New World Order: The Evolving Agency Of Markets
“Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences.” [Wikipedia]. Closely related to “Sapience, [which] is often defined as wisdom, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment, a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence or alternatively may be considered an additional faculty, apart from intelligence, with its own properties.” [Wikipedia]
Classic Alien. Source: Flickr/Roby-one
We have been wondering what life beyond our own looks like for some time, envisioning aliens with large heads and green skin.
We have also been asking ourselves what artificial intelligence might look like once it becomes centralized and aware of itself – what scientists refer to as a singularity - wondering when and how this singularity will come into effect.
Well, good news – or bad news, depending on how you look at it: we may have stumbled upon an answer, on both fronts, in a seemingly unexpected place that may take most individuals by surprise – even though, in retrospect, it’s the most obvious place to look at. It’s the Markets, and they have been growing in power and influence for decades.
Hal9000's all-seeing eye in Kubrick's vision for A.I.
Consider the following quotes (taken from typical TV reports):
“Ok, let’s take a look at the markets now. In the USA and Europe…”
“Markets were surprised by…”
“Markets have taken the new austerity measures rather well…”
“Markets don’t care for the way politicians have dealt with the latest impasse…”
“The markets smell blood…”
“Emerging markets are responding to…”
“Bond yields smile at the resignation of…”
These phrases are commonplace nowadays, part of the daily news reports on TV and the internet. Everywhere you turn, references on how the markets respond or don’t respond to some social, political or cultural development constantly guide our lives, as if markets are alive themselves, with their own purpose and agenda.
Well, here’s the thing: they are! Markets are sapient, sentient, purposeful, and in control of our lives. Say hello to the new form of consciousness rising out of humanity’s conglomerations, the best-kept public secret the modern world has known. They are in fact so obvious, right in our face, that we have yet to identify them for the conscious and determining agents they are, at least not on the mass level.
The insight is, of course, not new. It has been around for some time now, mainly in Austrian and Keynesian economics debates. But the practitioners have largely kept quiet, being content with working the markets rather than pointing out their sentience to the public. As far as the non-economics circles are concerned, they have largely overlooked the issue, unwilling or unable to being the issue to public awareness. One reason is that the insight could prove tricky to handle on a global scale, so we refrain from making it. Another is that we fear being branded kooks, so we keep quiet. And then there’s those who make the case with fervor, ending up being associated with conspiracy theories, thereby weakening and discrediting their position.
The question is, where are the scientists and why have they kept quiet? How come they are not stepping up to identify and study this very real phenomenon in ways that will make sense on a widely-accepted level?
Their silence may have to do with the fact that the money and grants that fund scientific research comes from big money, the same money that may not wish the insight being whistled to the public (conspiratorial outlook). Or the topic in question does not have popular appeal, thus has not been caught and spread by the media, nor has it acquired word-of-mouth value (objective outlook). Let’s face it, some points of view are just too disturbing to be entertained.
Dry graphs of something numerical or vital signs of something sentient and sapient?
Yet here we are, talking about the living markets and their obvious, yet, underestimated consciousness. They are here, a reality, alive and kicking, directing our lives, right under our noses. Am I doing a disservice to society by talking about them?
I am not sure. I believe knowledge is tantamount to a constructive existence, so I am sharing the insight. Let the UT readership decide if this knowledge proves useful when shared – if it would serve a purpose if made public on the global scale. Would people take kindly to markets dictating human life? Would they embrace the insight or would they rebel and destroy the system? If they did, where would that lead us? Do we have a working alternative to marketism – or are we going to go back to pre-industrial society? Are we going to be pitching ourselves against a natural and evolutionary mechanism, or are we going to rebel against a predatory and inhuman entity?
The questions are difficult. To answer them we need to know what we are talking about. So let us trace out our subject and see what it looks like, what it means and feels like, identifying key facts and insights one by one.
In the next article we will examine the effects of markets on nations and their people, ranging from the USA, Greece and Italy.
