In a previous post and in my recent book, You Are Your Media, I describe the brutal impact of strapping an OS2 (literate) application like debt to the hyper-efficient rocketship that is OS3 (networked) technology and letting greedy self-interested financiers light the fuse.
In post-literate capitalism – as in all networked culture – history ceases to exist. All that matters is the dialogical moment. Except that unshackled from history and its associated social contexts, networked markets are now free to feed on their own code, exponentially exploiting themselves without regard for the meaning of their transactions – scaled up in global real-time far beyond all previously monological possibilities – creating untold empires of networked wealth at our expense.
This article in today’s BBC.com explains that as much as a half of all trading is done by intelligent software programs parsing data rather than by people assessing value, often flipping stocks in a second or two, without any consideration of how these actions will affect either people or our planet in the real world, as life savings are diminished, currencies devalued and the earth is laid waste.
How Mathematicians Rule The Markets is definitely worth a read…
John Sobol 