This chapter explores the subterranean politics of anxiety in the student bodies of the USA, UK, and Canada. As a new generation is emerging into adulthood, for whom neoliberalism, financialisation, and its anxieties are all they have ever known, what forms of struggle, survival, and mutual aid are they inventing? Could everyday practices of student self-sabotage become the basis for collective acts of self-sabotage aimed at the financial machinery of the contemporary university?

This chapter examines the hostile dynamics of online communication, linking these to a fragmentation of social reality set in motion by the rise of capitalism. As this is taken to new extremes by developments in digital technology, affective inclinations towards paranoia and conflict come to the fore – hence the mindless antagonism of our moment.

The fundamental wager of libidinal economy is that contemporary capitalism can be fruitfully engaged through the lens of desire or ‘libido’. This introductory chapter develops a preliminary account of the relations between libidinal economy and capitalism in three ways. First, it positions libidinal economy at the intersection of economic and psychological thought. Second, it relates the development of libidinal-economic thought to the historical development of capitalism. Third, it emphasises the role of libidinal dynamics in the social reproduction of contemporary capitalism.

This chapter explores the relation between death and economy through an engagement with the work of Georges Bataille, Norman Brown, and Jean Baudrillard. While capitalism is just the latest in a long series of attempts to manage death anxiety, the accumulation of capital fails to alleviate guilt, resulting in an endless thirst for ever more money, wealth, and power.

Social media platforms present life as a networked space of possibility, where one chance encounter with a former colleague or contact might open new opportunities and life paths. This chapter shows how the desire for serendipity reworks neoliberal myths of entrepreneurship while further enriching those who control the mapping of social networks.

As potent new cultures of desire take shape around the intersection of digital technology and finance, this very site is beginning to take on the qualities of a fantasy, structuring ever more lives around recursive forms of emotional capture and release, while at the same time fuelling a lucrative game of anticipating and capitalising on such cycles. The result is a kind of runaway abstraction that applies not only to money and technology, but also perhaps to desire itself. What if the libidinal economies of digital and financial capitalism run best when detached from definite aims, ends, objects?

When global stock markets plunged during the onset of the 2020 pandemic, young South Koreans took out loans to fund risky personal investments. This chapter relates the lure of speculation at work here to a fantasy of escaping the hopeless realities produced through financial capitalism, in South Korea and elsewhere.

This chapter examines the psychic life of global inequality through the phenomenon of ‘compassionate consumerism’. Drawing on the psychoanalytic critique of ideology, it shows how explicit ethical appeals to assist those less fortunate than ourselves are underwritten by invitations to participate in a disavowed enjoyment of relations of inequality.

Drawing on Heinz Kohut’s conception of narcissistic development, this chapter situates the phenomenon of defensive intransigence within contemporary economic life. The ‘avocado toast’ stereotype – in which millennials are poor because of one brunch too many – represents a disavowal of worsening intergenerational inequality that is symptomatic of the rage that occurs when sustained beliefs about oneself and one’s place in the world are threatened.

This chapter examines the interface between desire and money infrastructures in the new crypto economy. Focusing on NFTs, utility tokens, and interoperability technologies, it argues that economic investment in monetary technologies is tantamount to a libidinal investment in technological designs and the forms of capitalisation they enable.

This chapter explores the effects of social hierarchies on identity formation, tracking the rise of neoliberalism in the USA through a dynamic of unconscious group formation and reaction in which categories of race and class are central. It argues that America’s long history of White anti-Blackness is in this way integral to the emergence and ongoing vitality of its more openly declared commitment to neoliberal capitalism.