Image: http://www.forextv.com
Pete, are you an economist, a mathematician, a statistician? Do you have something to say? Then say it, I'm curious to hear your POV and why it renders ours obsolete
Neither of you seem to have any understanding of economics or the financial markets. I suggest you back-track on your liberal arts degrees, take some time out to learn some mathematics, acquire some spacial analysis competencies, learn how to do regression analysis in Excel, get a grasp of the key metrics, and get a hold of yourselves in general. I don't disagree with either of your intentions. There's just nothing worse than someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
Presenting the biological underpinnings of the analogy would have indeed made the piece more lucid but this piece was intended to be a short article that would point at the issue rather than dissect it and expand on it extensively. I have already made a case on how AI may be in the making from the cell-conglomerate POV in previous articles, dealing not with markets but with the technological matrix as a possible rising consciousness. Look at the Observe and Learn series for more info. MNCs or TNCs as I prefer to call them (Trans National Corporations) are entities that transcend human boundaries and morality in practical terms. This process is aided by individuals placed in key positions, who know how to work the system, true. Yet their effect is real and overarching: their actions have an impact on life in scales that go beyond an individual’s reach, setting the pace in terms of fixtures meta-human (GDP, Debt-to-GDP ratio, Inflation, Nations, Emerging Economies, the Economy in general). It may be a reprehensible development with a brutal impact, but this is only part of the coin. TNC’s, Markets and the Economy have also been instrumental in the development of our species. Let us not forget the boom that led to the bust, without which we would still be inconsequential as a life form. Back to current reality now. We are in a bust and need to focus on it. TNC’s and Markets have shown very little concern for the individual as well as for the greater ecosystem; they seem to be driven by statistics; they are impersonal and sometimes monstrous. Which goes to show the extent of their agency, the range of their impact. Driven as they may be by individuals within them, TNC's and the Markets have all the same given existence to a frame of reality that is self-fulfilling and, thus, vestigially sentient and sapient, seemingly able to dictate development according to a set of rules that moves beyond straightforward human reach, opening up a new field of reality, a new set of parameters that obey entities of greater scale. The way they work may not match the way cells have aggregated into multicellular organisms, but they seem to be following the same rule: out of many, one! Their effects are not fictional at all; they may be devised and dysfunctional, damaging and self-gratifying, but they are very real, and so is their impact, and so is their influence. As we stand, our way of life and our politics seem to be obeying not the needs of the individual citizen but the health of the market. In the next piece I will indeed show how it is the markets that have dictated the political agenda of entire nations. If you are still uncomfortable with the notion that they may be independent and real in their own terms, even to a rudimentary degree, imagine them being a vessel in which a few shrewd individuals have taken refuge, guiding its every move. Think of them as avatars. Think of them as humans. For what are humans if not avatars for a number of key cells and organs that are (partially – sometimes fully, in cases where the flesh is stronger than the mind) dictating the life of each individual according to their specific needs. Bottom line, we are bound by what constitutes us – yet we also transcend those limitations by envisioning a greater field of existence. It’s not that markets are not developing a presence of their own. It’s just that this presence seems to be a suicidal one, more akin to cancer than anything else right now, its sole aim to feed itself until it bursts dead, taking everyone with it. We have to identify how deterministic they are before we can understand how to curtail their destructive tendencies while retaining their organizational ones.
