Debt as Future Haunting: Banks, Insurance, and the Unpayable (Symposium: No Linear F*cking Time) 

The Techno-Colonization of Time: On Clocks, Zones, and Regimes of Precision
Debt as Future Haunting: Banks, Insurance, and the Unpayable
Artist and No Linear F*cking Time interlocutor Femke Herregraven and writer and educator Max Haiven each deal in their work with the way that the financial structures established in the colonial past foreclose the future. Taking activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s observation that financialized systems of prisons in the United States “fix” capitalism’s crises at the expense of poor, working, and racialized people, Haiven suggests that profound global violence is continually unleashed in order to appease the providential market through a million minor acts of risk management. Herregraven explores the origins of ABN-AMRO bank, first established during the Atlantic slave trade, and shows how the debts and accumulations created at that time overabundantly persist today. These presentations excavate some of the historical and structural foundations of the current hyper-capitalist condition and offer provocations of common struggles to abolish it.