NP-naked capitalism

[Robert Mahnke]

Agree completely with the recommendation of Naked Capitalism (capitalism
applied to naked capitalism?), which is here:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com

Having had some exposure to industries affected by the ecology described
there, I both agree that there is something interesting going on, but
disagree that that "much of the world's financial system is made out of
automated systems looking for fleeting arbitrage opportunities." That
sounds like hyperbole in the service of a less interesting truth. I worked
at eBay for a while, and also have an interest in and views about the sorts
of algorithmic tools described there. I have used the same example of the
warring bots bidding up the biology book's price when I have spoken at
legal conferences, but I would just add that that price was wholly notional
-- no one was interested in buying the book at anything like that price,
which was escalating in part because there were no transactions to price
to. If that episode were a child, it would be in the second grade now:
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358.

On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 10:52 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Recently discovered this site/newsletter. Recommended:
>
> “Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans” [Boston Review
> <https://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/henry-farrell-philip-k-dick-and-fake-humans>].
> This:
>
> Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own
> particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology
> is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human
> beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media
> have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of
> unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in
> deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by
> quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake
> books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from
> other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take
> advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure [Holy moley!].
> Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems
> designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities.
> Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and
> Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring
> bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99
> shipping).
> In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or
> Aldous Huxley’s.
>
>
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>
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