In the near term, before its holy wars kick in, we can plot the Address layer-to-come by tracing how it works within the forms of algorithmic governance that we already have. We ’ ve suggested that the recent financial crisis was also a crisis of addressability in that the kaleidoscopic nesting of asset debt inside collateralized futures inside options and so on not only allowed contagion to spread without quarantine, but that the absence of any reliable map of this haunted house of intertextual valuation made untangling the rot from the flesh all but impossible. The redesign of money — not just the currency vehicle of exchange, but of the valuation of things and events as such — may also require, or even entail, a more rigorous, flexible, and intricate mechanism for the identification of discrete assets as they twist and turn their way through financial wonderlands. What we now call “ high-frequency trading ” or algorithmic trading may continue to represent an increasingly larger percentage of all transactions, and as these techniques become more institutionalized, their methodologies and mechanisms become more normalized for even long-term investments. At the same time, the ability for deep address to engender not one but multiple address topologies describing the same set of events means that the potential for unprosecutable chaos is increased unless there are some workable standards for financial singularities, bifurcators, and resolvers that can police these data ontologies. Among the key drivers in the emergence of HFT were proprietary market simulations with which traders could execute mandated best prices and which helped inaugurate the supercomputing arms race on Wall Street. <sup>63</sup> Money, as we know, signifies not only value but debt, and anthropology confirms that debt as a technology of social organization precedes the innovation of material tokens to measure it. In time, some traditional materials became reference standards, however unlikely, such as the element Au, a soft, shiny, yellow rock. This option reintroduces the problems posed by a delimited total amount of value or debt reference, which are elastic by definition, but which are supposedly equal to the total quantity of that signifying substance. That total may be continually subdivided into units with less and less value, but the zero-sum economics is guaranteed by the physics of the whole. Moving off the gold standard increased the scale and granularity of debt to both increase, and with them the quantitative intensity of the social bonds that debt binds to itself (in principle at least). It allowed currencies to swell and contract in relation to one another and to the vagaries of unit value purchasing power, but the indexing of price is not the same as the indexing of value which is the tabulation of what should be most scarce within an economy. For example, a carbon tax may help force the real deexternalized costs of carbon to rise, to undistort transaction pricing signals, and in principle to make its continued overdigestion by ecological sinks prohibitively expensive and hence scarce by design. This dovetails with the logic of computational megastructures like Planetary Skin, which would wish to identify, address, and ultimately sort the price of ecologically sensitive molecules and chemical reactions. Some future permutation of these sensing apparatuses that is also a kind of banking or insurance infrastructure (and what are banks and insurers if not also already sensing apparatuses) may turn carbon itself into the reserve standard against which units of currencies can enumerate debt and value (including our species ’ carbon debt and the value of the ecosystems we have remaining), or at least a kind of standard conversion currency. If Au has already established that we can link currencies to the table of elements, then why not to C? Would it do more to ground money in a marking fabrication of total debt that is more relevant to economies defined by the paradoxes of Anthropocenic growth?
The Stack to Come
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