I nsecurity o f territory, with the importance of islands, of ofshore ven ues and the evidently wani ng importance of, say, Switzerland, alo ng with b anki ng secrecy . . . I n security of H istory, whereby the accounting standard of the market is on the point of replacing the historical standard of the listing of stocks on the S tock Exchange . . . Th ese are all so many cl in ical symptoms of the ' futurism of the instant' and o f its i mpact on economic intell igence in the age of an ecological disaster whose scope never stops sp reading in b road daylight.
I n a recent interview published in the Sunday Times, the chairman and C EO of G oldman Sachs, Lloyd B l ankfein, declared: ' I 'm j ust a b anker doing G od ' s work . ' Clearly, th is particular G o d is no lo nger hopi ng for much from his faithfu l profit-wo rshippers, the investo rs to whom the Messiah of finance could still say, on accou nt of the ab u ndance of thei r speculative faith: 'G o, your fai th has saved yo u! '
Actually, the credit crunch, the crisis o f confidence, that has hit the stock exchanges of the S i ngle M arke t, is j ust an early-warni ng sign of a true ACC IDENT IN KNOWLEDG E that is about to strike an 'exact' science wh ich has recently turned into a tech noscie nce of i nstrument al eficiency that bears no relatio nsh ip to the knowledge we've acquired over the course of the ages. Th at technoscience's sophisticated mathematical models and software don't dissimulate all that well the systemic catastrophe of a science that has no conscience, a science that no longer even sees the warning symptoms of its own decl ine and especi ally not the lim its it has now reached in its discoveries - at once atomic, i nformatic and genetic. M ore than anyth ing else, the 'digital civil ization' so often trumpeted marks a retu rn to numerological paganism and its cults of yo re .
THE GREAT ACCELERATOR
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