Singularity Watch redux: The Trump

Kwakiutl shaman, 1914, via Retronaut.

Back when the blog was very young, in early 2012, I had a prophetic vision I haven't come back to, of a kind of Singularity, not the well-known Singularity of science fiction in which computers attain consciousness, but a socioeconomic Singularity in which it would be the corporate entities, networks of organic parallel processors, that would become conscious and autonomous things—or were perhaps already there, only too vast and from our microscopic point of view too disorganized (like a molecule from the perspective of an electron) to see.

Only I couldn't quite figure out how they would interact and communicate with each other or with us, other than by the patterns of their spending and receiving money, the only activities a corporation really undertakes on its own power, as opposed to the jobs done by the employees (it was the advent of electronic program trading, carrying on financial transactions thousands of times per second without direct human involvement, along with the concept of the corporation as person with First Amendment speech and religious rights, that got me onto the train of thought).

Anyway there's another and maybe simpler possibility, arising out of a very quirky detail in last night's statement from the Trump campaign:

Losing their grip

Photograph by The Nation, which also has some great coverage.

A labor story that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of play outside of New York City is the epic of the contract dispute at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus, whose 400 AFT faculty members have been ordered off campus, cut off from their classrooms and email accounts, and stripped of their salaries and health insurance, as the semester begins, and students find their classes being taught, or not, by "replacement workers". Rumor had it that ballet courses would be taught by Dean David Cohen, an elderly biology professor who specialized in plant morphogenesis.

The issues are gross inequities in salary between the faculty in Brooklyn and at the school's Post campus in Brookville, Nassau County, and the treatment of adjuncts, in the new cost-cutting contract the administration offered. Alana Semuels writes in a great piece in The Atlantic:

Arthur Kimmel has been an adjunct at LIU’s Brooklyn campus for more than 20 years. Under the terms of the proposed contract, he would have his income cut by 30 to 35 percent, he said. That’s because, in addition to the $1,800 or so per course he teaches, he has received pay for having office hours and money from an adjunct-benefits trust fund to help defray the cost of health insurance. Kimmel says the university’s proposal would eliminate the adjunct- benefits trust fund and payments for office hours, among other cuts. The new proposal would also decrease the number of credit hours he could teach, and establishes a two-tier system for adjuncts so that new employees would receive less than Kimmel does.

When the faculty overwhelmingly rejected the contract on Tuesday and the faculty senate overwhelmingly voted no confidence in the president, the administration made its move.

It's not completely surprising, in these times of increasing corporatization, when academic institutions come more and more to be run by business-administration types with little or no teaching experience of their own (LIU president Kimberly Cline has "experience as a president of a multicampus institution, as a CFO of a university system and as a university attorney, bringing a rare trifecta of managerial, financial and legal expertise to her new role" but clearly hasn't taught a class since she was a grad student, Doctor in Educational Administration, at Hofstra), to see teachers treated with such contempt, though it is distressing.

The contempt for the customers, fee-paying students, on the other hand, and their parents, as the academic year begins and the administration refuses them the education they've paid for (tuition is $34,000 a year), is just astonishing and anything but corporate. It's people who are supposed to be hard-headed and focused on the bottom line succumbing to emotionalism, dominated by rage and spite, against its own economic interests. It shows, I think, a CEO class that is losing its grip, in much the way the Donald Trump phenomenon does, doing terrible damage as it thrashes and fails.

Wrote this up partly because I didn't notice that Erik Loomis had done so, but he has. Loomis also notes how you can donate to the LIU Lockout Solidarity Fund.

Based on well-documented and widely accepted empirical evidence

Update: Hi MBRU readers! Thanks as ever Tengrain!

From the economists Aparna Mathur and Kevin ("Dow 36,000") Hassett at the Wall Street Journal last week, and recycled this morning in the daily bulletin of the American Enterprise Institute, where Hassett is director of economic policy studies,

The cure for wage stagnation

I know, teacher! Give everybody a raise! No, silly, of course that's not how economics works. If the boss gives you a raise, that isn't real; you have to get it from the Invisible Hand.

But it turns out that's going to be easy. All you need is a plan that everybody agrees in advance is the right one:

Juan is the loneliest number

Pop-tart sushi, from Pop-Tarts World, Times Square.  Photo  by Robyn Lee for Serious Eats.

Atrios says:

Shorter Juan Williams: I didn't try to pass off CAP's writing as my own, I tried to pass off my intern's writing as my own, which is totally not plagiarism because shutupShutupShutUpSHUTUPSHUTUP.

This may not be totally fair, or maybe not unfair enough, depending on how you look at it. I don't know what Williams's practice was when he was making a living as a writer, but that's not what he is today in any case; what he really is is a brand name, whose main professional function is to show up as a talkinghead on Fox News and lend it whatever prestige it is he provides. [jump]

One entity, one vote!

This photo of Kalispell is courtesy of TripAdvisor.

