Warthog and suricate or meerkat from the photorealist Lion King that opened this week. Terrible as the cartoon was, this one has to be far worse.
My kids were Disney-aged through the string of animated hits of what I guess were the Katzenberg years, Little Mermaid through Pocahontas, and I saw them all, some repeatedly, in addition to reading the book versions aloud, and mostly really hated them for various reasons, especially the disloyalty to the sources—they seemed to me to be working to destroy the sources, from Hans Christian Andersen to colonial history of Virginia, and replace them with perverted simulacra.
For instance in the case of Beauty and the Beast, Mme de Beaumont's Enlightenment fable of falling in love on grounds of moral affinity rather than being distracted by the superficialities was transformed by changing the character of the Beast. In the original he is a Beast because of the completely arbitrary malice of a wicked fairy, but unfailingly kind, generous, and self-effacing, which is why the Beauty comes to love him and the enchantment is overcome. Disney makes him into a cruel person who is bestified by a very judgmental fairy, as deserved punishment, and he becomes handsome again because he's making an effort to be nicer. The moral of the story turns out to be that if you're ugly it's probably your fault because you were mean to some old lady, and serves you right.
But the one I hated the most was The Lion King, for really political reasons at first.
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...
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?
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...
"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."
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.
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...
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]