I think it would have been more lucid had you included this microbiological standpoint in the article itself as your argument now takes on a different quasi-darwinian character (which is equally disturbing), presenting a sort of biological mysticism rather than just a plain old philosophical one (an argument that never did feminism any good). I would take issue with the idea that MNCs (multinational corporations) are somehow straying from human behaviour because of their magnitude. Firstly, most MNCs as we know them, are not the gargantuan companies that we think of, but rather collections of lots of different incorporated companies residing in different countries, within different nation states and under different sovereign laws. This is, more often than not, a tax avoiding strategy, taking advantage of different financial laws, transfer pricing, etc etc. often to the detriment of the host country. The point is that our economic system is not made up of self-generating cells that operate singularly, mutating, dividing and so on, contributing to a greater organism, ecosystem or whichever biological metaphor you want to use. Markets are the product of often fictional (in the case of taxation or policy) and physical (in the case of geography) boundaries, imposed by humans. Your argument that these markets or 'organisms' are the product of ongoing mitosis gives off a distinctly laissez-faire attitude. And even if this is your own political standpoint, the grossly distorted financial markets of today alongside the legal loopholes provided by tax havens and the like destroy any semblance of Ricardian comparative advantage celebrated by free market economists. Secondly, interestingly, your etymological deduction (corpus/corporation) exactly proves this point. In the eyes of the law, corporations are considered as subjects (actually as 'people' in the US), singular entities despite their disparate characters. This is a legal construction that actually bears no similarity to the corporation itself - a linguistic and strategic imposition. (As a friend of mine recently pointed out, if corporations are in fact legal subjects in America, why can't they also be subject to capital punishment?!). Our financial system is built out of contractual relationships, which do appear to go beyond strictly "human level" as you put it, resulting in gross distortions of value via speculation, prediction and other psychological impetus based on not wholly rational belief systems (in fact, to use your methodology, the word 'credit' actually comes from the Latin 'credere', to believe). In fact, I would go as far as to say that markets are in fact often irrational systems emotionally driven. But I would say that to argue markets have agency is a get-out-of-jail-free card for all those operating within the financial sector. Debate is indeed crucial. However, given the power of vocal agency seems to be your main concern, it seems strange that your argument (biological market autonomy) in fact gives no credence to this.
The aim is to explore the depth to which consciousness can be understood as a function of a specific body or aggregation of agencies, starting from the individuals that make them up and tracing it all the way up to its own potential standing. My frame of reference are DNA cells and cells proper i.e the constituent bodies of biological organisms, which once started as unicellular organisms, each acting in their own benefit, then getting organized, into multicellular organisms, their infrastructures slowly defined by cell parameters, programmed and operated with cell algorithms. Cell-centered as they were, these organisms slowly assumed a consciousness/agency/sentience of their own, acting in the benefit of not just the cells that made them up but for greater mind of the new organism. Can this not be happening here, with humanity and its individual cells? Dare we say life stops at the human level, and that there is nothing to aggregate through us from here on? It would be irresponsible to not explore the possibilities that it doesn't, and irrational to expect that we are IT, the pinnacle to evolution. Whether we are straying from human behavior when creating these new multicellular bodies (interestingly enough the latin word for body is 'corpus', and a key term in markets is the 'corporation') is another matter, dealing with the ethical application of such entities, their compatibility with individual human life, and with society in general etc. But as far as exploring the extent to which markets may be forming their own agency or needs, their own influence on reality, I must pose the issue provocatively and test its applications. My stance is of course not academic and dry but gonzo, neither for or against markets in this case, but digging into an issue by posing a provocative argument. Debate will see what is valid and what isn't, and your comments are very helpful.
In touting the notion that markets are 'sapient, sentient, purposeful, and in control of our lives', the author only serve to perpetuate the irresponsible actions of bankers and financiers that have led to the current crisis. Markets are not autonomous objects of mystique or abstractions, but rather the product of policies and decisions made by individuals, whether sovereign states, municipal bodies or the investing public. Our (defunct) economic system is made up of relationships, sometimes strategic and sometimes spontaneous but never serendipitous. Whilst the secondary markets in financial instruments that form the majority of markets certainly do appear to be very far removed from the agency of the trader/client/issuer, to say that the markets themselves have agency is not only to overlook the accountability of these individuals, but is factually incorrect. Algorithmic trading platforms that facilitate the these markets and price fluctuations are programmed by engineers according to the instructions of corporations. These sets of codified instructions operate according to the user. These trading networks and markets are not invisible and insidious independent organisms but are formed of burdensome physical subterranean infrastructure, with underground trenches for fibre optic cables, offshore server farms and huge service floors consuming abusive amounts of energy and giving off excessive quantities of heat. Markets are the immaterial product of material processes and societal relationships. I look forward to seeing how you handle the next article on the "the effects of markets on nations and their people, ranging from the USA, Greece and Italy" without dealing with the careless or calculated misdemeanors of governments, institutions, corporations and financiers. Or perhaps you will be able to articulate sovereign debt and the eurozone crisis as the product of whimsical fiscal abstractions?
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