Noam Youngrak Son

Speculated Everything: Speculative Financialization of Design, Self, and Futures Despite the impression that the title gives, this research is not a critique of speculative design. Instead, it observes the operations of the cultural industries under financialization—referred to in this work as the attention assemblage of Speculative Design—where speculative design gained popularity in the past decade. DM me for the full text! I am very interested in exploring the use value of this knowledge beyond the purpose of an MA thesis. Please let me know if you have any ideas! Key words: Financialization, Speculation, Speculative design, Attention economy, Assetization, Extractivism, Future. Produced during my study at Dutch Art Institute (@dutchartinstitute ) Art Praxis Graduate School ArtEZ University of the Arts Master of Arts Thesis Supervisor: Amit S. Rai

My entrepreneurial alter ego has been speculating on a groundbreaking business model for an art school, which was presented to esteemed investors @intiatawalpa @shrtfilm @antoniamajaca as well as many talented fellow entrepreneurs. The keynote was hosted by one of the most renowned venture capital organizations in the Netherlands, @dutchartinstitute Watch the full keynote and invest in the future of art here: https://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/22130/noam-youngrak-son-~-the-school-of-speculation “We see the potential of art students like that of the soybeans produced by Monsanto. The genetically modified soybeans, being far more resilient to various climate conditions than conventional varieties, can expand the reach of soy crops to ever more marginal areas of the world. And this is why they could become the most successful species in the history of plants. These beans are the entrepreneurs. They are the artists who speculate. Study with us at THE ART SCHOOL™, and become the soybean that expands the frontiers of art.” Video Documentation: Baha Görkem Yalim

The Blooms is now live. /theblooms/ This web-based diagrammatic science fiction maps entanglements between ecological blooms and speculative enclosures—Azolla, tulips, and reindeer lichens tangled with colonial trade, carbon futures, nitrogen crises, and aestheticized value. It’s both a digital publication and an interface for navigating deep-time metabolism, financial abstraction, and the extractive circulations of capital through plant life. But behind the diagrams and research, this was also the work that held me together during a period of acute mental health crisis. Working on The Blooms became a form of speculative survival fiction—speculating on speculation itself, metabolizing some of the accumulated resentment I held toward how value is extracted in the cultural industry. This project helped me reimagine what value could feel like—outside of the funding applications and portfolios we’re so often reduced to. I’m very moved to have The Blooms included in Speculative Reflexive, a group exhibition at @narsfoundation that brings together artists who reflect on speculation itself—not just as a method, but as a condition we’re embedded in. The exhibition explores what it means for speculation to turn inward—to become not only a tool for imagining futures, but a reflexive and critical method for interrogating its own conditions. Especially grateful to @elifcadoux @thamyres_vm and @meii_soh who were with me through it all—since our MA, and now again in this exhibition! Thank you to everyone who supported me through this. Link in bio.

What is this tool? What makes it a Union? https://www.qcwu.work Our work emerges from sustained engagement with the cancellation of the very category of labor under conditions of human capital, financialization, and platformization, through both empirical experience as queer cultural workers and theoretical analysis. While these conditions have eroded the structural and institutional foundations of unionism, we have also witnessed worker-led movements that mobilize the social—especially the discursive power—still available to cultural producers. At the same time, we have experienced that the production of discourse alone—prone to immediate reification into cultural commodities—is critically insufficient to activate the antagonism of queer cultural workers as a class. This tool therefore operates as an infrastructure of facilitation, bringing attention to the lived realities of queer cultural labor behind the images of “inclusion” and “diversity” that circulate in cultural spaces. The politics of recognition, which often functions as the dominant model of value in culture, obscures the structural conditions that contradict what it claims to represent. By bringing these experiences into relation rather than leaving them as isolated interpersonal conflicts, the archive traces the broader system of extraction that produces impressions of liberation while displacing collective momentum away from structural questions. Developed during the multi-year programme H0Ha at @stichtingplaatsmaken curated by @sssunflowersssoup

Link in bio 🔗 A so-called “queer collective” that demands its workers to “work alone.” The moment of contradiction opens up the condition for its negation. An open letter to those invited into collectivity on the condition that they do not interrupt its structure, As a workers’ union, our goal is to collectively reimagine forms of organization that do not reproduce the violence we have witnessed. This requires systems of value in which representation is no longer the totalizing value-form, and the development of reclaimed tools for genuinely collective authorship. This letter does not conclude a struggle, but marks its beginning. The infrastructure necessary to sustain it is already under construction and beginning to take public form. With care and attention, Queer Collective Workers’ Union

Link in bio!

