From Financialized Futurity to Algorithmic Eschatology: How Planetary Computation Colonizes Future-Talk through Algorithm Infrastructure

This essay argues that contemporary AI society should be understood not simply as a new phase of automation, but as the generalization of a financialized regime of futurity. Reading Maia’s (2022) Trading Futures alongside Benjamin Bratton’s account of planetary computation (2015), I develop the concept of algorithmic eschatology. Maia shows how financialized capitalism captures the future by commodifying uncertainty and monopolizing the means of prediction. Bratton identifies the infrastructural conditions under which predictive operations become socially ambient rather than sectorally financial. Taken together, they illuminate a regime in which socially consequential futures are rendered as prediction problems, operationalized in allocative institutions, and recursively fed back into present conduct. The result is a differential distribution of futurity: some actors hedge and monetize uncertainty, while others encounter the future through scores, ratings, and preemptive constraints. AI society, I argue, colonizes financialized futurity into algorithmic infrastructure.