded. The financial system's primary function is to observe observers and price their expectations. A future that cannot be modelled, a future that represents a radical break or a systemic alternative is simply incomprehensible to this system. It is registered not as a possibility, but as an unquantifiable "black swan" event, a pure risk to be hedged against and ultimately neutralized.
This is why our future feels "cancelled"; it has been sold short. We are living in a world haunted by the futures that were rendered impossible because they could not be priced by the de-futurization machine. The logic of financial time constrains not just capital, but imagination itself. Any radical political or social project is immediately subjected to a risk assessment. Its potential is translated into volatility, its promise into a liability. The result is a pre-emptive flattening of possibility, a cultural landscape where the only "realistic" future on offer is a slightly modified version of the present, a future that has been thoroughly hedged.
And truly, God knows best