The war also the starting point for the beginning in yet another shift in global consciousness. It was the combination of two influences, photography and electromagnetism that was primarily responsible for this change. After the war ended, television spread like wild fire, literally house to house. Living rooms were now being illuminated by the glow of fuzzy electronic moving images. The television was an immediate sensation, with people spending time watching pictures flit off and on the front of a radiating box. This phenomenon soon began to surpass the time people spent reading linear rows of black lines.
Understanding television demands an entirely different hemispheric strategy than used in reading. TV watchers must use their pattern recognition skills to comprehend the screen's low definition flickerings. Our retina's cones need bright light to read a static page, but television brought the rods of our eyes into usage. They see best in dim surroundings and can pick up the smallest of movements. As our culture watched more and more of the tube, the supremacy of the left hemisphere dimmed as the right hemisphere increased. For hundreds of thousands of years, families had gathered around burning hearths whose flames supplied warmth, illuminated the dark, encouraged fellowship and storytelling. The campfire had been an essential ingredient in the evolution of our verbal histories.
It was in 1950 really, that a new kind of fire replaced the hearth, and it emphasized and all- together different set of social qualities. Television's fascination and ubiquity greatly increased the impact of images. Iconic information had overtaken alphabetized information as the single most impactful cultural influence.
The first modern image to achieve the recognition of the world was the atomic bomb's mushroom explosion. The phallic cloud billowing up over Japan symbolized the unbalanced. The masculine imbalance of war. It was the climatic end product of thousands of years of the dominance of our left brains. The world stood stunned, slack jawed and wide eyed at the cruelest and craven powers of the warrior mentality carried to their most inhumane extremes. All the supposed virtues of abstract science, linear word, and sequential equations had led society to the edge of extinction.
The freaky sequence of photos of the bomb's defining plume was shown relentlessly in theatres and television screens until no one was unfamiliar with it. A great shock of terror and warning pulsed through the nervous systems of people throughout the entire world. This was the continuance of the arms race and the never ending heresy hunt, enveloping a greater part of the left brain's skills for thousands of years. Culture had now reached a morbidly idiotic zero-sum facedown, to win an all-out war meant to create an earth that was uninhabitable for humankind and all other species. It was the extension of the sealed train that brought Lenin through Europe and into Tsarist Russia; the unification of opposing interests.
As time moved on the period from 1967 to 1971 is best characterized by confusion and uncertainty in international monetary affairs. The devaluation of silver in 1967 came as a shock even though the instability in sterling had been seen by central bankers many years before. The next years however were marked by a series of devaluations, revaluations, inflation, SDRs, the failure of the Gold Pool, currency swaps, IMF loans, a two tiered gold price and other shirt tail solutions. During this same period, the leading economies throughout the world were experiencing internal strains, from student riots, labor protests, antiwar protests, sexual revolution, the Prague Spring, the Cultural Revolution and the ever constant growth of the counterculture. All this was layered on top of rapid technological change made visible by the ubiquity of computers. It was this and the constant fear of thermonuclear destruction and the jaw dropping awe of landing a man on the moon, that suddenly seemed to make the world balanced on a teetering foundation, in a manner not seen since 1938.
Yet, through all this, one thing remained certain and sure. The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 established the Treasury's exchange stabilization fund. It was to be financed with the profits from gold confiscation, which the Treasury could utilize on a wholly discretionary basis for currency market exchange intervention and other open market operations. The "slush fund" it was soon termed, because the money did not have to be appropriated by Congress. Ever since then the value of the U.S. dollar remained fixed at one thirty-fifth of an ounce of pure gold and the United States seemed prepared to defend the this gold value despite the vast increase in the supply of dollars and the fact that convertibility was limited to a few foreign central banks bound to honor a gentleman's agreement not to push too hard for conversion. The classical gold standard had represented an intellectual anchor, a monetary North Star that formatted the debate over what kind of mechanism was needed in the 1920's to jumpstart international capital flows and world trade after World War I and the Versailles Treaty. But then suddenly, this important link was severed. On Sunday, August 15,, 1971, President Nixon preempted television to announce the closing of the gold standard.
