A Year in Revenue Catalog

AMZN 354.53 +13.71% BIIB 389.16 +10.17% NBR 11.51 +8.48% CAM 44.78 +6.04% DNR 6.90 +5.83% PCARPAC 60.11 -6.15% DAL 47.31 -5.78% PHM 20.59 -5.64% LEG 42.63 -5.41% CB 97.90 -4.51% Nikkei 225 Japan 17,674.39 +0.39% A YEAR IN REVENUE Hang Seng Hong Kong 24,507.05 -0.36% FTSE 100 England 6,749.40 -0.90% FELIX KALMENSON DAX Germany 10,694.32 -0.41% VFIAX $143.0B +0.96% VTSMX $118.0B +0.95% VTSAX $117.5B +0.95% VINIX $102.1B +0.96% VITSX $96.7B +0.95% SPY SPDR S&P 500 ETF 199.45 -1.26% IVV 200.87 -1.27% EFA 61.22

Special Thanks to Vanessa Rieger, Rouzbeh Akhbari, Kathryn Frances Warner, Sarah Anne Friend, and Karen Frostitution for their valuable contributions.

an Ontario government agencyun organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

A YEAR IN REVENUE

Felix Kalmenson is Toronto-based artist, with a personal practice in installation, video, photography, and performance. Kalmenson has exhibited in solo and group shows in galleries and artist-run centres in Canada and internationally with recent exhibitions including Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (Aomori, Japan), ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics (Berlin), Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai), The Elizabeth Foundation (New York), Le Cube (Rabat), La Fabrique Culturelle des Anciens Abattoirs (Casablanca), Centro Negra (Blanca, Spain) The New Gallery (Calgary), and Kungliga Konsthögskolan (Stockholm). Kalmenson has participated in several international residency and fellowships programs most recently at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre in Aomori, Japan. Kalmenson completed a Bachelors of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Toronto in 2011. He is represented in Canada by Pari Nadimi Gallery.

felixkalmenson.comparinadimigallery.com

Catalogue designed with help from Elliot Vredenburg.

A Year in Revenue proposes an archeology of the formal remnants of late 20th century financial structures and investigates the successive stages of dematerialization born of the late capitalist optimization paradigm. These dematerializations have consequently restructured the built environment and occupational frameworks of finance, radically altering the appearance of the stock market floor; algorithms have replaced floor traders, the stock market floor has been restructured to accommodate computational power, and whole buildings and infrastructural systems have been retrofitted to optimize the flow of data and capital. A Year in Revenue adopts an archaeological strategy, investigating and cataloging the remnants of those systems that were subsequently rendered obsolete by this phenomenon. The show is composed of a series of installation works, employing strategies of critical reconstruction that examine these physical and conceptual structures in a museological setting presenting a troubling narrative of capitalistic optimization and dematerialization.

The artist acknowledges the generous support of:

Felix KalmensonFebruary 5 - March 28, 2015

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Under the cover of night on December 15, 1989, Italian-American sculptor Arturo Di Modica and his team of artist’s assistants sat in the cab of a truck, en route to Lower Manhattan. One world-famous wall had fallen only months before in Berlin, and Di Modica’s goal was to supply 3.5 tons of bronze reinforcements for another Wall right there in Manhattan. By jingoistically demonstrating the “strength and power of the American people,”1 he wanted to ensure it too didn’t collapse, as it had sixty-three million, seventy-two thousand seconds ago in 1987. Without permission, pretense, or precedent, Di Modica unloaded his Charging Bull onto Wall Street, directly in front of the New

York Stock Exchange. While now universally recognized as the symbol of the virility of American finance, this $360,000 piece of capitalist fan-art initially went unappreciated by those that ran the exchange—the Bull was seized by police and carted away on a flatbed truck to an impound lot the morning after, before public outcry led to it being installed in its permanent location in Bowling Green Park at the base of the Financial District.

