The verb in question is “to speculate”. Dave Karpf:

The value of much of the tech industry — indeed, most of the largest companies that dominate the Dow and the Nasdaq — is based primarily on vibes. It’s a gambling and speculation-based economic system. It is inaccurate to call these companies “for-profits,” because so little of their economic value is based in profit-generating activity.

So we ought to view all of their product announcements and public declarations through a vibes-based lens. The one skill that Sam Altman and Elon Musk clearly excel at manipulating the Keynesian beauty contest — signaling that this is what other people judge the future to look like.

That economics is essentially vibes is—or at least was—understood; as I understand it, much of Keynes’s work was about showing how the “animal spirits” operated, rather than newly revealing their importance.

But what really interests me in Karpf’s formulation here is the explicit connection of futures in the sociotechnical-imaginaries sense with futures in the speculative-investments sense. This is not an original observation either—not on Karpf’s part, and certainly not on mine—but the intensity and visibility of the conflation seems particularly striking at the moment.

That it was also intense and visible to Keynes, thinking and writing during the period between the two world wars of the C20th, is the historical rhyme that most troubles my sleep.