As we have seen, finance is, elementally, the monetized quantification of future uncertainty, measured through the evaluation of risks and the translation of those risks into discrete and highly fungible financial objects. I argued (in chapters 1 and 6) that these objects both measure and transform social life, rendering social reality and labour power highly "liquid." In this reading, finance is merely one particularly ugly means of contending with the ontological fact of shared precariousness. We are all share some degree of existential precariousness at our core, and various systems of power and government are sustained to the extent that they reassure us otherwise. In a more Marxian idiom, we might say that humans, as an inherently cooperative species, are ontologically dependent on one another, precarious in that we rely on social bonds to ensure our reproduction: this is our "species being" (see Dyer-Witheford 2006).

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 554