Seven hundred and eighty-eight million, four hundred thousand seconds later, after being surrounded by barricades during a period in which a bear would have been a more appropriate symbol for the economy, the bull is uncaged once more. Its brazen beginnings as an act of guerrilla art still seem incongruous to the

An essay for the exhibitioncatalogue, by Elliot VredenburgAMZN 354.53 +13.71% BIIB 389.16 +10.17%

NBR 11.51 +8.48% CAM 44.78 +6.04% DNR 6.90 +5.83% PCARPAC 60.11 -6.15% DAL 47.31 -5.78% PHM 20.59 -5.64% LEG 42.63 -5.41% CB 97.90 -4.51% Nikkei 225 Japan 17,674.39 +0.39% Hang Seng Hong Kong 24,507.05 -0.36% FTSE 100 England 6,749.40 -0.90% DAX Germany 10,694.32 -0.41% VFIAX $143.0B +0.96% VTSMX $118.0B +0.95% VT-SAX $117.5B +0.95% VINIX $102.1B +0.96% VITSX $96.7B +0.95% SPY SPDR S&P 500 ETF 199.45 -1.26% IVV 200.87 -1.27% EFA 61.22

motivations behind the piece (although flagrantly and regularly breaking the law is indeed an integral part of finance capital), but it is only now, with the Bull under constant surveillance; viewable from anywhere, at any time—on a tablet in the back room of a gallery in Toronto, for example—that it truly fulfills its conceptual potential. Its materiality dissolved, the Bull actively corresponds to the current state of the market that it originally sought to represent. In 2004, Di Modica announced that the sculpture was for sale, provided the buyer does not remove it from its current location—it is only a price tag, without an obtainable object attached. Not only does its perpetual for-sale status contribute to its complete dematerialization—the insane material weight of the Bull is further made immaterial by its projection across an inconceivable number of networks and protocols. It is one of the most photographed monuments in a city of most-photographed monuments, and its financial value as an artwork defies the hands of thousands of tourists who fondle it every day.

Di Modica could have never anticipated a 24/7 livestream of the sculpture—the distance from which we may now view it was unfathomable at the time. He built it for people to touch and hold. Likewise, the environments that the stock market occupies were specifically built and optimized for human interaction: The floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)—the trading floor this exhibition replicates and dissects aspects of—was specifically engineered for open outcry, the mode of communication that was once the primary mode of trading stocks. Now, more than 80 percent of the total volume of trades at the CME occur through Globex, an electronic trading system. The daily frenzy of traders signalling frantically, yelling at the top of their lungs, has been outsourced to machines moving at speeds beyond our capacity to perceive them. Money begets money without any human intervention; language, once an integral mode of deciphering and interpreting our environment, has been replaced by numbers. The micro- and nanoseconds that the stock market now operates at are only perceptible to anthropogenic

artificial intelligence—algorithms labeled with cryptic monikers like Ambush, Nighthawk, Raider, Dagger, or Guerrilla—unleashed by proletarianized programmers deep in the bowels of Goldman Sachs’ Manhattan headquarters. Even the CEOs of Wall Street’s largest banks cannot imagine the impossible temporality that these machines operate at—but not being able to imagine that scale does not make it unfeasible to spend billions to gain fractions of milliseconds in trading speed. Numeric logic has superseded human imagination.Unlike the machine, we like to think that our bodies are comparatively reliable tools—autonomous; resistant to ideological tyranny. We are free to move and communicate as inefficiently as we wish. We may prefer to walk slowly, or refuse to applaud at a celebration. But Sunrise to Sunset demonstrates otherwise, as does attempting to walk slowly down a crowded sidewalk during rush hour. The numeric logic of capital directs us toward optimizing our capacity for “participation in digital milieus and speeds”2—paradoxically pressuring us to imitate the inanimate as we strive to achieve the inhuman speed and decisiveness of automation. Despite this impetus to extend our physical abilities beyond their limitations by mechanical means, humans will always exist at the anthropological position between dogs and gods; the beast and the machine. Boris Groys writes,

The position of humans does not lie between the animal and the God, as was once the case, but rather between the animal and the machine. The authors of older utopias tended to affirm what is mechanical in humans in order to differentiate humans more sharply from animals, for they perceived the greatest danger

