From mere tools to nefarious manipulators: How do amateur retail investors make sense of selfhood vis-à-vis investing apps?

The paper concerns sense-making around digital investorial selfhood vis-à-vis investing platforms among amateur retail investors. From a cultural sociological perspective, while there is no one ideal archetype of financial subjectivity, the study identifies two structuring, binary ideal types shaping sense-making. A singularised self of an independent decision-maker, and a synchronised self, foregoing its agency to the platform's nudges. One imaginary privileges the agency of the user, whereas the other privileges the platform. Both imaginaries shape the meanings investors attribute to both their own investing and to the investing of others via apps. By using this theoretical lens, the paper overviews and interprets how investors navigate between and utilise these imaginaries while they make sense of their own use of digital investing platforms. Based on 23 in-depth interviews with individual Czech and Slovak amateur retail investors, the study shows that both imaginaries are employed differently in investors' accounts. While the singularised imaginary features prominently in the respondent's expressed subjectivity, the synchronised imaginary is more projective and attributive. I interpret this discrepancy as shaped by a broader cultural milieu of postsocialist capitalism, where neoliberal selfhood emerged especially strongly as a moral project, making not achieving self-responsible, independent, and enterprising subjectivity a moral failure.