If Rep. Steve Lavin (R-Kalispell) gets his way, owners of property in, say, Troy, but who live in, say, Ekalaka, will be able to vote and run for office in municipal elections in Montana even though they are not residents of the municipalities in which they’re voting. Even more startling, Lavin’s bill, HB-486, can be construed as giving the out-of-state corporate owners of property in a Montana municipality a vote in that municipality’s elections. Walmart’s bigwigs in Arkansas might be able to vote in Kalispell’s city council election by mail ballot.  (James Connor's Flathead Memo, February 21 2013)

And immediately, of course, the blamesters, as I like to call them, are snapping at your heels. "You're already buying the candidates, that isn't enough? Now you want to vote for them too?"

You have no idea how hurtful that is. When you're a corporation. In fact I have no idea either, not really. It's a little like the question of whether the unborn child feels pain or not, inside the womb, sheer guesswork. They're at another—some say a higher—order of existence, and we can't communicate directly with them. Does that mean they don't care? You can say any spiteful thing you want and it's not going to bother them? Hath not a corporation cameras? Hath not a corporation recording devices, with microphones planted in certain meeting rooms, lavatories, and so forth? If you prime us with alcohol, do we not leak?

The fact is, corporations live among us, in their disembodied way, working hard, playing by the rules, and trying to ensure a better life for their subsidiaries. If they have an interest in Kalispell, it's sort of like living there, except for the living part; they're concerned, just as you or I might be, with the little things that make a place a home, like do you have to pay workers minimum wage even if they're illegals, or how strict are they about hazardous wastes. Corporate citizenship is second-class citizenship; they feel they deserve the real deal. Is that asking so much? (Apparently yes, the bill didn't make it out of committee. But it's the thought that counts.)

Thank you for your service stations

Romney's explanation for why he failed to mention the troops in his convention speech—

When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list, you talk about the things you think are important...

—is as they say taken out of context to make it sound funnier than it is, but it's when you put it back into context that it starts telling you something about who Romney is, and fairly damning:

...and I described in my speech, my commitment to a strong military unlike the president’s decision to cut our military. And I didn’t use the word troops, I used the word military. I think they refer to the same thing.

In the first place, he does consult a laundry list, as you see, as do they all, but only Romney feels constrained to lie about it, which shows the degree to which his lying has become practically a reflex, something he can't quite control. Anyway, he feels he did manage to check off the troops even though he didn't use the word.

In the second place, however, no, they don't refer to the same thing. What he had to say about the military in his speech, aside from a reference to dead troops and their unitedness (in reproachful contrast to those divisive Democrats despicably dividing us by race, social class, and party affiliation*), is this:

[Obama's] trillion dollar cuts to our military will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and also put our security at greater risk.... [while Romney's] America, that united America, will preserve a military that is so strong, no nation would ever dare to test it.

Policy-wise, what he's talking about has nothing to do with troops; it's about equipment that the Pentagon doesn't even want, but certain senators do, along with the contractors that keep them in campaign funds. When he speaks of "our military" he means the number one client of some of his "job-creating" colleagues, the corporate Thing. And then if corporations are people, the military is people too, including soldiers, sailors, and marines, but that doesn't say anything about their needs (such as adequate pay and benefits, just like factory workers, and a claim on the so-called American Dream), and there's no evidence that he cares about those at all, only that the corporate Thing should be impregnable, like Palpatine's Death Star; it might as well be peopled by droids (which would make somebody a ton of cash).

So that—finally—he's lying about that too. He knows very well that he didn't mention the troops in the speech but he doesn't want to admit, so he cooks up this story about how he mentioned them but we just didn't notice.

*It's one of the best rhetorical tricks they've got: "There are two kinds of people in this world, dividers like those damned Democrats, and uniters like me."

Singularity Watch (addendum)

Via Kevin Drum, here is an animated graph from Nanex of high-speed trading volume in the US stock markets (all 14 of them! no, I didn't know either), from January 2007 to January 2012. (You'll have to click it to make it work.)

You can watch the configurations develop from an apparently quiet hum at the beginning (and yet the crash of 1987 was caused by program trading, wasn't it, and that was 20 years earlier) to a roar around last September when it starts looking like Götterdämmerung.

Drum remarks,

The basic idea behind HFT is that humans are taken out of the trading equation entirely. Instead, computer algorithms trade stocks directly, executing millions of trades per second and occasionally going crazy, as they did during the Flash Crash of 2010 and then again a few days ago, when an HFT bug cost Knight Capital $440 million in 30 minutes. ...The problem with HFT isn't that we know it's dangerous, it's that we don't know anything at all. It's become flatly too complex for even its creators to understand what their creations are doing.

But what I was thinking, in the perspective of last Friday's post about the possibility of a Singularity among the corporate entities, is that these graphs could be perfectly intelligible if they were the representations of a language, to those who knew the language. Tagalog sounds like a series of random bird chirps to those of us that don't know it, but to the Tagalog speaker there's nothing random about it at all; what seems to the non-speaker like randomness is precisely what carries information.