A YEAR IN REVENUE FELIX KALMENSON10

for humanity to lie in animality. By contrast, the authors of more modern anti-utopias have affirmed what is animal, passionate and instinctive in humans in order to differentiate them more sharply from machines, for they perceive a greater danger for humans in machinery than in animality.2

The messiness and inefficiencies of nature, both human and environmental, resist the rigidity of an automated control society. Our ability to imagine is what makes us human: It is what allows us to narrativize and historicize experience so that we may communicate with each other. As Nietzsche observed, “an essentially mechanical world is an essentially meaningless world.”3 Affirming this is vital to mitigating the effects of the society of control, out of control in which we now live. We must learn from the past, in order to think of the future, so that we may act in the present, lest we extirpate the now-mineable cognitive landscape just as we have exhausted the Earth’s.

With the rise of the Industrial Revolution of the 20th century, we entered the era of the Anthropocene. The crux of the Anthropocene is not that we humans are the centre of it—capital is—but that we may treat the Earth as if we are. But as the spectre of the post-Anthropocene emerges, so does the paradoxicality of our situation: Although we started using technology to shield ourselves from Nature—to protect ourselves from the death, catastrophe, and entropy that Nature entails—we are now using it to shield ourselves from the effects of that very technology. In desperately seeking ways to slow or mitigate the onset of global warming, “resistance” to climate change has quickly shifted toward “adaptation.” In the process of this adaptation, humans themselves have become repositories of extractable resources—personal data is

the “new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.”4 We are at the mercy of a nature that we have created.

The blurring of the boundary between the human and technological is evident in much of the built world—a concrete park bench is a direct result of global-scale resource extraction—but its dominance is especially evident in mobile applications that are built to decipher the black box that is today’s financial market for interfaces designed specifically for human interaction. They paradoxically decipher an anthropogenic phenomenon that has grown in automated complexity to the degree that we are no longer able to understand or even see it happening, and contorts it into an interface. The Forex Blackbox app, displayed on an Android phone, paradoxically deciphers an anthropogenic phenomenon that has grown in automated complexity to the degree that we are no longer able to understand or even see it happening, and contorts it into an interface—reducing the infinite chaos of global finance into a single bevelled-and-embossed “trade” button. Our memory and comprehension has been externalized to the digital, accelerating us one step further away from owning the technological means of production.

We are relentlessly marching towards the post-Anthropocene, at which point humans become ultimately irrelevant to capitalism’s functioning. This shift is materially evident in the ongoing evolution and dispersion of the stock markets at the very core of capital. Karl Marx was the first to observe that the primary requirement of capitalism is the dissolution of its relation to the earth. “Capital by its very nature drives beyond every spatial barrier,” he wrote, making “the annihilation of space by time” not only achievable, but inevitable.5 Prior to electronic trading’s takeover of the stock market, traders converged in centralized locations. Until the the hyper-industrial era of the late 1990s took hold, you could almost count the number of major North American stock exchanges on one hand—the NSX, the NYSE, NASDAQ (and its Boston and Philadelphia iterations), the CHX, and the TSX


in Toronto and MX in Montreal. Eight, on this continent. Now these spaces have been hollowed out into façades of the processes they were built to house. Since the turn of the millenium, the number of stock exchanges in North America has skyrocketed to over twenty. Many of the newer exchanges do not even have trading floors. The real action takes place elsewhere—for Wall Street, in massive server farms in the tiny New Jersey townships of Mahwah, Secaucus, and Weehawken; and for the CME, in a huge warehouse in sleepy Aurora, Illinois.

