--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "The Great Accelerator" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: null library_document_id: "bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580" source_sha256: "768e3e2e1bbc1a89b6dc82d24a0b7a084f273b697cdce779e7598c45ce5068c2" pdf_physical_page_count: 105 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 80 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580?start=80&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580.md?start=80&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580.md?start=70&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580.md?start=90&limit=10" --- # The Great Accelerator > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=80 | PRINTED_PAGE=74 2009 , we learned that 33% of salaried employees are now scared at work. In thi s statistical sto cktake of psychological and social risks, we also learned that for 2 2 . 6% of staf it is the qu antity of work that is too often excessive, whereas for 30% i t is the qual i ty i tsel f o f the work that is at issue, since the pressure of time no longer gives people enough time to fi nish what they' re doing. 1 O nce upon a time, people were familiar in advance with the fear of forced labou r in penal colon ies to which convicts,forrats, were deported. B ut what dominates in the middle of these liberal ti mes is fear of chosen work - no matter what the nature of the job or the task at hand. The other characteristic o f this enquiry shows that 42% of salaried employees feel, as unbearable stress, the obl igati o n to hide thei r emotions wh ile they' re at work, an obligation written i nto their contract. We see, then, that this psychopathological approach to jobs, al ready th reate ned on all sides with being moved of-sho re or with the productivi ty gains of all-out automation, has i ncapacitating and ab usive dimensions that reinforce each other THE GREAT ACCELERATOR I Sud- Ours/ , Ocrobcr 2009. 74 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=81 | PRINTED_PAGE=75 - mutually - to the point where p rogress, which, to Edgar Allan Poe, in the n ineteenth century, was j ust the heresy of decrep itude , has suddenly, in the twenty-first centu ry, tu rned into the frenzy of stupefaction. Th anks to the rise o f tech nology and its tools, science has i n fact become not only functional b u t also , above all , fu nctional i st . . . since fun ctio n now generates the component! Today the most insigni ficant o f technological pseudo-innovations very qu ickly becomes a 'hitech industry', and then a system for creating panic, as we 've seen with the WEB and its allencompassi ng netwo rk, without any precautions b e i ng taken i n the i r use . Th i s will soon l ead to the great b reakdown of the I nternet, the explosio n of the information bomb, which will p robably do irreparable damage to the digital economy. 1 Apropos, note the current craze fo r nanotechnologies that nothing will now stop, any more than the b io-engineering of G M O s was stopped yesterday, or gee-engineering of the cl imate will be stopped tomorrow, or not long after. THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 1 Paul Virilio, 7he Information Bom b. tr. Chris Tu rner. London: Verso, 2005. 75 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=82 | PRINTED_PAGE=76 The latest confirmation of this is the setting up, in Beijing, of a Bureau of Meteorological Modifications, responsible for the national climate of China. As it happens, the bureau recently weathered an avalanche of criticism for having induced unseasonal snowfalls. Those snowfalls grounded hundreds of planes and caused a number of road accidents for Beij ing residen ts caught out by a phenomenon created by the mass dispersion of chemical products in clouds in a bid to relieve the persisten t dro ugh t in the no rth of the country. 1 But the fatal convergence, no ted in the pages above, of con trol and abuse in the workplace, can also be explained by the fact that in Chi na, as elsewhere, it is the diverse forms of the TOTALITARIAN experience that are in turn converging. The globalization of the Single Market and the instantaneity of interactive telecommunications are inducing a fusion/confusion of extremisms and the deliberate hybridization of this 'tyranny ofreal time', this COSMOTHEISM, behind a rurbocapitalism that reproduces the excesses of Soviet COSMISM in the days j ust before the USS R imploded - the big bang of historical material ism ending in the very cybernetic accident of wh ich we are now victi ms. The SYSTEM I C C RAS H of Wall Street illustrates pe rfectly not only the Gargantuan nature of a 'science without a conscien ce' wh ich is nothi ng more than the ' ruin of the so ul ' . Ab ove all , it exposes the Gargantuan appetite of an economic science that is now without confidence, being nothing more than the ' ruin o f the S ingle M arket', the very possibility of tu rboprofit thro ugh highfrequency trading suddenly co ming to an end, or close to it, for one very simple reason : confidence is one thi ng that can never be instant! THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 1 Sud- Ouest, October 2009. 