The derivative represents a new contagious logic or pattern of social and institutional cognition and organization, one that spreads through and influences various social, economic and governmental spheres. For instance, he illustrates the way this approach has infiltrated US military strategy, whereby pre-emptive “investments” of hightech “shock and awe” warfare in key “hotspots” are intended to produce massive “regime change,” aimed at “securitizing” global risks and installing governments that will make the world safer for transnational capital flows. He also shows how this logic plays out in new forms of neoliberal governance, which no longer see vulnerable citizens as a responsibility, but as “at risk” populations in need of pre-emptive intervention to help them better manage risk (“financial literacy” campaigns, deregulation to allow predatory lending, “investments” in silver-bullet-type programs aimed at giving youth “a hand up”) (Martin 2007, 21–42). For Martin, this spread of the logic of the derivative is not simply finance overstepping its proper bounds, nor is it merely symptomatic of a global social and economic scene dominated by financial pressures. It represents a fundamental shift in the nature of wealth and capital itself, one germane to a rapidly globalizing world where the connections between and dynamics of economic processes are more chaotic than ever. Financial derivatives are an example of an emergent technology for measuring and controlling the flux of human labour and social cooperation as it becomes unfathomably more interconnective.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 481