Microprocessors are not built with the visual grandeur of yesterday’s financial institutions in mind. Instead, they are exclusively designed for functional purposes, and their technical aesthetic expresses that. The data centers of global finance are similarly banal—a look inside will not yield much more than sights of rows upon rows of server stacks and water-cooled pipes filled with cable runs hanging over top of polished concrete floors. Many of these massive server farms employ less than 200 people—there aren’t even any humans for scale in the stock photographs of these massive warehouses. In an image of one of Google’s data centers, a lone multi-colored bicycle sits in the middle of an immaculately clean space, cluttered with a superabundance of similarly colored pipes snaking through and around the walls. With the gargantuan scale of these structures comes the sole concerns of energy efficiency and cost effectiveness, and the main requirements of these structures are equally few: thick masonry walls, and few or no openings to any sources of heat outside them. These unassuming suburban server farms could not be further from the hallowed financial institutions that symbolize global capital—but they are the new heart of Wall Street.Now that the market has become pure abstraction, its speed constrained only by available energy resources, the formerly chaotic and paper-strewn trading floors are well on their way to resembling Kalmenson’s reconstruction of them. It is now impossible to imagine what the

market at heart of capitalism looks like, never mind how it actually works. In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis explains:

For a market expert truly to get inside the New York Stock Exchange, he’d need to climb inside a tall black stack of computer servers locked inside a cage locked inside a fortress guarded by a small army of heavily armed men and touchy German shepherds in Mahwah, New Jersey. If he wanted an overview of the entire stock market—or even the trading in a single company like Intel—he’d need to inspect the computer printouts from twelve other public exchanges scattered across northern New Jersey, plus records of the private dealings that occurred inside the growing number of dark pools. If he tried to do this, he’d soon learn that there actually was no computer printout. At least no reliable one. No mental picture existed of the new financial market. There was only this yellowing photograph of a market now dead that served as a stand-in for the living.6

This exhibition is an expression of the yellowing photograph Lewis describes: A historical reconstruction of something that isn’t yet historical; a fossil of the present from and for the future. Buildings are abandoned when they become too slow and inefficient for the purposes they are used for—ruins of a past paradigm. Brian Dillon describes the ruin as embodying a set of historical and temporal paradoxes, reminiscent of the algorithms that have superseded humans in running the globalized economy.7 Simultaneously, the ruin is a fragment of the past; a portal backwards in time, as well as a reference point for moving forward, prompting us to imagine a time in which our present is


reduced to the ruin that sits before us. The actors have left the stage long ago, yet the audience is still applauding.The essential elements of the formerly frenzied trading floor replicated by Kalmenson are modeled on the layout of an amphitheatre. Historically, the theatre has been an important place for collective experience—Hannah Arendt writes that “the theater is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art.”8 Indeed, politics is also a stage on which dramas are played out—and all technologies involve scripts. The forms that these dramas take—social, biological, juridical, financial, military, and so on—are endless. Dramas are a specific type of fiction, predicated by the fact that they are collaboratively performed and collectively received in public. Accordingly, the word drama itself, from the Classical Greek δρᾶμα, means action. As Jacques Rancière says, on the political stage, actors are “surrounded by the performance, drawn into the circle of action.”9 At a point where the richest one percent of the world’s population owns more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth, being able to stage these dramas to re-frame and re-imagine even a modest change in wealth distribution is crucial. But the dramas that occur in the realm of finance are no longer either performed or received by humans—they are invisible, technological dramas performed on temporal and spatial scales imperceptible to human actors. Another world may be possible, but its very possibility has been erased from human imagination.

By anatomizing this reality, Kalmenson projects another world that is “recognized as a reality which is suppressed and distorted” in our current one, encouraging the viewer to become a voyeur of our present from the perspective of the future, allowing us to perceive

“the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which [defies] the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions.”10

When the market at the centre of the capitalist economy is run by inhuman algorithms that are premised on predicting the future, it is only by projecting further—“on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else’s future”11—that we may construct a parallel world in which the possibility exists of contesting the stranglehold market logic has over our lived reality.

After all, even the word “impossibility” has possibility embedded into it.

1 McFadden, Robert D. “SoHo Gift to Wall St.: A 3 1/2-Ton Bronze Bull.” The New York Times. December 15, 1989. Accessed January 25, 2015.

2 Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, 100. London: Verso, 2014.

