c) that citizen
Dark pools. Dark pools of money, of financial activities. Unregulated and unreported. Estimated to be three times larger than the officially reported economy. Exchanges not advertised or explained to outsiders. Exchanges opaque even to those making them.
Go into one and see what’s being offered in there for less than in the regular exchanges. Buy a lot of it and hope it’s what it was supposed to be, take it out and sell it at the list price. A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. Trades happen that fast. The offer on your screen is not in the actual present but represents some moment of the past. Or, if you want to say it’s in the present, there are high-frequency algorithms that are working in your actionable future, in that they can act before you can. They’re across a technological international date line, working in the next present, and when you offer to buy something they can buy it first and sell it to you for more. High-frequency trading algorithms can react to a quote faster than the public actually sees it offered at all. Any trade in the dark pools is getting shaved by a high-frequency interloper. It’s a stealth tax imposed on the exchanges by high-frequency trading, by the cloud itself. A rent.
Liquidity vaporized. Liquidity gone through the phase change that makes it a gas. Liquidity become gaseous, become telepathy. Liquidity gone metaphysical.
So because of this situation, much of the movement of capital therefore now happens out of sight, unregulated, in a world of its own. Two thirds of all finance, but this is an estimate; it could be more. Trillions of dollars a day. Possibly a quadrillion dollars a day, meaning a thousand trillion dollars. And some people, when they want to, can pull some of this vaporized money out of the dark pools and reliquefy it, then solidify it by buying things in the real economy. In the real world.
This being the case, if you think you know how the world works, think again. You are deceived. You don’t know; you can’t see it, and the whole story has never been told to you. Sorry. Just the way it is.
But if you then think furthermore that the bankers and financiers of this world know more than you do—wrong again. No one knows this system. It grew in the dark, it’s a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No single individual can know any one of these megastructures, much less the mega-megastructure that is the global system entire, the system of all systems. The bankers—when they’re young they’re traders. They grab a tiger by the tail and ride it wherever it goes, proclaiming that they are piloting a hydrofoil. Expert overconfidence. As they age out, a good percentage of them have made their pile, feel in their guts (literally) how burned out they are, and go away and do something else. Finance is not a lifelong vocation. Some small percentage of financiers turn into monster sages and are accounted wise men. But even they are not. The people hacking around in the jungle aren’t in a good position to see the terrain. And they’re not great thinkers anyway. HFM, the anonymous hedge fund manager who spilled Diary of a Very Bad Year, was a fluke, an intellectual working in a trade. When he understood, he left. Because there are very few ideas uptown. And even the great thinkers can’t learn it all; they are ignorant too, they bail on the details of the emergent situation, unknowable in any case, and after that they write or talk impressionistically. They are overimpressed by Nietszche, a very great philosopher but an erratic writer, veering between brilliance and nonsense sentence by sentence, giving cover for similar belletristic claptrap ever since. His imitators at their best end up sounding like Rimbaud, who quit writing at age nineteen. And no matter the pseudo-profundities of one’s prose style, it’s a system that can’t be known. It’s too big, too dark, too complex. You are lost in a prison of your own devise, in the labyrinth, submerged deeply in the dark pools—speaking of belletristic claptrap.
There are other dark pools in New York Bay, however. They lie under the eelgrass at the mouths of the city’s creeks, deeper than any algorithm can plumb. Because life is more than algorithmic, it’s a snarl of green fuses, an efflorescence of vitalisms. Nothing we devise is anything like as complex as the bay’s ecosystem. On the floors of the canals, the old sewer holes spew life from below. Up and down life floats, in and out with the tides. Salamanders and frogs and turtles proliferate among the fishes and eels, burrow in the mulm. Above them birds flock and nest in the concrete cliffs of the city, beneficiaries of the setback laws for skyscrapers that were in force between 1916 and 1985. Right whales swim into the upper bay to birth their babies. Minke whales, finbacks, humpbacks. Wolves and foxes skulk in the forests of the outer boroughs. Coyotes walk across the uptown plazas at 3 a.m., lords of the cosmos. They prey on the deer, always numerous everywhere, and avoid the skunks and porcupines, who stroll around scarcely molested by anyone. Bobcats and pumas hide like the wild cats they are, and the feral ex-domestic cats are infinite in number. The Canada lynx? I call it the Manhattan lynx. It feasts on New England cottontails, on snowshoe hares, muskrats and water rats. At the center of the estuarine network swims the mayor of the municipality, the beaver, busily building wetlands. Beavers are the real real estate developers. River otters, mink, fishers, weasels, raccoons: all these citizens inhabit the world the beavers made from their version of lumber. Around them swim harbor seals, harbor porpoises. A sperm whale sails through the Narrows like an ocean liner. Squirrels and bats. The American black bear.
They have all come back like the tide, like poetry—in fact, please take over, O ghost of glorious Walt:
Because life is robust,
Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,
Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,
So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,
O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,
Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,
Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.
Will Irwin: To the European these colossi seem either banal, meaningless, the sinister proof of a material civilization, or a startling new achievement in art. And I have often wondered whether it does not all depend upon the first glimpse; whether at the moment when he stampedes to the rail they appear as a jumble, like boxes piled on boxes, or fall into one of their super-compositions.
Pedestrian killed by a cornice falling off a building.
d) Inspector Gen
Inspector Gen got a call from Vlade at around four that afternoon.
“Hey, we found those guys who were snatched from the farm.”
“Did you! Where were they?”
“Up in the Bronx. I was up there doing some salvage work when we saw a hot spot down in the Cypress subway station. So I went back with some of my old city sub friends and dived it, and got an SOS from people inside a container down there, and a police boat cracked it and pulled them out.”
“Really!” Gen said. “Where are they now?”
“At the police dock station at One Two Three. Can you meet them there?”