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Markets Without subjects: Nasdaq aNd the
FiNaNcial iNterFace

Morgan Adamson

Abstract This article is a re-evaluation of recent discourses around financial

subjectivity and debt, popularised in the wake of the 2008 crash, from the
perspective of critical media studies. Through an examination of the history
and development of the Nasdaq market - the world’s first electronic stock
exchange which came to serve as the engine for the ‘New Economy’ and
the dot-com boom of the 1990s - this paper complicates recent theoretical
conversations around the way that financial capitalism shapes political
subjects in the neoliberal era in order to take into account the machinic
and pre-individual operations of financial markets and the computational
infrastructures that undergird them. It argues that the Nasdaq offers insight
into the unfolding of a unique socio-technical apparatus that defines
contemporary capitalism, one not adequately accounted for in either the
popular or scholarly discourse on finance written since the crash. Paying
particular attention to the role of the Nasdaq in producing the myths of the
New Economy, this paper examines how the Nasdaq model was instrumental
in an attempt to resolve the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. It argues
that the Nasdaq marks a crucial moment in the integration of financial
markets and new mechanisms of control in contemporary capitalism that
work on the dividual, always rendered in a subjugated and reactive position
to the flow of automated financial information.

Keywords Nasdaq, neoliberal capitalism, MarketSite, Wall Street,

financialisation, capitalist realism

At the dawn of the new millennium - New Year’s Eve 1999 - the Nasdaq
market celebrated its ascent to global financial dominance by unveiling
its new MarketSite in the centre of Times Square. Moving its headquarters
from Washington DC to New York, MarketSite’s opening was a performative
gesture that announced to the world, in no uncertain terms, the triumph of a
new financial paradigm that had been three decades in the making. Located
miles from the historic centre of finance capital, Wall Street and the New
York Stock Exchange, MarketSite’s 11,000 square-foot television screen (the
world’s largest at the time) became the newest eyesore in the gentrified and
‘disneyfied’ Times Square that has come to exemplify the cultural dynamics
of the ‘new’ New York City.
MarketSite is not an exchange: no trades are executed at this location, nor

Doi: 10.3898/NeWF.88.05.2016 Markets Without subjects 69

1. Giovanni Arrighi, is any of the technical infrastructure that facilitates the Nasdaq market, located
The Long Twentieth
Century: Money Power within its walls. The computers and servers through which Nasdaq pricing
and the Origins of Our information and financial transactions take place are located, unglamorously,
Times, Verso, London
1994. in Trumbull, Connecticut. MarketSite is, instead, the public ‘presence’ of
the Nasdaq, the mediatised face of the new finance, a space full of screens
2. Maurizio delivering real-time financial information, news broadcasts and the ability
Lazzarato, Signs and
Machines: Capitalism to generate content in its own television studio. Its name, which suggests a
and the Production kind of situatedness of the market within the confines of physical space, belies
of Subjectivity.
Trans. Joshua its dispersive form. In its spectacularisation of financial markets, MarketSite
David Jordan, is emblematic of a dynamics of power that separates contemporary finance
Semiotext(e), Los
Angeles 2014. from all previous eras of financial expansion that have taken place over what
Henceforth Signs Giovanni Arrighi termed the ‘long twentieth century’.1 Launched in 1971 as
and Machines. For
a discussion of the world’s first electronic stock market, the Nasdaq signals the inception of
social-technical a distinct financial framework, one that implements a new financial interface
agencements and
economic actors in that came to serve as a ‘dream machine’ for the New Economy.
the context of hedge
fund managements
Since the crisis of 2008, a vast amount of scholarly and activist literature
see: Iain Hardi and has been produced on the intersections of finance, power, and subjectivity.
Donald Mackenzie,
‘Assembling an
While wide ranging, this literature has largely been concerned with the status
economic actor: of debt and the indebted. These debates have focused on the process of
subjectification that unfolds through the
asymmetrical power relationship between
debtor and creditor, generating the moral
imperative that debts are repaid. For
figures like Maurizio Lazzarato, attention
to the processes of subjectification
through debt has coincided with a
concern for the entrepreneurial nature
of neo-liberal subjectivity.2 This emphasis
on debt and processes of subjectification
seems appropriate, given the central
role that consumer debt - in the form
of sub-prime mortgages - played in the
2007-08 crisis and the subsequent crises
of sovereign debt that have plagued the
Eurozone. Though this emphasis on the
dynamics of the 2008 crisis have been
central to unpacking forms of power
and exploitation through debt, which
are both ancient and post-modern, 3
shifting our focus to the Nasdaq market,
the New Economy it engendered, and