2 Groys, Boris. “Communism, From Outside Looking In.” In The Communist Postscript, 78. London: Verso, 2009.

3 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

4 Kuneva, Meglena. “Introduction.” In Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class, 5. World Economic Forum, 2012.

5 Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 125. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 1993.

6 Lewis, Michael. “Brad’s Problem.” In Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, 53. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

7 Dillon, Brian. “Introduction: A Short History of Decay.” In Ruins. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. 10-19.

8 Arendt, Hannah. “Action.” In The Human Condition, 188. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

9 Rancière, Jacques. “The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes,” In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 119. London & New York: Continuum, 2010.

10 Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, 7. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

11 Stross, Charles. “Lobsters.” In Accelerando, 5. New York: Penguin, 2005.



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A YEAR IN REVENUE

“The New York Stock Exchange’s (NYSE) Opening and Closing Bells mark the be-ginning and the end of each trading day. The ‘opening bell’ is rung at 9:30 AM to mark the start of the day’s trading session and at 4 PM the ‘closing bell’ is rung and trading for the day stops. There are bells located in each of the four main sections of the NYSE that all ring at the same time once a button is pressed. There are three buttons that control the bells, located on the control panel behind the podium which overlooks the trading floor. The main bell, which is rung at the beginning and end of the trading day, is controlled by a green button. The second button, colored or-ange, activates a single-stroke bell that is

used to signal a moment of silence. A third, red button controls a backup bell that is used in case the main bell fails to ring.” 1

“The original signal was a gavel (which is still in use today along with the bell), but during the late 1800s, the NYSE decided to switch the gavel for a gong. After the NYSE changed to its present location at 18 Broad Street in 1903, the gong was switched to the bell. The bell is rung by a diverse cast of characters, ranging from heads of state, to corporation wishing to celebrate anniversaries or companies announcing a new listing on the exchange. The bell wasn’t always considered an important act and it wasn’t until 1995 that the NYSE began having special guests ring the bells on a regular basis. Prior to that, ringing the bell was usually the responsibility of the exchange’s

Index of Language and FormBy Felix Kalmenson

The Bell and Marking Time

AMZN 354.53 +13.71% BIIB 389.16 +10.17% NBR 11.51 +8.48% CAM 44.78 +6.04% DNR 6.90 +5.83% PCARPAC 60.11 -6.15% DAL 47.31 -5.78% PHM 20.59 -5.64% LEG 42.63 -5.41% CB 97.90 -4.51% Nikkei 225 Japan 17,674.39 +0.39% Hang Seng Hong Kong 24,507.05 -0.36% FTSE 100 England 6,749.40 -0.90% DAX Germany 10,694.32 -0.41% VFIAX $143.0B +0.96% VTSMX $118.0B +0.95% VT-SAX $117.5B +0.95% VINIX $102.1B +0.96% VITSX $96.7B +0.95% SPY SPDR S&P 500 ETF 199.45 -1.26% IVV 200.87 -1.27% EFA 61.22

floor managers.” 2 A Year in Revenue presents a compilation of the Opening and Closing bells from all 252 Trading days in 2014 from January 2nd to December 31st, there are 504 videos in total arranged in a grid of 36 on each screen, 14 screens in total.

Looking amoung the many faces in a year of trading you come across some hilarious and some disturbing adjacencies, giving you a sense of the total system over which capital functions. It is most telling that the year of 2014 was inau-

gurated by Booz Allen Hamilton, the se-curity contractor that employed Edward Snowden, perched up in the top corner of the installation, looking down and sur-veilling the whole system of network and exchange that sits beneath it. These bells serve to celebrate capital flow and accu-mulation, appearing as an audience both inaugurating and applauding the perfor-mativity of finance.