Certain queer collectives have been already functioning like a platform. If human capital turns the worker into an entrepreneur of the self, what is its collective form? What happens when autonomy is attended without activated negativity?

Marina Vishmidt’s work has been so crucial in my engagement with theory. The videos in this post are excerpts from my essay “Queer Collectivity as Speculation, Unionization as Mediation,” written in dialogue with her dialectical framing of speculation. You can access the full text on my newsletter. Recently, I was introduced to her unpublished manuscript for the book Infrastructural Critique thanks to @itllbeokbaby who organized the Kinks in Cables reading group. I was moved by its introduction, where Danny Hayward shares with great care how her life—from adolescence to just before death—consistently informed her theory and praxis. It is immensely empowering that even after her passing, her theories are still in motion, collectively expanding (and I feel proud to self-identify as part of that sporadic genealogy). Marina, too, feels like someone who has been rigorously engaging with the same questions that have been a great source of joy and rage for me over the last few years. I feel less alone knowing that someone (not only her, but the collectivity her work has managed to mediate) lived and is living beautifully like that. It powerfully reminds me of what kind of usefulness a life can have.

The diagram has been steadily expanding this year, and it will continue (through your subscription). I’ve been looking for an exit from what I called “Omelas” after Ursula K. Le Guin—the political and financial infrastructure of the cultural industry whose modus operandi is the unmediated creation of surplus value through the extraction of otherness and the financialization of representation. Outside Omelas, there appeared a broader stretch of an assemblage made of the same institutions plus Substack and Instagram. If merely walking away from one complicit territory were believed to constitute liberation ipso facto, it could have ended as yet another internalization of the same heteronomy, a becoming of human capital. But the joy of publishing this newsletter was not in teleological promises but in the fact that it effectively mapped those seemingly unrelated economies and served as a diagrammatic tool through which I could navigate between different audiences and circuits of value, without being confined to one. I wholeheartedly appreciate the 28 paid and 387 free subscribers who are witnessing this experiment at such close proximity. I’ll try my best to reciprocate that generosity. The Archive of Patchy Studies is a science fiction of its own, and it is never too late to join it!

The Gentrification of Queer Collectivity: Witness to a Lost Fugitive Sociality You can find the rest of this text on my newsletter platform, the Archive of Patchy Studies. Link in bio! #newsletter #videoessay #gentrification #collective

Queer Collective Workers’ Union (QCWU) @ Jan van Eyck Open Studios 2025 Born from our experience within Bebe Books, the Queer Collective Workers’ Union (QCWU) confronts the contradictions of collective practice under financialized culture where friendship becomes labour and autonomy becomes use. Across two spaces — a reading room and a public action — we reclaim unionization as a speculative and collective form of refusal. 🗂 Read the Room: QCWU Office 📍 Studio A202 | 24–26 October Our evolving counter-archive gathers traces of erased labour, symbolic hoarding, and the foreclosure of a queer commons. It maps value relations and records the evidence of extraction within our own communities. ✊ QCWU Action: Unionization as Negativity in the Time of Speculation 📍 JvE Auditorium | 24 October | 15:00–16:00 A live strike-as-gesture. Through a collective withdrawal statement and diagramming of value relations, we perform the union as a form of negativity—a refusal that acts within heteronomy rather than outside it. This is not a dispute but a case study in how solidarity must operate when collectivity becomes a platform. Join us—as witnesses, as readers, as comrades in speculation. In solidarity, Queer Collective Workers’ Union (QCWU)

An excerpt from the sci-fi short story “As the Atomium Moves Behind Me”, written for @publiekpark and read at @janvaneyckacademie . Find more like this in my newsletter “The Archive of Patchy Studies” (link in bio) #newsletter #scifi #sciencefiction