David Golumbia

High-frequency trading: networks of wealth and the concentration of power

The development of high-frequency trading (HFT) – automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments – provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere. Despite the widespread rhetoric that computerization inherently democratizes, the consequences of the introduction of HFT are widely acknowledged to be new concentrations of wealth and power, opacity rather than transparency of information flows, and structural resistance to democratic oversight and control. Even as computerized tools undoubtedly provide individual investors with more power relative to what they had before, they also provide powerful actors with relatively more power as well, in some cases effectively excluding the majority of individuals from insight or meaningful participation whatsoever, especially with regard to the political impacts of market activities. Reports on recent financial crises, and the 2011 film Margin Call provide narrow windows into the operations of HFT and the challenges it poses to democracy; these in turn raise significant problems for the view that computerization inherently democratizes.

“Correlationism”: The Dogma that Never Was

Few theoretical movements have developed as quickly or as publicly as the one known, among other names, as “Speculative Realism” and/or “ObjectOriented Philosophy” (hereafter collectively referred to as SR/OOO). The views of each of the main writers associated with these movements—Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, Iain Hamilton Grant, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton, among others—vary widely, and even the views offered by these writers individually often vary. What they share in general is a conviction that, as the editors of one of the movement’s primary collections, The Speculative Turn, put it, “reality appears in [recent continental] philosophy only as the correlate of human thought,” and that what is needed now in contrast is for theory to “speculat[e] once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally.”1