Figure 1: MarketSite Image 2

Nasdaq, Times Square, New York.
(Photo by author).

70 NeW ForMatioNs
the subsequent 2001 dot-com crisis, allows us to draw out a different set of the agencement
of a Hedge Fund’,
philosophical and historical implications of the cultural dimensions of finance Sociological Review.
in the neoliberal era. By examining the cultural logic of financialisation Feb 2007, Vol. 55
Issue 1, p 57-80.
through the lens of Nasdaq, this paper complicates recent theoretical
conversations about the way that financial capitalism shapes political subjects 3. David Graeber,
in order to take into account the machinic and pre-individual operations of Debt - Updated and
Expanded: The First
financial markets, the computational infrastructures that undergird them, 5,000 Years, Melville
House, Brooklyn
and the unfolding of a unique political-economic apparatus that defines 2014.
contemporary capitalism.
I examine the Nasdaq market and the manner in which its history and
development come to embody the complex dynamics of the new finance by
analysing what Michel Callon calls ‘socio-technical agencements’, agencements
indicating a kind of ‘assemblage’ or arrangement that ‘conveys the idea of a
combination of heterogeneous elements that have been carefully adjusted [to]
one another,’ that make up the material practices of contemporary finance, the
operation of financial markets are never separate from these socio-technical
agencements.4 By examining a socio-technical assemblage that is often elided 4. Michel Callon.
‘What does it
within the field of critical financial studies, an analysis of the Nasdaq model mean to say that
promotes an understanding of finance that is not captured in our shared economics is
performative?’, CSI
spatial and political imaginaries of Wall Street and the subjectivities it Working Papers
produces. Through a critical genealogy of the Nasdaq and its co-evolution with Series 005, 2006,
13, http//halshs.
financialisation as a cultural process, this paper complements and expands archives-overts.fr/
halshs-00091596
the emphasis on market performativity by Callon and others by bringing the
insights of media studies to the examination of financial markets in a manner
that supplements and perhaps complicates our assumptions about how these
markets shape culture and subjectivity within our present.
Examining both its socio-technical agencements and the ‘New Economy’
that they helped advanced, I argue that the development of the Nasdaq, as
an exemplary model for a new financial interface, allows us to tell a distinct
story about financialisation in the post-industrial era. In doing so, the paper
examines the immediate pre-history to the 2008 financial crisis through the
Nasdaq market by first analysing the ways its implementation transformed
5. See Do Economists
cultures and subjectivities of finance in the 1970s, and second, exploring Make Markets?: On
the expansion and modulation of the Nasdaq through the 1980s and 1990s, the Performativity of
Economics, Donald
whereby the new financial interface is generalised across social life in the New MacKenzie, Fabian
Economy. The Nasdaq, I argue, is an essential site for examining the shape Muniesa, and Lucia
Siu, eds, Princeton
of the neoliberal counterrevolution that has taken place over the past half University Press,
Princeton 2008
century. and Alexandros-
Andreas, et al., ed.
Financial Markets
THE FINANCIAL INTERFACE and Organizational
Technologies: System
Architectures, Practices
The call to attend to the ‘socio-technical arrangements’ of finance comes and Risks in the
out of recent interdisciplinary work focused on questions of technology Era of Deregulation,
Palgrave Macmillan,
and performativity.5 Figures such as Michel Callon and Donald Mackenzie New York 2010.