Think about it: trading isn't you and Chuck any more, or the rich guy next door who stays home to work in his pajamas, it's mostly these machines (on behalf of our pension funds, should we have any): 84% of trading is HFT. As far as we know, they're autonomous, and as far as the market goes the Singularity in the ordinary sense has already taken place, but a very simple one, in which the newly conscious machine is only conscious in a single dimension, driven by the need to squeeze the profits out of the spreads.

But to generate each graph takes more than one machine, a host of them, and independent of one another. It's in the array of them that a higher consciousness might arise, using those one-dimensional consciousnesses as its neural networks, and communicating among themselves that way...

Lyonel Feininger. From Laura Gilbert's Art Unwashed

Singularity Watch

There's something about that odd little cataclysm that struck the stock exchanges yesterday:

An automated stock trading program suddenly flooded the market with millions of trades Wednesday morning, spreading turmoil across Wall Street and drawing renewed attention to the fragility and instability of the nation’s stock markets.

While the broad stock indexes quickly recovered and ended the day slightly down, it was the latest black eye for the financial markets. The runaway trading suggests that regulators have not been able to keep up with electronic programs that increasingly dominate the supercharged market and have helped undermine investor confidence in stocks.

It brought me back to that idea of the socioeconomic Singularity, where it's the corporations, aggregates of employees and shareholders and equipment and value, that begin to acquire an independent consciousness—not that corporations are people, my friend, but that they might, under certain yet to be determined conditions, become monsters, if you will, superorganic Creatures with appetites and abilities of their own.

When we last visited it, we got slightly hung up on the question of how the Creatures would communicate, if they attained that second-order consciousness, the ability to see themselves as the center of a narrative, and ultimately to see the Other seeing them the same way. Corporate speech is money, right? Would they speak by cutting checks?

From NPR's Planet Money.

Today's story suggested a totally different approach, one that works better from a strictly scientific point of view: that the voice of the corporation could be the movement you see on the charts: the throb of sales, the crooning of prices, going up and down, up and down, with the kind of linear structure that is necessary for the classic (or Saussurean) sign.

When we look at a graph, we're looking at a very limited kind of pattern—trends and associations—in the aim of predicting: will it go up or will it go down? Sharp jerks and outlier numbers are ignored, because they aren't part of the pattern. When you're parsing a sign, it's exactly the opposite: it's the sudden swoops and spikes that have information value, the predictable part of the sequence is just white noise.

In this way events like Wednesday's flood of trades or the flash crash of 2010 might be not so much communications as the first cries of infants just beginning to recognize their separateness from their surroundings...

Who says money doesn't equal speech?

Just when I became convinced that Willard Mitt Romney doesn't really believe that corporations are people, it turns out that he really does:

"Well, the banks aren't bad people. They're just overwhelmed right now.... scared to death, of course," he said. "They're feeling the same thing that you're feeling. And so they just want to pretend that all this is just going to get paid some day."

(from AP; h/t to Jed Lewison at Daily Kos)

You want to know how he got so in touch with the feelings of banks? Well, it probably has something to do with this:

Employees at the five largest U.S. banks by assets, including Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., had given Romney about $600,000 through the first three quarters of 2011, according to the most recent filings available from the Federal Election Commission.

The second-largest recipient of bank employee contributions, President Barack Obama, had far less, about $200,000, the analysis showed....

Romney received more from employees of those top five banks than all the other candidates combined.

(from McClatchy; h/t to Pat Garofalo at ThinkProgress)

Looks like money really is speech, eh? Those banks have been whispering sweet nothings in Willard's ears all year!

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

A singularity of purpose

Thigh, by Francis Picabia. From Disasturbation

I'm haunted by that vision of the corporation as superorganic Creature, slouching towards—whatever goal you might imagine them to have, feeding and reproducing, I guess, like everything else. I think I know how it could really happen, too (at least in a science fiction sense), as a kind of socioeconomic Singularity, analogous to the technological Singularity when all the artificial intelligence devices are supposed to achieve their own independent intelligence and declare independence from their human masters...

Think of all those folks in their cubicles [jump]

Citizens far from United

I've been absorbed in a discussion chez Kos to a diary by Adam B to a remark made (somewhere else) by Eugene Volokh, in reference to the infamous Citizens United decision, and asking what if Congress were to ban corporate speech (i.e., money) on issues of legislation instead of elections—so that Google, say, would not have been able to mount its protest this week against the loathsome SOPA bill. How would we feel about corporate speech then? It was one of those Talmudic questions to which "Not going to happen" is not an acceptable answer—meant to elicit the underlying principles on which that discorporate entity "the Left" bases its objections.

So the conversation turned quickly to the question of whether corporations are persons [jump]