We may not have all died today, but 12/21/12 has indeed marked our passage over a very particular sort of event horizon: we have been overtaken by our own abstractions.

Today, the venerable New York Stock Exchange is accepting an offer to be acquired by a much, much younger trading platform called The Intercontinental Exchange or, more chillingly,  ICE.

And while pundits galore will explain that this has to do with American regulation of markets making them less attractive or profitable, the story is really much simpler and more grotesque.

It starts with the real – or the almost real. The New York Stock Exchange is, primarily, a place and a platform where people sell shares of companies to one another. The stock market. ICE is a bit more complex, or one level more abstracted, in that its principal business is to administrate the sales of derivatives.

Derivatives, as the words implies, are one or more levels of abstraction away from real stocks. Where a share of stock represents some small percentage of ownership of a company, a derivative – like a futures contract – is just a bet on the future price of the stock. When you buy or sell a derivative, you are not investing in a company but in the price movement of the shares. It’s one level abstracted.

Of course, you can also buy derivatives of derivatives – bets on the movement of derivatives prices – or even derivatives of those. Exchanges like ICE also let you bet on volatility or the changing rate of volatility.

The amazing thing here is that the derivatives market is now so much bigger than the “real” market, that it has gone ahead and purchased it. The transactions abstracted from the reality of the marketplace are now more important than the marketplace itself. It’s kind of like when The Simpsons became a bigger mainstream hit than the sitcoms it was satirizing, or when the deepest level down in Inception turned out to matter more to reality than reality.

In terms of hoisting corporate capitalism on its own petard, this is the best moment in finance since Wall Street Journal’s editors – who had always argued in favor of corporate takeovers – began whining about how their takeover by Rupert Murdoch would “kill the culture” of the newspaper. Ha.

Likewise, stock traders have always justified their extraction of value from our economy as a form of investment. In reality, stock transactions account for more economic activity than real economic activity, such as people buying stuff and companies making stuff. The majority of money has been trapped in this faux marketplace of paper, which is why however much the central bank prints, it never ends up paying for workers or projects or bridges or schools. Productive assets are less profitable than paper – but Wall Street has argued that this is just the way corporate capitalism works.

Now they’re learning their own lesson, having become the mere signifier in someone else’s sign. They’re going to look back on the era when people used to signal sixteenths of shares with their fingers as the golden age of analog trading – before capitalism slipped over the event horizon into an infinite regression.

This is a sigil.

I’ll be plain about that from the outset. I am carving out a space in the data sphere for something special to take place. It is a tent of meeting, a humans-only zone, an occupation.

And if it’s successful, this little squat will provide safe haven for thought and new opportunities for connection. That’s what media is for, anyway: connection. It’s what I need, anyway. Some connection.

I’ve been at this a while, an itinerant media philosopher, hanging up his hat in various safe houses and writing, speaking, or engaging there with a cohort of other squatters until whatever it is we’re doing is identified and stamped out or commercialized. Or until a skillful troll comes along and pits us against our own need for inclusivity. Or until too many of us decide we have to go make some dough and move on.

TNI is different. It’s a more fertile soil than I’ve experienced before. It’s very female in here. It’s very young. It’s very smart. And unlike most of the other super smart platforms for radical thought out there, TNI doesn’t end up choking on its own political correctness. People here espouse ideas from all ends of the political spectrum and opposing sides of the intellectual discourse – sometimes at the very same time – rendering such primitive distinctions obsolete. This mixing and matching is not adultery but adulthood.

There is something happening here. This is a scene without the scene-sters, an e without the -lite. Imagine liking something without the nagging obligation to click a “like” button, or to tweet it out. The fact that we’re here, and reading, and writing, is enough.

What do I plan to write about? Anything and everything, but all tied to the basic proposition that human beings connecting intelligently and intimately is a good thing. Obstacles to this – from markets that require distance in order to sell more things to more people, to moral codes that depend on shame and disconnection in order to perpetuate unjust power structures – will be exposed and deconstructed. Beauty will be celebrated, along with the ability to perceive it. Connections will be drawn, mistakes will be made, and all will be forgiven.

I will write in all states of mind, and all states of excitement. I will make audio files. I may even take pictures. I do want to get inside you, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

If you have read this far, you are in this thing, too. Cool.

Any time, Or anywhere,
Just look over your shoulder
Guess who’ll be standing there.
–The Monkees

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