Project Alpha

The Wall Street Journal reports on the NYSE’s Project Alpha, its new high-speed trading hub being built in New Jersey. While I blog this, I’m listening to a fascinating lecture by Kevin Slavin on high-frequency trading. The transition of M-C-M’ to M-M’ that Jeffrey Nealon suggests operates at the base of capital today is not only free of commodities it is free of any kind of human place, which is reduced now only to electronics located at the intersection of real estate values and latency.

The phenomenological world of non-places that we saw in the early 1990s (and that was undone by wireless communication technologies) proves now to have been a rehearsal for a world run by non-places from which humans themselves are absent.