For the past few decades the classic im-age of a stock exchange has been a giant room where a group of traders stands in a pit waving their hands around frantically. What these traders and stockbrokers are engaged in is the performance of a com-plex system of language called open outcry as part of what is called floor trading. Trad-ers usually flash the signals quickly across a room to make a sale or a purchase of futures or stocks. Signals that occur with palms facing out and hands away from the body are an indication the trader wishes to sell. When traders face their palms in and hold their hands up, they are gesturing to buy. These gestures serve as an exter-

nalization of the performance or process of an er-ratic and complex world of finance. The function of these gestures and the traders that make use of them is to facilitate liquidity, to optimize the movement of a good from a buyer to a seller, they represent the zenith of human capacity to bodily move the idea of value, the representation of cap-ital and resource. They also function to highlight the way that capital reshapes the body, reducing it through a Taylorization or scientific manage-ment of optimal gestures, where each movement is accounted for in the attainment of maximum productivity. But even this complete optimiza-tion of the body could not contend with the speed of emerging communication technologies and algorithmic trading platforms in an age of high frequency trading and accelerating capital.


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Like the traders themselves the floor upon which they stood was also reconfigured by the linguistic and spatial optimization demanded of an accel-erating capitalism. In their fundamental forms one can readily see a formal lineage to the Ro-man Amphitheatre, an architectural typology that served as a public venue for gladiator combats, animal slayings and executions, a lineage that perhaps appropriately references the violence enacted by capitalistic modes of extraction, ex-ploitation and subjugation outside the theatre of finance. Like the trader, the gladiator performed value bodily, referencing the skill of wit in com-bat that would render them victorious. It was not until the banning of the gladiatorial games in the 5th century and of animal slaying in the 6th that amphitheatres fell into disrepair, and their materials were mined or recycled. The remaining theatres continued to function as sites for open meetings and in some cases religious ceremony and this offers some hope that perhaps when

the exchanges are long abandoned, those architectural elements of gathering, will be appropriated and made social.

What is fascinating in these floor sec-tions is how the necessity for facilitating a complex system of sightlines and visual languages has transfigured the amphi-theatre template. The architectural form no longer facilitates the communication of one individual to the masses but instead allows for the communication from the


masses—or rather an individual within a mass—with another individual across a room without the aid of non-bodily com-munication technologies. The result is a dizzyingly complex floor plan and possible prototype for a meeting place for some sort of radical democracy.

These ‘pits’ as they are termed have experienced periodic upgrades, includ-ing vast air circulation systems, and most recently a circulation system of cables and electronic networks that has come to supplant the visual and bodily circulation of value that was once enacted in those spaces. The floor sections have become

like the traders themselves, redundant shapes from a bygone era of bodily or human-centric forms of capitalism optimized out of relevance in an era of speed where they can now only serve as symbol.

Beginning in the 1980’s phone trading and then by the 1990’s electronic trading began to challenge the primacy of the gesture as optimal language. By the time the CEO’s of the Chicago Board of Trade began to cut into the cake celebrating the launch of Globex, the first international electronic trading platform, The London Stock Exchange had already fully converted to electronic trading. By 2014 over 80% of trades at the Chicago Board of Trade were performed through Globex, with the New York Stock Exchange also moving almost exclusively to electronic trading with only a hand-ful of high-priced stocks still traded on the floor in a hybrid auction and electronic platform3. It is a bitter irony that individuals whose sole pur-pose was to optimize the mechanisms of capital where themselves optimized out of relevancy, but it is this speed and the fundamental restructur-ing of time and space that is at the very heart of the neoliberal paradigm of optimization. It is


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an immense compression of space-time, where just-in-time manufacturing coordinates within a multimodal landscape of ports, warehouses and exchanges, where milliseconds are millions and high frequency trading dominates the finan-cial landscape. As Paul Virilio notes, “Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile. We are replacing the expanse of the world with speed” 4. This new paradigm Virilio terms the Dromosphere, the race-like quality of late moder-nity’s temporality.

