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TRADERS (photo: Harri Homi) Note: This essay was commissioned in 2015 by VICE USA, who then neglected to publish it. Apologies to everyone who took the time to give me quotes Hedge fund traders are financial mercenaries. Like all mercenaries, they are hired by rich and powerful people. Unlike some mercenaries, however, their lives are never in danger. Rather, they settle in upmarket offices with wood-paneled boardrooms and sparkling water, getting extraordinarily wealthy by betting on anything from Apple shares to oil futures to distant coalmines operated out of Indonesia. This, though, is no normal hedge fund. Robin Hood Coop  is an activist hedge fund run by anarchic artists. And this is no ordinary office. It has no wood panelling and no sparkling water. In fact it barely has running water at all, being a graffiti-strewn ex-slaughterhouse in Milan squatted by a radical arts group called Macao . Below us in the hall is a naked woman painted blue wearing a gas mask, dancing to th...

Note: I published a shorter version of this in Nesta's magazine The Long+Short as You Are the Robots . This is a modified and extended version, published under Creative Commons A banker in 1716 had two main tools: a ledger book and a quill pen. A customer – perhaps a prominent carpenter – would enter a branch, request a withdrawal or make a deposit, and the banker would make a careful note of it within the ledger, editing the customer's previous entry to keep authoritative score of exactly what the bank promised to them. ACCOUNT LEDGER BOOK OF 17th CENTURY BANKER EDWARD BACKWELL Fast-forward to 2016 and we’ve entered into a world no longer dominated by tools, but by machines . The crucial difference between a tool and a machine is that the former relies on human energy, while and the latter relies on non-human energy channelled via a system that replicates - and accentuates - the action of a human using a tool. The carpenter is now a furniture corporation using computer-program...

Please note: Part 1 of this essay appeared in the Feb 2015 edition of Contributoria . It is published and modified here under a Creative Commons license. PART 1 (3500 Words) A 900 million microsecond primer on high-frequency trading In the time it takes you to read this sentence, a high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithm, connected to a stock exchange via “low latency” trading infrastructure, could make, perhaps, 1,000 trades. I say 'perhaps', because it really depends on how long you pause on those commas I put in the sentence. If you’re an individual with great respect for commas you might give the algorithm a chance to throw in a few hundred more orders. Let’s just clarify this. That means computers owned (or leased) by a firm somewhere can 1) suck in data from a stock exchange, 2) process it through a coded step-by-step rule system (algorithm) to make a decision about whether to trade or not, 3) send a message back to the exchange with an order for shares of ownership in a ...