Towards fully automated investing? How venture capitalists are making the economic future old-fashioned

Finance is increasingly datafied and automated. Anthropologists (and sociologists) have worked towards a nuanced understanding of how investing remains social and driven by people despite this observable development. My research with venture capitalists – equity investors in technology startups behind companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and so on – shows a more extreme case. They are still investing the ‘old-school’ way, driven exclusively by Keynesian animal spirits of gut feeling, herding and Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). This resistance to datafication is in their own best interest as it allows them to reproduce themselves as an elite industry and the economic inequality in the startups they fund.