Hi Chad: Actually, I had a few after thoughts in response to your post and several other ones. My example using insider trading doesn't really offer a cogent direct critique of your point about market unpredictability, but it points to a better one: the potential for manipulating market perceptions. A crude example would be trying to create a buzz around a stock you hold in order to create a demand and a higher price for it. I know very little about the stock market, but its mythology says that it functions on perception, for, after all, an investor makes money there by buying and then selling, though there are certainly many more complex variations. A bit like the way advertising, somewhat unnoticed, affects perceptions. "I, Legend," for example, as an eleven year old recently pointed out to me, has Google ads in it for those with the habits of viewing necessary to see them.
To give another example from the world of "investing": brokers and fund managers make money when you sell stocks, i.e. via commissions. Churning is the illegal variation where a fund manager executes excessive numbers of trades to create commissions for him/herself. What about creating the perception of market volatility so that it becomes a reality, and one favorable to high volumes of trades? The real interest in "Google distorting reality" is in the potential for abuse in creating the fabric of perceptions on a global scale. Google has already made deals with the PRC to not allow its citizens to even access materials critical of the current dictators over the proletariat. Why should it treat its advertisers, or large share holders any differently? These are again quite crude examples and it could be argued that Google would never risk its credibility to such a degree, but it zeroed out for me when they caved to the US Government, giving them information about searches by individuals, "potential terror suspects"-the list goes on. Most other large telecom companies did the same. But finally, Google's principal interest is in remaining on top, in remaining the Google of the world. It has shown that it is capable of doing what it needs to do in order to remain so. It will be interesting to see whether US and European Union Courts approve the acquisition by Google of a large firm involved in internet advertising. Microsoft has recently attempted the same strategy. What was privacy? Privacy exists, but its ground has shifted. Privacy has always been relative, just like security. One can be more or less private, not absolutely private, just as one can be more or less secure, not absolutely secure. You make decisions to maximize your chances. Like NOT participating in Facebook, for example. Was it McLuhan who said: "1984 began in 1934, but it was only in 1964 that anyone noticed." Common wisdom says monopolies are bad; I wonder if oligopolies are any better? It makes the analysis more complex, but may only mask more complex forms of manipulation. But does complexity exclude the ability to influence? Advertising, whether on your sad old tvset, or on your happy new laptop lcd, would have use believe otherwise. I was initially unaware that the author of the report was a luddite, without a critique of capitalism. But I wonder how much this changes things? The old dichotomy of techno-utopian and luddite itself seems a bit limited at this point. But surely one can have a critique encompassing both positions: both positions are techno-determinist, just as both positions in the cold war could be described as variants of the spectacle. The question is, given the current form of the spectacle-or whatever you'd like to call it-how may one oppose it? The methods tried up to now: google bombing, virtual sit-ins (aka browser attacks), more aggressive covert forms of hacking, may still carry the root assumptions of the spectacle and worse have sometimes only strengthened security measures around the citadels of electronic power. I am reminded of the old dictum: those who make revolution half-way are only digging their own graves. Though I also wonder whether this applies, since it is still important to appear in Googleworld in the form of an opposition to its power. But more importantly: what is the world we would like to imagine after this form of spectacle? There was an ad campaign in the US more than a decade ago that called pork, "the other white meat." This was quickly detourned to feature various ersatz politicians contending to substitute themselves for the then current ones. All were indeed "white." Which new search engine has the potential to become something more than the apologetic-or worse-catalog of the web? Which one can remain truly subversive? Which one can help the "user" discover sexy, liberating knowledge in place of current forms of oppression? I personally don't see an end to the skeptical, critical analysis and use of any media, electronic even more than the rest. Otherwise we remain inter-passive pseudo-historical subjectivities, rather than radical agents of our own subjectivities and desires. The problem may be one of scale-not in numbers, as some techno-utopians have recently proposed-but in terms of psychological scale: the perception of one's relative size in the global network, the perception of one's own agency and how to keep that edgy. The name Google itself alludes to an extremity of imaginable scale; the question may be to scale up our own imaginations. Keith >Hi Keith, > >Thanks for your reponse. I was thinking this morning a lot about the >nature of the information which insiders utilize to leverage in >their benefit. It is always proprietary data from analysts and/or >bankers. Google contains information which is available to anyone >with a web client and a machine capable of engaging in http >transactions with it's w^3 servers. Insider trading defined as >acting on buy/sell securities transactions with knowledge that is >not available to the common investor. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
