Joshua Johnson

Spiders roam gossamer filaments, burning through RSS feeds, social networking platforms, and blogs, routing back through high-speed fiber-optic cables, and depositing base data to be transmuted in the server-banks to pure gold.

Last week, NPR reported that 75% of market volatility was the product of High Frequency Trading (HFT). [1] HFT runs on hyper-engineered algorithms whose complex mathematics produce an instantaneous transcendental model of the world based upon data consumption far beyond any human phenomenal capacity. The light-speed synthesis of pure information may or may-not be deciphered by human interpreters after-the-fact, in effect modeling possible futures whose real-world fallout may never actually be understood by the very people it affects or is meant to serve. [2] HFT proposes a world in which capital as social relation is instead operated by an anonymous and asocial computer network whose xeno-economic agenda is all but invisible to only the most advanced of computer specialists whose comprehension of the very devices they deploy may be governed not by understanding (as in knowledge) but an opaque operability. Capital becomes an alien and alienating relation, whose machinic agenda follows no specific human intention, but the purely fictional causality of virtual universe.

1 Jim Zarroli, “Is Computer-Driven Trading Causing Market Spikes?”, NPR, August 19, 2011
2 Kara Scannell and Tom Lauricella, “Flash Crash is Pinned on One Trade”, The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2010