CATALOG ESSAY
The Underlying
On speculation, temporal violence, and the condition of being priced
In the language of derivatives, the underlying is the asset upon which a contract is based. The stock beneath the option. The commodity beneath the future. The index beneath the swap. The underlying is what is real—the thing that exists in the world, subject to weather and war and human decision, while above it floats an architecture of positions, hedges, and bets.
You are the underlying.
This is not metaphor. Prediction markets have achieved sufficient scale and granularity that virtually every consequential dimension of human life now serves as substrate for financial positioning. Employment statistics are not merely reported—they are bet upon, continuously, by actors who have no stake in whether you specifically find work, but very much have stakes in the aggregate behavior of labor markets. Health outcomes are not merely tracked—they are priced, by parties whose profit depends on actuarial accuracy about people like you. Housing costs, electoral outcomes, climate events, cultural relevance—each exists simultaneously as lived experience and as tradeable position.
Aaron Vick's THE SETTLED makes this dual existence visible. The work monitors prediction markets in real-time, using artificial intelligence to translate financial positions into human terms. A contract asking whether unemployment will exceed a threshold becomes: Right now, 12,847 positions are open on whether your neighbor loses their job. Current sentiment: bearish on American labor. The market has decided this question. You're still inside it.
The piece introduces a metric it calls the temporal index—an ongoing calculation of how far ahead of lived experience the market has already traveled. As of this writing, the index hovers around four and a half months. The market is nearly five months ahead of your life. The questions you're carrying—will I keep my job, will my rent increase, will my industry survive—have already been answered, financially, by people who have moved on to the next position.
The traditional critique of speculation focuses on its extractive character: value created by labor is captured by capital through financial engineering. This critique remains true but is no longer sufficient. What THE SETTLED reveals is a different kind of extraction—not of value, but of temporal experience.
Consider what it means to hold a position. To have a position is to have decided. The uncertainty that characterizes lived experience—the not-knowing that shapes our days, that makes us plan and hope and fear—is precisely what the position-holder has resolved. They have converted your open question into their closed account.
This creates a new form of inequality that operates not through the distribution of resources but through the distribution of temporal experience itself. There are now two classes of people in relation to any consequential question: those who are still inside it, and those who have already settled.
Vick calls this temporal violence—the condition of being lapped by capital, of living in a present tense that is, for others, already past. The violence is not in the outcome of the bet but in the having of the position at all. Someone has finished the story you're still living. Not metaphorically. Financially. They've closed their books on your open question.
THE SETTLED refuses the interactivity that characterizes much digital art. It does not ask visitors to input their fears or bet on their own futures. It does not gamify the critique. The piece simply runs—monitoring, translating, calculating—whether anyone is watching or not. The settlement feed scrolls continuously, each entry a question that just resolved: employment, housing, health, cultural relevance. Somewhere, the thing being priced is a person. The feed does not pause.
This formal choice reflects the condition the work describes. You are already participating in prediction markets—as underlying—whether you consent or not. The piece does not need your engagement any more than the markets do. It will continue to reflect your position back to you, updated in real-time, until you close the window. And after.
The voice of the piece—generated by AI, trained on the contracts it monitors—speaks in second person with mournful clarity. It is not angry; anger implies surprise, and this voice is past surprise. It has seen the machinery. It speaks to you as someone who wishes you didn't have to know this, but believes you deserve to.
The market is 73% confident your rent will increase beyond federal guidelines. Conviction: high. Liquidity: deep. This question is closed for everyone except you.
There is a word that appears throughout the work, never defined, always weighted: conviction. In financial contexts, conviction refers to the strength of a position—how confident the market is in a particular outcome. High conviction means tight spreads, deep liquidity, little remaining uncertainty. The market has made up its mind.
But conviction carries other meanings. Belief held firmly. The state of being convinced. The formal declaration of guilt.
To have high conviction about someone else's future is to have judged them in some sense. The market's conviction about your employment prospects, your health outcomes, your cultural relevance—these are not neutral assessments. They are positions that benefit from specific outcomes. The market's confidence is directional. It is, in some cases, rooting against you.
THE SETTLED surfaces this double meaning without resolving it. When the work reports that conviction is high on a given question, it names both the financial condition (the market is confident) and the experiential one (you have been judged). The ambiguity is the point. Speculation has always been a form of judgment disguised as prediction.
Vick has suggested that the cultural stigma his work anticipates—the future unseemly-ness of having positions on others' lives—will not arrive through argument. It will arrive through experience. Enough people discovering they've been bet against. Enough people encountering the temporal index, the settlement feed, the translated contracts. Enough people recognizing themselves as underlying.
THE SETTLED is a machine for producing that recognition. It does not persuade. It reflects. And in reflecting, it makes visible a condition that persists precisely because it has remained invisible—the ambient hum of capital positioning itself against your future, continuously, at scale, without your knowledge or consent.
The work ends with a question that never answers itself:
What would it mean to live unpriced?
The question is not rhetorical. It is, genuinely, open. Perhaps one of the few remaining.