Hence my desire to find the traces of such a process where we are least likely to expect it, such as the fertile, imaginative and complicated world of children’s play. I argued in Chapter 4 that we can examine young people’s engagement with Pokémon trading cards as an example of a financialized social practice wherein kids “learn to learn” the dispositions, subjectivities and practices germane to a financialized society. … It is not so much that Pokémon cards fail as a financialized commodity because they leave too much space open for children’s autonomy. They rely on this space of autonomy, play, agency and creativity to succeed where other, more didactic or directive products fail. My argument is that this tells us a great deal about the complexities and nuances of cultural politics under financialization. While neoliberal financialization may, ultimately, be characterized by the pathological and limitless collapsing of all social values into and under the ruthless quantitative measure of economic value, it is also, contradictorily, dependent on the forms of innovation, social reproduction and subjectivity generated in the intervals.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 567