Re: <nettime> The secret financial market only robots can see

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 09/27/2013 12:21 AM, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Finally, I do think that the claim to manage risk through hedging
> strategies tends to deny collective responsibility for risks that,
> nonetheless, are run by everyone and whose effective consequences are
> typically paid for by large numbers of people, whether through losses of
> vital assets like houses, or by taxpayers in the form of government
> intervention (whether it's in the economic, social or ecological realm).

This is, precisely, the point. What has happened through
financialization is not the rise of machines, or some creation of
intelligent forms of agency beyond human comprehension. Such arguments
are simply part of the narrative that underpins the creation of a
social/economic system that centralizes rewards and decentralizes
risk. But other than what has been promised by the hedging wizards,
decentralized risk means simply that the risk is carried by everyone,
rather than those who create and profit from it.

For society, this is an incredibly destructive situation, since
incentives the few to generate more risk, while the rest experience
lives that are diminished and increasingly chaotic, since there is no
telling who gets hit when the risk materialize. Perhaps, this is just
the decline of the West, but it seems at last as much a reoganisation
within it, that cannot be reduced to changes in the world economy.

I'm currently in Athens, which is, in Europe, at the forefront of
this experience. It's not pretty. The rise of ultraviolent fascists
(with money from oligarchs, apparently) is terrifying everyone here.
Whether yesterday's crackdown made any difference remains to be seen.
The systemic forces, however, one which they rose in the first place,
remain unchanged.


Felix











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-|- http://felix.openflows.com ------------------------ books out now:
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*|Cultures & Ethics of Sharing/Kulturen & Ethiken des Teilens UIP 2012
*|Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa. transcript 2012
*|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studienv. 2009
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions. Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society.Polity P. 2006
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed Futura / Revolver, 2005
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