I read this article this morning on the NASDAQ stock exchange in New York going down for a few hours. The comments are as usual better than the article. There are the usual jokes about Skynet and Terminators, conspiracy theories, Chinese cyberwarfare, “Someone, somewhere made money from this”, and other bullshit in there. Several commentators expressed hope that its a sign of things to come however.
Thats the really exciting though. The very core of the globalised capitalist system collapses not through popular uprising but because someone didn’t press CTRL + ALT + DELETE fast enough.
Huge volumes of automated trading run at the millisecond level, vast sums of OUR cash being bet by suckers on stocks and options that are obviously doomed. (sub-prime mortgages are on the rise again because some bright spark thinks he has found a ‘fool proof’ way to make money on them…. pull the other one its got fucking bells on)
Marx always said that the capitalist system sowed the seeds of its own destruction. OK he couldn’t have foreseen high volume millisecond time scale automated trading but I bet if someone with a time machine grabbed him and brought him to the present day he would have shit himself laughing. That could be a great Doctor Who plot.
shoutybloke 
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