Markets and Machines: Work in the Technological Sensoryscapes of Finance

Abstract

n the hit 1983 film Trading Places, the august banking brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke bet one dollar on the answer to the question of what matters more, environment or genetics, nature or nurture. The pair wager on the fortunes of Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Akroyd), a pedigreed white com- modities trader from whom they strip job, family, and reputation, and Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy), an African hustler and con artist, whom they set out to remake into a successful businessman. The Dukes's social experiment unravels as Winthorpe and Valentine learn about the scheme and unite to take revenge on the brothers, conspiring to bankrupt their bosses and enrich themselves. In the film's climactic scene, Valentine takes his place on a trading floor that is teeming with activity. Immersed in the sea of bodies, he begins to sell enormous numbers of orange juice futures contracts, driving down prices, bringing financial ruin to the film's comic villains, and earning Louis and himself enough money for an immediate beachside retirement. The decade after the film's release found real life financial firms engaged in far more ambitious social experiments—experiments motivated by economic concerns and fueled by technological innovations. During the 1990s, financial exchanges themselves traded places, largely abandoning the wild and boisterous pits where men like Winthorpe and Valentine made their deals face-to-face, in- stead moving to high-tech digital dealing rooms where speculators work quietly in front of computers, face-to-screen. This transformation—essential to the Americanization and globalization of financial markets—required both tech - nological and social engineering at the levels of both individuals and systems. The spread of American style or Chicago style trading systems depends on the new social dynamics facilitated by technological and architectural changes. More trenchantly, these changes illustrate the ideological power of neoliberal assumptions that are made material in the design and application of information technologies, architectural designs, and work practices within