Markets Without subjects 71

 have done a great deal of work to advance the idea that financial markets
are performative, in the sense that they are constituted through their socio-
technical practices. For instance, bringing questions of technicity to the
fore in his essay ‘Opening the Black Boxes of Global Finance’, MacKenzie
advocates for the expansion of a ‘science studies’ approach to the critical
analysis of financial systems and operations, opening the ‘black boxes’ of
financial practices and technologies that remain uninterrogated by both
6. Donald the industry and its critics.6 The science studies approach that MacKenzie
MacKenzie.
‘Opening the
brings to financial technologies such as options pricing and arbitrage attune
Black Boxes of us to what we might call the micropolitical processes that organise financial
Global Finance’
in Alexandros- markets. Supplementing this trans-disciplinary science studies approach to
Andreas, et al., eds, global finance with a methodology not wholly distinct from it, I advocate for
Financial Markets
and Organizational the expansion of a critical media studies approach to financial markets because
Technologies: System apprehending the complex and interpenetrating networks of finance that
Architectures, Practices
and Risks in the mediate contemporary capitalism, such as Nasdaq’s MarketSite, demands that
Era of Deregulation,
Palgrave Macmillan,
we push beyond existing social and spatial imaginaries of financial markets
New York 2010, p92. and their effects. In coming to terms with the financial networks endemic
to our present, we must turn our attention to the ways that contemporary
finance works through a myriad of interfaces that shape the horizon of
possibility for politics.
In order to develop a concept of the financial interface, I turn to the
recent work of media theorist Alexander Galloway. In The Interface Effect,
Galloway argues that an interface is not simply a ‘thing,’ a fixed object, but
rather a technique of mediation or interaction that produces effects: effects
that give us access to ‘the dialectic between culture and history’ in the age of
7. Alexander information.7 He calls the interface a kind of ‘allegorical device’ that can be
Galloway, The
Interface Effect, Polity,
used to apprehend processes of mediation - and politics - in an era where the
Cambridge 2012, contours of global capitalism are ever shifting and our efforts to cognitively
p45. Henceforth
Interface Effect. map them are increasingly futile. For Galloway, the interface does not reflect
or reveal a deeper social reality; rather, it ‘stimulates the metaphysical
arrangement’ (p20). In other words, the interface is not mimetic; rather, it
is an animating force that disposes social reality.
A central aspect of my analysis of the Nasdaq, then, takes up Galloway’s
more ambitious theoretical deployment of the interface by looking beyond
the ways that interfaces function as ‘portals’ to financial markets. In contrast
to the supposition that the interface serves as a gateway to what lies beyond it,
Galloway insists we must take the interface itself as a critical zone of political
economic inquiry. Following this proposition, to understand the Nasdaq as
an ‘interface effect’ that allows us to chart distinctive features of ‘the dialectic
between culture and history’ in the present state of financialised global capital.
The point is not to present a comprehensive history of the Nasdaq market, but
rather to offer a thought experiment about what shifting our social imaginary
of finance from Wall Street, personified by its ‘wolves,’ to the Nasdaq might
open up. To embark on this experiment, let me start by recounting the basic

72 NeW ForMatioNs
story of its inception.
The Nasdaq, or the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated
Quotation system, was launched in 1971. As the name suggests, the Nasdaq
was not a new stock exchange, but rather a technical infrastructure that
delivered real-time pricing information for the over-the-counter (OTC)
securities market, a decentralised group of traders represented by the National
Association of Securities Dealers (NSAD). The NASD was self-regulating entity
created by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the aftermath of the
1929 crash in which OTC markets and trusts had wiped out the life savings
of millions. Hindered by lack of up-to-date, reliable quote information, the
OTC market was a historically small and disorganised area of the financial
sector, one which posed no real threat to the hegemony of the New York
Stock Exchange in the industrial era. Intended to curb the abuse and fraud
by participants in the OTC market who sought to exploit disorganisation and
profit from misinformation, the automated quotation system was envisioned,
with the aid and encouragement of regulatory bodies like the Securities
Exchange Commission, as a mechanism that would level the playing field
among securities dealers.8 It is out of this set of contingencies that Nasdaq was 8. Mark Ingebretsen,
Nasdaq: A History
born, its creators perhaps unable to foresee the potential impact of creating of the Market That
a system capable of delivering real-time financial information through a Changed the World,
Prima Lifestyles,
computerised network. To build the new automated quotation system, the Roseville 2002, p66.
NASD commissioned Bunker Rambo, a military contractor. The original Henceforth Nasdaq.

