This instinct to zoom out, to guess the direction of the market, is a bad habit, I think. It is a defensive crouch, a crutch, and it calls to mind some of the worst tendencies of the political press: Well, I thought the politician’s speech was thoughtful and detail-oriented, but how will it play with voters in Terre Haute? These framing devices say very little but attempt to imply quite a bit, foisting the creator’s opinion — or sometimes a totally orthogonal opinion — on some imagined future consumer.4
Why indulge this speculation? If you’re a writer or video producer, tell me how you felt about the thing you’re talking about. You experienced it; I didn’t. Don’t guess what I’ll think six months from now. Do you have reservations about the price of the Switch 2? Think Marathon isn’t feature-complete, and you won’t pick it up when it goes live?5 Say it with your chest. Is it enough for you?
When did the termite of boardroom argot bore its way into the fleshy lumber of our speech? In a 2022 review in Bookforum, Max Read (summarizing the work of the author Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou) writes that “we find ourselves assuming — sometimes by choice, sometimes by default — the attitude of speculators in everyday life. If the world in the years before the global financial crisis was defined by the business-minded rationality of the entrepreneur — save and invest now, reap and profit later — activity in the years since is better characterized by the creative imagination of the financial speculator, who embraces, seeks to profit from, and perhaps even attempts to intensify volatility.”