It would be, however, be erroneous to suggest that dematerialization of systems of finance and exchange into electronic signals is somehow indicative of a totally dematerializing system or that the labour of value and capital is likewise dematerialized or made post-human. The pro-cess of digitization is fundamentally a process of re-materialization and re-territorialization where, “grey ecologies of server farms and for-ests of fibre […] inscribe financial archipelagoes that would game the speed of light by locating offshore sites that would optimize the move-ment of pulses between trading centers, for which the incremental value of a commodity is determined literally by its location in the Earths light cone.” 5 The reemergence of the material

is in the physical infrastructure of these networks of speed, requiring an immense web of cables to circumvent the globe to connect the post-human architectures of server farms that increasingly house the bulk of global trade.

One such centre, located in Secau-cus, New Jersey called New York Four, is a “340,000 sq foot facility which features advanced power and cooling systems, more than 57 miles of cabling, and multi-ple levels of biometric access security be-tween the lobby and the customer cages6, illuminated by energy-efficient blue phos-phorescent light. Countless metal cages contain racks of computers that perform trades for Wall Street banks, hedge funds, brokerage firms and other institutions”

7. And within just one of these cages, is an array of servers that together form the mechanized heart of one of the top four stock exchanges in the United States. New York Four receives up to 10,000 orders a second8, a frequency which makes the floor traders of the past decade seem like stone implements.

The network of cables that connect these centres are equally if not more im-pressive, spanning thousands of kilome-


ters across the world and are constantly being updated in a bid to cut milliseconds off of trade times in an age of high fre-quency trading. From 2007 to 2010 Spread Networks a Mississippi-based company employed 155 construction crews to build an 825-mile underground route from New York to Chicago, boring through largely rural, mountainous terrain to shave off 3 milliseconds off the previously fastest route9. The result is a multinodal land-scape of grey ecologies of post-human, fully automated colocation facilities. Even more impressive, Hibernia Atlantic, A New Jersey-based telecom company laid a 3,000 mile stretch of cable (310 miles shorter than the previous route) between London and New York to shave off 5.2 mil-liseconds10. In electronic trading, speed is measured by latency—the time it takes from when a trade is started to when it’s executed. The farther a signal has to travel, the higher the latency, which is why a shorter cable is a faster cable and the milliseconds of difference translates to millions in gains or loses.

What becomes apparent in these stag-gering figures is the equally staggering amount of resources required to lay these cables and manufacture the vast com-putational systems that function within these networks. These processes require whole new or expanded industries that employ labor in their functioning. Whether it is the mining of rare earth metals in-

tegral to the computational systems and the subsequent exploitation and destabilization of geopolitics necessitated by this extraction or the laboring bodies in factories assembling the thousands of kilometers of cables or the immense amount of microprocessors for com-putational technologies. This is not to mention the vast, polluting and exploitative industries that emerged for the disposal and recycling of e-waste, the material of these network sys-tems which in a fervor of acceleration makes hardware redundancy and turnover staggering. Considering all of these points it is hard to take seriously the claim of dematerialization or post-humanization in these processes; the human is merely being repositioned into sectors of labor where computation has not yet excelled or where by global inequities, bodies are still cheaper than processors.

Likewise Paul Virilio’s statement that “speed is a non-place that supplants geography” 11 seems rather utopian in consideration of how these structural shifts in the global economy have actually served to reassert the impor-tance of territory and the state. The state not only governs and regulates the extraction of resources and labor necessary for the lubrica-tion of this networked global system of capital but also negotiates the terms of the networks themselves. Because of the physicality of these networks, they have a corresponding necessity


The Continued Presence of the Material and the Territorial:

A YEAR IN REVENUE FELIX KALMENSON30 A YEAR IN REVENUEFELIX KALMENSON 31C

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for place and contrary to naïve notions of the complete open and free nature of the Internet it is a largely balkanized geography, determined and governed by the laws and ambitions of states through which these networks flow. For example one might ask why New Jersey of all places has emerged as what the CEO of New York Four termed, ‘the Heart of Wall Street’? This was largely a coincidence of the availability of low cost property and low property and corpo-rate taxes, a set of economic conditions unique to that state. Furthermore, one can point to the Google-China conflict or any recent case of

state intervention in networked geographies in times of upheaval, such as in Turkey during the Gezi Park protests, the Green Revolution in Iran and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong to name a few, to see the continued importance of the state in regulating networks and flows. But these networks do introduce a whole new set of challenges to contemporary notions of ter-ritory leading to what Benjamin H Bratton terms the delamination of geography from jurisdic-tion.12