network was connected to a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe computer and ran

through telecommunication networks to 500 Bunker Rambo terminals. The
Nasdaq was, in essence, one of the first and most elaborate precursors to
the Internet (p81). Long before the PC revolution and the early days of the
dot-com boom, the Nasdaq system had prefigured the digital revolution and
networked society that was later propelled by the Nasdaq exchange itself, a
point I will turn to later.
Supplanting the age-old system of financial markets run by centralised,
hierarchical entities in which each buy or sell order had to go through
market specialists, the Nasdaq created a horizontal structure that enabled
the possibility for ever-more complicated operations in which traders could
react to instantaneous financial information. In addition to horizontalising
market activities, Nasdaq opened up a fully decentralised space of financial
activity. As Gordon Macklin, NASD’s president at the time of Nasdaq’s launch,
boasted: ‘what we did with the Nasdaq was to create a trading floor that was
3,000 miles long and 2,000 miles wide’ (p82). Mapping the trading floor
onto the geographical expanse of the US, the Nasdaq prefigures the fully
networked, financialised configuration of capital that defines contemporary
markets.
Importantly, the Nasdaq’s innovation was not merely in the scope of its
network. The Automated Quotation System’s major contribution - to both
financial markets and early computer network infrastructures - was in developing

Markets Without subjects 73

Figure 2: a non-specialised interface
Bunker Ramo for brokers to add input to
Terminal the system, ‘a somewhat
Figure 3: f r i g h t e n i n g p ro s p e c t
UNIVAC 1108 for real-time computer
(Images courtesy professionals’.9 According
of the Museum to Nat Mills, an early Nasdaq developer, through a specialised keyboard and
of American messaging system, the Nasdaq terminals provided ‘self-teaching interaction,’
Finance, NYC.) and ‘enabled users to get that they wanted from the system with next to no
training’.10 In other words, the real breakthrough of the Nasdaq, according to
its original engineers, was its capacity to provide a real-time network whose
interface could seamlessly and automatically enable market functions for its
users, embedding market interaction into a computational framework that
stimulates it in turn.
The early implementation of the Nasdaq opened a world of technical
innovations that have facilitated the merging of markets and the expansion
9. Nat Mills, of financial networks, starting in the early 1980s with terminals that allowed
‘NASDAQ - A User-
Driven, Real-Time traders to execute trades electronically. The transmission and availability of
Transaction System.’
Proceedings of the
this instantaneous financial information was essential to the proliferation of
May 16-18, 1972, increasingly complex financial products and practices, like the vast expansion
Joint Computer
Conference.
of derivatives markets, algorithmic trading, and so forth. In her work on the
(Montvale: American introduction of electronic trading systems in Chicago and London, Caitlin
Federation of Image
Processing Societies, Zaloom notes that screen-based interfaces transform trader’s interactions
Inc., 1972), 1201. with financial markets:
Accessed through
the collection of the
Computer History In the pits, the traders lived the markets in their bodies and voices. On
Museum (www.
computerhistory. the screen, traders observe the market and work on it.11
org).