76 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=83 | PRINTED_PAGE=77 Th at is the reason for this unsayable fear of stock market volatility in the face of the B IG CRUNCH o f credit - in other words, of investors' belief and speculative faith when confronted by the extreme u ncertain ty o f the moment . I n M ay 2010, that fear lead to what traders themselves call ' the fear i ndex' , the M a rket Volatil i ty I ndex (M VI ) . Th is barometer o f a nt i cipated market volatility was co nceived as early as 1 9 9 3 , while t h e C RAS H of 1 9 O ctober 1 9 87 was still fresh in everyone's mind. This is where the most crucial question comes in: has INSTANTAN EITY become, for the materialists of the Single M arket, what ETERN ITY o n ce was fo r the sp i ritual ists? THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 77 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=84 | PRINTED_PAGE=78 With the development of money in the M iddle Ages, the time also came for serious debate about the legitimacy o f credit and of i nterest-beari ng loans. Usury was prohibi ted for Christians and consi dered a morral sin, an act of theft, theft of time, which b elongs o nly to G o d , si nce ' interest charges the time that has elapsed between the loan and its re i m b u rsement' . 1 Today we can easily imagine how this issue might once again call into question the relativi ty of time, o f spacetime and its continuum , which is at the centre of the debates on the future of tomorrow's world economy. I f this were indeed the case, the futu rism of the instant would make its entry both in THEOLOGY and in the ETHOLOGY of the stock exchange of values, with the poli tical econom ics of speed merging, from then on, with that of the wealth of nations. M eanwh ile, an event way o utsi de the norm occurred at p recisely 2 . 2 5 pm on 6 May 2010. This was a F LAS H C RAS H , in which the D ow Jones plum meted a thousand poi nts in just a few minutes. For the American Srock Exchange watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Comm ission (S EC) , which disco u nted all proof of human error, computer hacking or cybernetic terro rist attack, this catastro p h i c event urgently imposed the p utti ng in place of harmonized and above all synchron ized circuit-b reakers on a scale covering the ent i re market. Th is was done, as early as n J une, for the electronic trading platforms of Wall S t reet . THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 1 J acques Le G o fl". L e Moym Age et l "argmt. Paris: Perrin, 2010. 78 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=85 | PRINTED_PAGE=79 So, after the MONEY WALL produced by the accumulation of cap ital , M ary Schapiro , the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commissi on in New York, put up another kind of 'dividing wall ' , a TIM E BARRI ER against cybernetic acceleration o f felonies (insider trading in the fi nance secto r o r terrorist attacks by hackers . . . ) . B ut th at move begs a supremely important strategic question, one that is undecidable: 'When you are incapable of detecting the origi n o f a stock exchange crash and, so , find i t impossible to know if it's a CYB ER ATTAC K of some reach by o ne state against another, or whether it's a SYSTEM IC C RAS H that's purely accidental, what do you do?' THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 79 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=86 | PRINTED_PAGE=8o 'We need to forget about time at the most fundamental level . We don't need that particular parameter to describe the wo rld that surrounds us. The theo retical framework I propose allows us to do with o u t it: this is the fram ework of loop quantum gravity. ' So speaks the physicist Carlo Rovell i , an adept, l ike so many others, at the confusion of the general relativity of the physics of the infinitely big and the quantum mechanics of the i n finitely smal l . After the End of History was fo recast last century, the End of Time is now b ei ng forecast, certainly i n theo retical physics, b u t also i n relation to political economics. In the end, what is most reveal ing i n this general disarray is perhaps what Benoit Mandelb rot claimed in 2004, when he said that the conventional mathematical models employed by the stock market 'are not only wrong; they are dangerously wro ng. ' 1 THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 1 Benoit M anddbrot, The (Mis)Behaviour of Mm·kets. New York: Basic Books, 2004, p . 