Paper short abstract:

This paper explores embodied economic activities of bedroom traders as digitized labour through ethnographic research. It aims to create anthropological knowledges around the emerging imaginaries of speculative work and its impact on the changing nature of the workplace.

Paper long abstract:

Web3.0 and smartphone-access blur boundaries between domains of work and leisure, going beyond geographic or institutional limits to where and how work can be performed. Post-workerist theories (immaterial or relational labour) can be applied to that. However, certain forms of labour have become unbounded more than others, to the point where it becomes difficult to recognize them as such– one of these is retail investment via FinTech. How can investigating this as embodied activity contribute to trace changing working conditions?

I argue it is necessary to reconceptualize this economic activity as speculative labour (Bear 2020) to attend to a shift in ideologies of work that isolates workers from the social context of their economic activity. To showcase this, I will situate retail investing among labour theories, followed by an ethnographic outline of working conditions of five bedroom traders I do collaborative research with.

In differentiation from traditional banking roles, retail investors embody traders, wealth managers and analysts at once, while also bearing all financial risk in completely unregulated work environments without salary. Consequences can be mental (depression, gambling) and physical (insomnia, posture issues) unwellness. Moreover, well-being as multidimensional extends beyond individual to communal dynamics: Neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility for wealth management isolates and compounds inequalities around material conditions and financial, digital literacies. Examining bedroom trader’s embodied work experience reveals how speculative technologies shift imaginaries of work and what alternative ideas of investing work and workplaces emerge.