Mason and Dixon on the New York Stock Exchange

[Thomas Eckhardt]

"By the summer of 2009 the line had a life of its own, and two thousand 
men were digging and boring the strange home it needed to survive. (...) 
The line was just a one-and-a-half-inch-wide hard black plastic tube 
designed to shelter four hundred hair-thin strands of glass, but it 
already had the feeling of a living creature, a subterranean reptile, 
with its peculiar needs and wants. It needed its burrow to be straight, 
maybe the most insistently straight path ever dug into the earth."

Michael Lewis, "Flash Boys", 7.

For what this is about, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_Networks
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l