276 . 8o ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=87 | PRINTED_PAGE=8 1 F aced wi th the repetition of a crash that will soon be systemic, we have no choice but to ask ou rselves about the powerlessness of savvy econom ists to interp ret the alarm bells that have been ri ngi ng steadily for a quarter of a century and, in particul ar, since the 1 9 87 crash . T rying to describe the catastrophic swings observed over such a long period thro ughout the Single M arket, M andelb rot i ntroduced m ultifractal time and thus ushered the history of finance into a dynam ic world, where stock market tradi ng time no longer has anything in common with physical t i m e , since, in th is new model, ' t radi ng time speeds up the clock in periods of high volatil i ty , and sl ows i t down in periods o f stab i l i ty ' , 1 the space o f fractal geometry combi ning here with the ' multifractal ' chronometry of the fourth dimension . With o u r professo r emeritus, the n , i t is no l onger j ust ' critical space' that is heralded, b u t the efraction o f H i story , the ' critical sp acetime' of times to come! With Benoit M andelbrot, then, property bubbles suddenly turn tnto FINANCIAL THE GREAT ACCELERATOR I Ibid. , P · 2 2 . 8 1 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=88 | PRINTED_PAGE=82 MAN DELB U B B LES , not just within the expanse o f real estate, but also within time, the long durations of the 'world eco nomy' so dear to Fernand B raude! . Strangely, we note yet again that the 'loop' and the 'sphere' shoot to the fore, as though the circular time o f d ays gone by was reasserting i ts rights over the linear time of a Progress o nce continuous . . . After Karl Popper's famous ' feedback loops' , Carlo Rovelli, as we've j ust seen, now i nt roduces his 'loop quantum gravity'. C i rcular t i m e yeste rday , l i n ear time o f p rogress right now, and tomorrow, or soon after no doubt, thanks to M andelbrot, globalitarian time . . . H ere TIM E - from the Latin temp us, which refe rred to a ' fraction of d u ration ' as d isti nct from aevum, which was used o f continuity and of an 'era' - really is the ACCI D ENT TO EN D ALL ACC I D ENTS . This is because ' m ultifractal ' efraction of the durations involved in stock exchange operations tallies with H e isenberg' s u ncertainty principle, only to be applied to the modellers, the financial planners in a finance industry that has gone algorithmic, the famous credit crunch of the market here signalling the end of an era, the B IG CRUNCH of turb ocap italism ! THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 82 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=89 | PRINTED_PAGE=83 As an academic recently poi nted out: 'We must finally have the humility to say that we can't model uncertai nty accu rately.' And to add, as far as I ' m co ncerned, that, despite the propaganda of Progress, confidence never will be automatic! B ut let's get back to Karl Popper and his indeterminism . According to Popper, and his ' feedback loops' , events influence our opinions every bit as much as these same opini ons influence events. But the acceleration of the real , of real t i m e , i s t u rni ng our si tuati on o n i t s head, since, from now on, it is accidents and not j u st events anymo re that influence our deep feelings. And th is has reached the point where the co mmunity of opinion of our mutual interests is now taken over by the ' community of emotion' of the present instant, with emotional synchronization subsequently taking over from the standardizatio n o f p u b l i c o p i n i o n that was, all the sam e , at the root of represe ntative democracy. And note how, wi th M andelb rot, Karl Popper's 'feedback loop' j ust keeps on shrinking, l ike some peau de chagrin, with the accruing ri sks that this implies fo r the su rvival of o u r old political parties, now l iterally overtaken at speed, m uch like econom ic investors. The systemic crash under way since 2007 afects the pol itical top b rass of the Republic every b i t as much as those of the big banks in a market that's interconnected thanks to twenty-first cent u ry program trading, with the high-frequency electro nic platfo rms of the flash trading that was responsible for the CYBERCRAS H of 6 M ay 2010 functioning outside human time, thanks to the time machine of Stock Exchange computers. THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 83 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580.md?start=90&limit=10)