Soon after this came the initial phase in the world of computer linked financial servers and financial quants, when digital networking first greatly increased the ambition and greed that had been at the margins of the world of finance. Beginning in the early 1980's and exploding in the 1990's finance became networked, and for the first time market ideations, schemes, and scams were able to exceed the pre-digital limitations of human deception. There is a very real argument about whether the weakening of regulations was the cause of the debacles, or if the regulations were weakened because the temptations of overcoming them became so great due to the new technologies. Financiers now put more effort into political influence than they ever had.
This financial networking created a phenomenon where the same money might be earning interest at two different banks at opposite ends of the world at the same time. No one at any of the banks involved would have a clue. The financial severs work the same fluctuation, they hook into a feedback system with each other and inadvertently conspire to milk the rest of the world to no purpose. The algorithms learned to trip the circuit breakers at the correct millisecond to seize the profit. If the frequency of the trades is hindered, then some other parameter, like the timing of trades will be automatically manipulated and refined so as to take an advantage. This cat and mouse game can and is going on endlessly. Overthrowing the pattern of the financial servers is the only means back to a truer from of democratic capitalism.
It is our common shared illusion that we imagine the data that computers and financial servers hold as a substance, like some natural resource waiting to be mined from the ground. The information that drives our automated culture comes from you and me, we the people, in the form of massive dumps of data. It is understood as an elaborate form of string pulling, or sophisticated puppetry, creating a daunting successor reality in information. The irony is real, since mankind has become psychologically victimized by the very technological innovations that we have created. It is an ambiguous irony however, because it isn't clear to us how much choice we truly had. Once the tracks of life are changed, we lost the ability to grasp what we may have forgotten from a previous period. We have all become lost in the process of growing up.
The very idea of artificial intelligence give humans the cover to avoid accountability by kidding ourselves that computer networks and machines can take on more and more of our own responsibility. Algorithms don't represent emotion or meaning, but only statistics and correlations. The financial servers that drive them are narcissists; dumb to where value comes from. It is impossible for high frequency trading to incorporate information about the real world, because there is no time for that information to get into the feedback loop. Digital information after all, is just people in disguise. In this way, digital modernity resembles a sort of soft blackmail. Once we become accustomed to having an information service, our cognitive styles and capacities become shaped by the availability of that service.
Our transition from childhood to adulthood is important to reflect upon. None of us really knows what was lost in process of growing up. Our minds can't realize the mentality in which our childhood memories were so very meaningful. Technological change has put generations of adults through similar gaps and disruptions in our cognitions. We are all the reverse images of unimaginable epochs of cruelty and heartbreak. We can't begin to know fully what we have lost as society becomes more technological. We are in persistent doubt of our own authenticity and essence. The recent breakdowns in finance capital can be seen as the symptoms of a false hope that information technology can make promises on its own, without people, without judgment. Sometimes, the devil we know is probably not as scary as one we don't. The more a culture bases itself on a perverted model of automation and efficiency, the greater the potential for sudden breakouts of evil.
In Greek mythology, Homer warned the sailors not to succumb to the call of the sirens, but he was totally complacent about Hephaestus's golden female robots. Today however, the sirens might be even more in their organic form, for it is then that we are really most looking at ourselves in disguise. It was not the sirens that Homer warned of, who harmed the sailors, but the sailor's inability to think rationally. So it is with us and our computational machines. Every bit in a computer is a potential wannabe demon.
Today, we have a sad culture where the biblical Cain is still killing his brother. The Book of Genesis gave us the creation of the universe, the illicit acquisition of knowledge, the expulsion from Paradise, and the slaying of Abel by Cain, a second fall from grace into jealousy, competition, alienation and violence. When God asks Cain, where his brother is, Cain responds, "Am I my brother's keeper?" He refuses to say what God already understands: That the spoiled blood of Abel cries out from the earth that has absorbed it. He is also raising one of the greatest perennial social questions: are we beholden to one another, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself?
If John Maynard Keynes the great and prescient demand side economist had seen the emergence of such machines as ENIAC and their eventual computational power, he would have known his mission was doomed. He would have seen that judgment would become overwhelmed by efficiency. He had once said, that" judgment is to capitalism what the secret police are to a totalitarian state. Without judgment," he stated, "you will have financial anarchy or worse."
Keynes likened it to what happened in the 14th century, when the plague came off a boat in Venice, as a germ no bigger than a pinhead in the blood of a rat. That rat found another rat to bite, or a person. And so it went. Within ten years, a third of Europe was gone.
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