Financial technology deepened traders’ detachment and made finance increasingly game-like

Evidence

Indeed, the central conceit of what is still the most popular and influential financier autobiography/testimonial, Michael Lewis’s (2001) Liar’s Poker, takes the popular card game and its culture of high-stakes, hyper-masculine competition and duplicity as a metaphor for the culture of Wall Street in the 1980s (see also Bjerg 2011; on the genre of financier confessional, see Hayward 2014). As outlined in Chapter 2, little has changed culturally since that time, though the advances of financial technology have accelerated, exacerbated and broadened the volatility such a culture creates. Indeed, as Ho (2009), Zaloom (2006), Preda (2009) and other anthropologists illustrate, the level of technological and mathematical detachment that characterizes today’s financial sector allows traders and other financial actors an even greater level of detachment and renders finance even more game-like. Michel Callon (2007), Donald MacKenzie (2005), Karin Knorr Cetina (2005) and others have likewise illustrated the ways that, in an age of incredible computing power, when the sublime movements of the “market” must be represented through computer models and when some of the most important work in finance is done by digital engineers, the game-like qualities of finance become even more acute (see also Hutton 2014). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 331

Categorization

• XREF: Direct precursor to deWaard’s cultural argument about finance colonizing imagination — the game metaphor shows finance’s self-representation leaking into culture. — connects to: Screen-based trading recreated rather than abolished trader sociality and mutual anticipation. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 427; Speculative technologies are both mediators and expressions of the finance-society relationship; Modern financial markets are deliberately designed entities — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1235 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Speculative technologies are both mediators and expressions of the finance-society relationship #expands (0.78)
• Trader sociality persists inside electronic markets and was ethnographically documented #contradicts (0.75)
• Online trading culture deferred consumption and enjoyment to an indefinite future #exemplifies (0.75)
• Modern financial markets are deliberately designed entities #complicates (0.72) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1235