In the Terminator movies, a massive computer network created by the U.S. military known as Skynet suddenly becomes sentient and launches a catastrophic attack on humankind that reduces the planet to rubble. Most of the action in the films takes place before that holocaust, as desperate humans travel back in time hoping to prevent Skynet from being invented in the first place. Technology in that bleak future was no gleaming iPad. It was a mortal enemy.
Unfortunately, there's no unwinding the myriad events of the 1980s and 90s that led to the Wall Street financial implosion in 2008. What's left now is the economic rubble left by the collapse of a massive speculation machine built by Wall Street firms with the connivance of elected officials and regulators.
The high priests and priestesses of the Money Industry were those who could program the computers to predict the market and trade at light speed. Algorithms were the bible code of Wall Street. Billions were made by these middlemen as finance went viral, growing to a third of the U.S. economy, drawing the best and the brightest into the processing of paper and the manipulation of stocks, commodities, insurance contracts, and later packages of bundles of financial assets including mortgages, and then insurance contracts on those derivatives, as they are known.
Finally even the high priests and priestesses – never mind the regulators – no longer understood that the machinery was not doing, nor what any of the newly invented virtual assets were worth. Trading moved from the noisy floors of exchanges where traders frenetically bought and sold to super-fast processors operating silently on proprietary networks.
In retrospect, May 10, 2010 may come to be remembered as the day we had inkling that the machines were taking over. Suddenly stocks started falling in value and no one could figure out why. Within a matter of minutes on that afternoon, the Dow dropped 700 points. Then it miraculously recovered. No one really knows for sure, but most observers suspect that the so called "flash crash" was the result of high speed computers programmed to automatically react to unspecified market indicators. Today's New York Times reports that the regulators are fearful of more computer-driven crashes - and so are investors.
Another date to remember is June 1, 2009. That day, Air France flight 447, a highly computerized fly by wire Airbus A330 airplane, fell 35,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean off South America. All 228 on board died.
The cause remained a mystery until the black box flight recorder was recovered from the deeps earlier this year. Investigators determined that the pilots did exactly the opposite of what they were trained to do, and based on faulty information from the airplane's computer system literally flew the plane into the water.
Science fiction has become fact: we are gradually, almost invisibly, forfeiting our judgment and our human attributes to technologies we do not fully understand and as yet do not fully control. This surrender pervades the culture: Corporations are persons for purposes of permitting them to exercise and ultimately swamp our First Amendment rights, the US Supreme Court has decreed. Restoring the primacy of human beings in the political process is imperative.
Like the Constitution, technology should serve us, not the other way around. An astounding outpouring of grief and affection for Steve Jobs this week has been followed by well-deserved odes to his creativity and acumen. Jobs democratized computers, putting them in the hands of the masses. The operative distinction is that apple products gave consumers more control over their assets – music, video, photos. Every one of Jobs' creations came with an on-off switch. One wonders what the man had to say about technology run amok, used to gild the lives of a few at the expense of many more.
No Lobbyist Left Behind
If we forced CNN commentators to wear the names of their clients on their sleeves like NASCAR drivers we might have a deeper, more honest debate over what’s going on in Washington.
Unless you live under a rock without any form of media, it’s hard to miss the nonstop frenzy over dumb comments made by CNN commentator Hilary Rosen about Ann Romney.
Rosen said Romney never worked a day in her life, which made her unqualified to comment on the economy. Republicans then attacked Rosen as another in a long line of Democratic elitists who have no respect for women who work in the home.
When she comments on CNN, the network labels Rosen a “Democratic strategist,” though they don’t disclose any particular strategy that she’s come up with.
CNN doesn’t mention her work representing many high-profile clients in Washington, D.C. with interests across a wide range of issues. Her firm, SKDKnickerbocker is filled with former government employees cashing in on their contacts on behalf of their corporate clients. The firm, which includes President Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn as managing director, isn’t required to disclose clients because it doesn’t acknowledge that what it does is lobbying. In Washington-speak the firm is “political consulting and public relations firm.”
Last year, Bloomberg Business week reported that the firm coordinated an army of lobbyists unleashed by a coalition led by Google, Apple and Cisco pushing for a tax holiday.
The Republic Report compiled a partial list of clients, including big railroads, agricultural interests, PepsiCo and General Mills and for-profit education companies.
In addition, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Dunn pitched SKDKnickerbocker’s services as part of a team that offered to restore hedge funds’ sullied reputations, though apparently nobody swung.
Rosen’s poke at Ann Romney may have stirred up media frenzy, offering just the excuse for a jive revival of jive working mom v. stay-at-home brawl that sheds no light and offers no insight to anybody.
It’s also not the kind of controversy that’s likely to upset Rosen’s clients, who will recognize it for the sideshow it is compared to their free-flowing access to the White House. It’s more likely that it will provide Rosen with an opportunity for some good-natured self-deprecating humor to grease her way as she makes the rounds through the corridors of power.
The Obama administration has made a big deal about how it holds itself to a higher standard by not taking money from lobbyists. But that doesn’t mean lobbyists don’t have a strong presence in the White House, as the New York Times reported Saturday. “Many of the president’s biggest donors, while not lobbyists, took lobbyists with them to the White House, while others performed essentially the same function on their visits,” the Times reported.
Several years ago, GOOD magazine came up with the idea of making politicians wear suits with the names of their biggest contributors, like NASCAR drivers advertise their sponsors. Politicians have been reluctant to embrace the idea. They’re perfectly happy to keep us focused on the sideshow provided by Rosen and those like her, who babble phony nonsense on TV but profit from their access to the real game off-screen.