I would argue, however, that innovations in financial markets like the Nasdaq
10. https://www.
computer.org/ are far more complicated than simply reorienting the relationship between
csdl/proceedings/
afips/1972/5079/
trader and market from material embodiment to detached abstraction. These
00/50791197.pdf interfaces do not simply present the market as stable entity to be observed

74 NeW ForMatioNs
and worked upon, they rather stimulate the market, as mentioned before, 11 Caitlin Zaloom,
Out of the Pits: Traders
constantly producing and forming the reality of what we might imagine to and Technology
be ‘the market.’ As Galloway puts it: from Chicago to
London, University
Of Chicago Press,
the world no longer indicates to us what it is. We indicate ourselves to it, Chicago 2010, p141.
Henceforth Out of
and in doing so the world materialises our image (Interface Effect, p10). the Pits.

It is not that the market exists in any place outside of the interface; it is itself
an effect of the interface. In other words, the interface does not simply serve
as a gateway to the market, a set of screen technologies through which traders
access the market; it is, instead, the social and political configuration that
gives form to this abstract entity we call the market. The financial interface
is the configuration of the market, the self-stimulating orientation of the
market and life itself.
Rather than positing that these electronic networks signal the
dematerialisation of money and the market, it is perhaps more useful to
conceive of them as a material form of capitalist infrastructure and explore the
consequences of new socio-technical arrangements within financial markets.
The discourses of dematerialisation and disembodiment obscure the ways
that the Nasdaq, taken here as an exemplary moment in the implementation
of the new financial interface, took a distinct material form and functioned
through a particular set of interactions between human and machine. The
‘self-training’ interaction between trader and computer imagined by the early
Nasdaq designers, was aimed at producing new modes of automated responses
that figure the trader as a ‘user’. On the precipice of the era of financialisation,
1971, the introduction of the Nasdaq both expanded the geographical
scope of financial markets and horizontalised trading procedures, while also
introducing a new interface with dramatic consequences.
This brings us to a crucial question: if we explore financialisation as a
cultural process through the lens of the Nasdaq, what new questions and
problems appear? What are the consequences of the financial interface
introduced by the Nasdaq for mapping how power and control work in and
through financial markets in our present? Beyond conversations around debt
and indebtedness, aspects of our financial systems that have been imbricated
within human power relations since antiquity, I argue that the story of
the Nasdaq centres socio-technical arrangements in a way that demands
historical specificity. The automated quotation system works less through
the production of subjectivity than through what Maurizio Lazzarato calls
‘machinic subjugation’. While Lazzarato spends the majority of The Making of
the Indebted Man looking at the issues of subjectification and the production
of the indebted person, towards the end of the book he makes an interesting
suggestion that these processes of subjectification alone cannot fully account
for the operation of financial power in the neoliberal era. Instead, he
argues, we need to analyse the function machinic subjugation in engaging

Markets Without subjects 75

 automatic, pre-individual responses. Drawing on Deleuze’s concept of control,
Lazzarato uses machinic subjugation to describe a mode of domination that
is constantly taking place at the molecular, pre-individual level in a perpetual
relay of cybernetic feedback. This mode of mechanic subjugation forms the
background for more readily apparent, molar processes of subjectification
within a financialised capitalism. Lazzarato cites the ATM machine as an
example of a machinic mode of finance capable of operating without a
subject: ‘there is no subject who acts here, but a ‘dividual,’ that functions in
an ‘enslaved’ way to the socio-technical apparatus of the banking network.
12. Maurizio The ATM machine activates the ‘dividual’ not the individual’.12 Such ongoing
Lazzarato, The
Making of Indebted processes that lie behind, beside, or beyond more conscious or subjective
Man, MIT Press, processes need to be theorised if we are to grasp forms of power and control
London 2012, p148.
set in motion by the contemporary era of financialisation. Lazzarato thus
complicates his own argument for the centrality of debt and the subjectivity
of the indebted in the neoliberal era by pointing to formations of control that,
unlike debt, are in no way trans-historical, but rather are embedded in the
ever-changing technological infrastructure of the market itself. The example
of the ATM is significant here because the ATM, introduced in the late-1960s,
is a socio-technical arrangement that reconfigures a subject’s relationship to
her bank account that bears similarities to the Nasdaq and can be seen as part
of the same computational revolution within banking systems. However, while
the ATM introduces machinic subjection into the relationship between the
individual and her bank account, the Nasdaq introduces machinic subjection
into the operation of financial markets as a whole.
Elaborating on problem of the machinic in Signs and Machines, Lazzarato
further explores the tension between subjectivity and non-subjective modes of
exploitation, which he calls ‘enslavement’. Moving away from his definition of
capitalism as primarily structured through the operation of debt, Lazzarato
claims:

Capitalism is characterised by a dual regime of subjectivity, subjugation

- centred on subjectivity and the individual subject - and enslavement,
involving a multiplicity of human and non-human subjectivities and
proto-subjectivities’ (Signs and machines, p34).

Drawing primarily on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Lazzarato

foregrounds the molecular processes in capital that cannot be contained by
theories of the subject, or even inter-subjectivity. The micropolitical arena of
enslavement, Lazzarato claims, operates through an ‘asignifying semiotics,’
a concept borrowed from Guattari, which are at the centre of mechanisms of
accumulation and control in contemporary capitalism:

What matters to capitalism is controlling the asignifying semiotic

apparatuses (economic, scientific, technical, stock-market, etc.) through

76 NeW ForMatioNs
 which it aims to depoliticise and depersonalise power relations. The
strength of asignifying semiotics lies in the fact that, on the one hand,
they are a form of ‘automatic’ evaluation and measurement and, on the
other hand, they unite and make ‘formally’ equivalent heterogeneous
spheres of asymmetrical force and power by integrating them into and
rationalising them for economic accumulation (p41).

Though never directly addressed by Lazzarato, the Nasdaq marks a crucial

moment in the integration of financial markets and new mechanisms of control
in contemporary capitalism that work on the dividual, always rendered in a
subjugated and reactive position to the flow of automated financial information.
It is worth noting that Anti-Oedipus, from which Lazzarato draws at
length in his discussion of debt, already anticipates Lazzarato’s turn to the
problem of the molecular. Throughout the book, but primarily in the final
section on schizo-analysis, Deleuze and Guattari suggest a conception of
power that exceeds the emphasis on molar processes of subjectification
that structure relations of credit and debt by pointing to the possibility of a
‘molecular unconscious’.13 In moving their emphasis from the anthropological 13. Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari,
construction of systems of debt to the cybernetic mechanisms that are always- Anti-Oedipus:
already in excess of subjectivity, they identify the increasing importance of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans.
such systems in the operation of neoliberal capitalism as early as 1968. When Robert Hurley, et
taking up a discussion of the molar and molecular in reference to finance al. University of
Minnesota Press,
and monetary flows in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari outline a Minneapolis 1983,
crucial methodological distinction: p283.

The issue is that the molar and molecular are distinguished not by size,
scale, dimension but by the nature of the system of reference envisioned
[…] the molecular, or microeconomics, micropolitics, is defined not by
the smallness of its elements but the nature of its ‘mass’- the quantum
flow as opposed to the segmented line.14 14. Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari.
A Thousand Plateaus:
In other words, while we may see a distinction between creditor and debtor Capitalism and
and the segmented line of financial obligation that connects them when Schizophrenia. Trans.
Brian Massumi.
approaching the problem of finance from the perspective of the molar, the University of
Minnesota Press,
vantage point of the molecular changes the frame of analysis, allowing us Minneapolis 1987,
to investigate the ‘quantum flows’ of capital that are concerned with the p217.

‘communication, conversion, and co-adaptation of the two parts of the circuit’

(p217). In shifting our mode of analysis from the molar to the molecular,
we attune ourselves not only to the problem of ‘machinic subjugation,’ but
also to the ‘mass’ of networks that are inseparable from molar processes of
subjectification but not reducible to them.
As a significant moment in the production of a new financial interface
predicated on machinic subjugation, I am interested in how expanding our
framework of analysis to look beyond the subjectivities formed through

Markets Without subjects 77

 financial processes - important as they are - toward a micropolitics of machinic
subjugation. The Nasdaq, taken as a case study in the development of financial
capitalism in the past half-century, offers us insight into the very real machinic
processes that form the material basis of exploitation in what we have come
to call the ‘New Economy’. This is a situation in which the homo economicus
is eclipsed by the adaptive reactions of the ‘dividual.’ An analysis of these
dimensions of the power set into motion through the Nasdaq complicates
and supplements theories of a financialised neoliberal subject with a spectre
of a market without subjects.

