Disruption

Cover of 'Flashboys' by Michael Lewis

    Much water has flowed under the bridge in a very short time due to the current global situation and many people have voiced the opinion that this represents a potential tipping-point in human history, a chance to re-think the way we manage this world; a chance to reset the game.
    This makes sense on so many levels that the decision seems trivial to make - do this or we all suffer, now and in the long term. We have so far managed to practically destroy not only our environment and much of near-space - this much is known - and the very nature of how we co-exist socially and economically has been thrown into question. It hasn't been revolutionary socialism that has brought the system to its knees, it has been capitalism itself. The COVID-19 pandemic has simply served to highlight the deeply entrenched systemic problems the world has built up for itself over the last forty years.
    This has been the result of a simple desire - greed: the (political) notion that the only human trait worthy of value is the desire to own more than the next person; that the only activity of any value is the acquisition of wealth - that this in itself is a sufficient raison d'etre for living.
    The absolute embodiment of this is The City and it's multifarious analogues throughout the world - the 'Markets'. Where once fair and equitable trades were made between people(s) of real things - with the albeit abstract artifice of 'money' - the trading - relying on the balance of supply and demand, price fluctuations based on availability of commodities, was for a slice of the cake based on knowledge that the other was not party to - the profit-margin that creates income over expenditure: old as the hills. We've been doing this as a species for millennia.
    What has changed is the speed of communication and the relinquishing of political or societal restraints over commercial activity. Where once communication relied at best on papers carried on horseback, over the last couple of centuries technology has - initially gradually, latterly exponentially - changed both the game and the very scale of the game itself.
    Much is made of the word 'disruptive' when applied to novel technologies or business models - usually in a complimentary way: disruptive = good, but increasingly, it's becoming obvious that this is now just a synonym for, 'we've discovered another device to make inordinate quantities of cash with minimal talent or effort'.
    This has, as has always been the case throughout history, been dependent on information - information is king when striking a deal - which itself is synonymous with getting one over someone else and creaming off the profit as a result.
    When the 'Markets' were opened up to the world electronically in the 1980's, the system promptly crashed and burned. The balance of the 'Market' was based on a transactional timescale that was pretty much 'human' in scale - a commonality with it's 18th Century forebears - just an extension of proper market-trading writ somewhat larger.
    The problem with speeding up the flow of information is that it emphasised the essential shortcomings of the market model - we  had ceased to trade the real for the increasingly fictitious: we are trading stuff that not only doesn't exist, but cannot exist. We trade phantoms. And when you exploit the potential of electronic networks to gain miniscule trading advantages, you enter the realms of complete fantasy. Money creates money by selling money in profit increments so small as to be almost unmeasurable, but at such speed and in such quantity as to be enormously profitable to the those privy to those trades - high-frequency-trading being the apogee of this monumental stupidity.
    When companies in the States started to install their own fibre-optic networks in the straightest lines possible between critical servers - we're talking of shaving fractions of nanoseconds off data round-trips in order to gain micro-cent gains in profits in trading non-existing financial products  - ultimately, your'e talking a totally bullshit game for short-term financial gain for a very, very few chancers. In any other sphere of life this would be considered criminal activity. The Mob used to run 'The Wire Game' on exactly the same principle. They were criminals then and the modern marketeer is no better. Time for a rethink. About everything. Time to reset. But I'm not holding my breath.