In media, the tools to produce and remix all kinds of media, and then to propagate and share them around the world, have become very common. Pieces of media that were once integrated can be found all over the place in new forms--audio, lyrics, video clips, etc. This creates an extremely complex and potentially rich global media environment (for better or worse). This is exactly what has happened in the financial industry.
Until the 90s, financial assets were integrated things. If you wanted equity, you could buy a stock. If you wanted debt, you could buy a bond. If you farmed wheat and wanted crop price insurance, you could buy a futures contract. These are all fairly simple financial instruments, and they are all created by large, reputable invesment firms (the equivalent of ABC, CBS, NBC, if you will). Then, in the 90s, some very mathematically savvy folk created a kind of financial asset called a "derivative." Derivatives enable you to split up other assets into their component parts, and then sell each part. So now, instead of one person owning a share of stock, one person can own the stock's volatility, another can own the stock's PE ratio relative to an index, or whatever. With bonds, one person can own the principal, another the default risk, another the coupon or interest income, etc.
If this sounds foreign and nonsensical, it's because it is. Nobody really gets it. The bottom line is that once-simple financial assets are now mixed and remixed all over the world in incomprehensibly complex ways, for better or worse (mostly worse, it seems). Unlike the really soft social sciences a la anthropology which can thrive in extremely complex environments, finance starts to suffocate under its own complexity. Contracts become incomprehensibe, prices become meaningless, and once-sound models fall apart. In consequence, we've seen the worst year in capital markets since 1937. I picked a heck of a time to start investing.
If you made it to this paragraph, thanks for humoring my random connection. I guess my point is that technology facilitiates the disintegration of all kinds of things, from vido clips to mortgages, and all of this disintegration has consequences. On the media/social science side, I'm mostly concerned that the really important information and meaning is being lost in the noise of an exploding cacophony of content. Some of the Greeks were very wary of the technology of written language. They thought that some things should just be written on the heart in an intimate connection between master and pupil, lest the medium and message become disconnected (disintegrated) over time. Perhaps they were onto something.
3 comments:
my poor anthropologist brother...soft science :)
i don't understand a thing about the financial mess, except that it scares me, and my own finances are too confusing for me to pay must attention to the dow going below 9000 (that's right, i watch the news!)
Hi,
I don't mean to blogstalk, but I'm interested in what you've described. I hope you don't see this as an intrusion but an invitation for conversation.
You describe something very Wittgensteinian here about language. Language, of course, is an abstraction though a subtle and probably necessary one.
I'm really interested in what you hint on here about the abstraction of the financial market. Once upon a time, we knew the people we bought things from, and if it wasn't a thing, we didn't buy it. And if we didn't know the person, we didn't buy it. And if we didn't know what exactly it was we were buying, we didn't buy it. Modern living has introduced some pretty interesting notions of commerce and exchange by what you've described. What's interesting is that our system of producing food have undergone a very similar transition--we no longer recogninze the things we eat given its additives and processing mechanisms. I don't know if you've read Michael Pollan's books about food reductionism and abstraction, but its all very thought provoking about how modernity has infiltrated our food. It seems though, what you've described is the conquest of abstraction over not only the abstraction of money itself, but how we make it.
At what point is the economy going to be so abstract that money will no longer be money and exchanges will become meaningless in their abstraction? You started off about how media is also becoming fractioned and partitioned in the name of availability. I think Andy Warhol really hit on something with Campbell's soup which is applicable to YouTube. At what point does media cease to be media and start to be noise, just as when does art cease to be art? When does money lose its value beyond the idea that we simply imagine it being there?
I guess just as philosophy entered postmodernism, and art has gone that way too, does this mean that we've just witnessed the end of posteconomy? Are we now entering post-posteconomy? very thought provoking.
clears throat...
your audience misses you and wants a new blog post...or an email every now and again...
that is all :)
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