‘NEW ECONOMY DREAM MACHINE’

If, as Galloway argues, the interface effect gives us access to the ‘dialectic between
culture and history’ in the age of information, then how might we begin to
map the effects of the new financial interface? As we saw, the early Nasdaq
marks a fundamental transformation in the operation of financial markets
and our orientation to them, one that compels us to look past questions of
subjectification to the molecular, pre-individual processes that drive financial
markets and the mass of technical infrastructure that supports them. In
exploring these aspects of the Nasdaq, however, it is also imperative that we tie
the micropolitical dimensions of the financial interface to complex historical
transformations taking place within capitalism as a system that develop in and
through the Nasdaq. Doing so entails examining the ways that new financial
interface and the molecular processes it implies are intimately tied to the ascent
of the New Economy in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that what Randy Martin
called the ‘financialisation of daily life’ is inseparable from the expansion of
the new financial interface and the micropolitical forms of subjugation that
15. Randy Martin, embedded within it.15 Furthermore, by examining how the Nasdaq’s socio-
Financialisation of
Daily Life, Temple
technical arrangement facilitated the rise of the New Economy, we can also
University Press, evaluate the widespread belief that the contradictions of capitalism could
Philadelphia
2002). Henceforth be overcome by way of this new financial interface. In becoming the ‘dream
Financialisation. machine’ of the New Economy, the Nasdaq and the new forms of financial
control that are born through it are deeply involved in both the fantasies and
the realities of neoliberal capitalism that continue to underpin its current crises.
From its inception, the Nasdaq was part of a larger revolution in the
advancement of financialisation as a cultural process. For example, the year
the Nasdaq was launched, 1971, also saw the end of the Bretton Woods
agreement and the decoupling of the dollar from gold, and thus the financial
sector witnessed concomitant revolutions in the functioning of money and
capital markets. This transfiguration in the material condition of currency
markets and exchanges was followed by perhaps an even more important
event, the publication of the Black-Scholes-Merton equation in 1973, which
made the expansion of the derivatives markets viable. More than simply
indicating the ‘dematerialisation’ of money or the abstraction of finance, these

