A highly educated, highly indebted population that still believes that their debts must be repaidthat is willing to sacrifice in order to repay the debts they have incurredmay be the single most important element in maintaining the status quo.
The earlier ability to consider machine labor as an extension of human actionas the mechanical amplification of human laboris replaced by models where the machine does not augment but supplant, in the process apparently removing the human intermediary that historically lies between the work of designer-engineers and the human production required in the fabrication of their plans.
The nineteenth century protestant work ethic is the conceptual starting point for the development of a new ideology of automation that merges the nineteenth century ideology of autonomous achievement with digital technology to eliminate human labor from production, apparently rendering human agency obsolete for the generation of value in the digital information economy.
HFT reveals one of the clearest examples of the semiotic procedures of digital capitalism in action. The Nanex analysis of the first "crash" suggests that agnotology can be applied in automated systems as well, simply by using the sequential nature of data processing (i.e. the linearity of computers) to create uncertainty.
The first "flash crash" in the markets happened on May 6, 2010. There have been a number of others since then. It seems reasonable to assume that this will become the norm; to be involved in any market that includes HFT and attempt to trade without the support of this extractive technology is clearly foolish (we all know what "they" say about fools and their money...)
I have a new essay published on Vague Terrain about the cat organ, the mouse organ, the Jingle Cats albums, and the development of sampling. It's an interesting piece of theory suggesting where the idea of semiotic reassembly may have come from and what that means....