What is at stake in this process of digitization, dematerialization and rematerialization, deter-

ritorialization and reterritorialization? Well I think the answer to this question is first I don’t know and also I will defer to others to speculate. The science fiction writer Charless Stross, in his book Accelerando imagines a future where the foundational logic of optimizing the conversion of mat-ter to value will become increasingly post-human and eventually leave earths lightcone as a self-replicating organism floating through space converting matter into processing power so as to ad infin-tium optimize flows.

Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance Minister in his 2015 article, ‘How I became an erratic Marxist’, presents what might be a glimmer of hope, a rather bleak glimmer but one nonetheless. Varoufakis asserts:

“Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human pro-ductive inputs as interchangeable as-sumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creat-ing and distributing value. For a start, a society of dehumanised automata would


But What’s at Stake?

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resemble a mechanical watch full of cogs and springs, each with its own unique function, together producing a “good”: timekeeping. Yet if that society contained nothing but other au-tomata, timekeeping would not be a “good”. It would certainly be an “output” but why a “good”? Without real humans to experience the clock’s function, there can be no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.” 13

So for Varoufakis, what he calls the indetermi-nate, recalcitrant human freedom is what allows for the generation of value, and the disappear-ance of this economic category of human free-dom would collapse the whole system.

While this is perhaps a hopeful note for the continued relevance for human society the post-human character of neoliberalism persists today, producing what Varoufakis calls a global demo-cratic deficit. For him the objective behind 19th-century liberalism was to separate the economic sphere from the political sphere and to confine politics to the latter while leaving the economic sphere to capital. Contrary to the rhetoric of numerous world leaders, NGO’s and institutions that facilitate the expansion of neoliberalism, economic ‘liberalization’ does not directly corre-late with personal freedom and democracy, and in many cases has the opposite effect bolstering regimes of resource and value extraction that reproduce a centralization and concentration of power and capital. This last passage of Varou-


1 “New York Stock Exchange.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 15 July 2015. Web. 15 July 2015. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange>

2 Ibid

3 Shell, Adam. “Technology Squeezes Out Real, Live Traders.” ABC News. ABC News Network, 12 July 2007. Web.

4 Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Semiotext(e), 2007. Print.

5 Bratton, Benjamin. “Activate New York: Benjamin H Bratton.” The Guard-ian. 13 May 2011. Web.

6 Miller, Rich. “What The ‘New Heart of Wall Street’ Looks Like | Data Cen-ter Knowledge.” Data Center Knowledge. 2 Jan. 2011. Web.

7 Bowley, Graham. “The New Speed of Money, Reshaping Markets.” The New York Times. 2011. Web.

8 Ibid

9 Philips, Matthew. “Stock Trading Is About to Get 5.2 Milliseconds Faster.” Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 29 Mar. 2012. Web.

11 Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Semiotext(e), 2007. Print.

12 Bratton, Benjamin. “Activate New York: Benjamin H Bratton.” The Guardian. 13 May 2011. Web.

13 Varoufakis, Yanis. “How I Became an Erratic Marxist.” The Guardian. 15 Feb. 2015. Web.

10 Ibid

14 Ibid

fakis is telling of not only of this fallacy of liberalization but also of the reinscription of territory and state power in the neolib-eral contemporary, as a regulator of re-sources and labour.

“Take a look at South Africa today, more than two decades after Nelson Man-dela was freed and the political sphere, at long last, embraced the whole population. The ANC’s predicament was that, in order to be allowed to dominate the political sphere, it had to give up power over the economic one. And if you think otherwise, I suggest that you talk to the dozens of min-ers gunned down by armed guards paid by their employers after they dared demand a wage rise.” 14

Chicago Board of Trade: Launch of CME Globex, the first global electronic futures trading platform, 1992

A Year in Revenue Catalog

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