78 NeW ForMatioNs
events mark the beginning of the technological revolutions in the production
and communication of financial information and money that have, in part,
enabled the vast expansion of the financial sector and circulation of ever-
more complicated forms of financial commodities in the past four decades.
Starting in the 1980s with the postmodernism debates, there have been
numerous accounts of networking and the new capitalist technologies
that allow for the easy facilitation of the flow of money and information.
A host of scholars brought to our attention the larger implications of
financial capitalism’s ability to collapse time and space, the networked
and instantaneous cultural logic of the New Economy, and the decentred
postmodern subject unable to ‘cognitively map’ the contours of global
capitalism.16 I take these observations to be more or less self-evident starting 16. Manuel
Castells The Rise of
points, but want to explore, more systematically, the implications of the Networked Society,
Nasdaq’s socio-technical revolution from the standpoint of our present by Wiley-Blackwell,
Oxford 2000), David
examining the inner workings of the confluence between the rise of the New Harvey The Condition
Economy and the Nasdaq’s financial interface. of Postmodernity,
Wiley-Blackwell,
Launched at the end of the industrial era, the Nasdaq broke with monopoly Oxford 1991,
capitalism by creating a computational network through which investors Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism, Duke
could inject liquidity into smaller-scale, OTC, entrepreneurial capitalisms - University Press,
Durham 1992.
heralding the age of the start-up. While most start-ups were initially funded
by venture capital, it was their public debut on the Nasdaq, the Initial Public
Offers (IPOs) of these firms (often at extremely inflated prices) that propelled
the dot-com boom. Historian Mark Ingebretsen calls Nasdaq in the 1980s
and 1990s the ‘New Economy dream machine,’ not simply because it was the
exchange that fuelled the boom and bubble, but because of the networked
capabilities of the Nasdaq itself: ‘during the 1990s, for the first time ever, a
single network seamlessly linked individual online investors trading from their
desktops directly to brokerages and then to exchanges and clearing firms’
(Nasdaq, p224). Even before the heyday of internet trading and the arrival
of the day trader as a major factor in the speculation on financial markets in
1990s, technical advances to the Nasdaq network like the Nasdaq National
Market in 1982, which improved the quality of pricing information, and
an automated order-routing system, SOES (small-order execution system)
enabled entirely new, horizontalised trading cultures to spring up around
the burgeoning industry in digital technologies.
The melding of this new financial interface with the personal computer
revolution is evident in the close relationship between Bill Gates and Alfred
Berkeley, who advised the NASD on the uses of new technology throughout
the 1980s and 1990s (p89). The attraction of Nasdaq to the early pioneers of
the industry like Apple, Oracle, Intel, and many others, was that its automated,
dealer-driven quotation system, unlike the specialist model of the NYSE,
allowed the injection of huge amounts of liquidity into the market simply
because of the high volume of trades enabled by its technical model. The
success of Microsoft’s IPO on the Nasdaq in 1986 served as model for the

Markets Without subjects 79

 industry, in that, according to Ingebretsen:

The stock performance of companies like Microsoft convinced anyone with

an idea or the capital to back it that a mechanism existed to reap sizable
rewards in short order. In other words, wealth through stock ownership
became a clearly defined and dependable exit strategy for those who
laboured to build start-up companies as well as those who funded them:
they could field an IPO (p92).

The result was an enormous movement of capital towards the tech industry
and ‘an amazingly efficient wealth-creation machine the likes of which had
never been seen before’ (p92).
It is worth pausing to consider the implications of the idea that the Nasdaq
was a ‘wealth creation machine’ or a ‘dream machine’ that operates on the
principles of efficiency, removing human fallibility through the automation
of market functions. In Tactical Media, Rita Raley charts the rise of financial
markets and their dependence on electronic networks, as well as artists’
attempts to tactically intervene in these informational flows in the realm of
digital art. Eschewing organic metaphors for electronic networks, she writes,
‘informational capitalism, we might conclude, mutates not as an unavoidably
communicable virus but as a nonorganic entity whose operative criterion is
17. Rita Raley. performativity’.17 She cites Lyotard who, almost a decade after the inception
Tactical Media,
University of
of the Nasdaq market, prophetically wrote that:
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis 2009),
p133. a computer could become the ‘dream’ instrument for controlling and
regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself, and
governed exclusively by the performativity principle. In that case, it would
inevitably involve the use of terror (p134).

While Raley cautions against the understanding of informational networks

as organic entities capable of regenerating themselves present in much of
the literature, she finds some truth in Lyotard’s vision of terror, a terror
born from an autotelic logic that feeds into itself through the performance
of its own functionality. Yet, is this not, on some level, the logic of capital
itself? That is, the perpetuation and preservation of itself as capital, forever
modulating while reproducing the conditions under which it can expand and
insure the basic conditions of its own production - those of exploitation and
class domination. The Nasdaq is then emblematic of the reproductive logic
of capital in the post-industrial era because it both prefigures and enables a
performative, non-organic, cybernetic, and machinic operation of finance.
Accordingly, the elementary electronic network and infrastructure that
comprised the early Nasdaq system created the conditions in which such a
system could be expanded and mapped onto the entire world, first by way of
the personal computer revolution in the 1980s, and then by way of the 1990s

80 NeW ForMatioNs
dot-com frenzy that generated one of the greatest expansions of capital in
history. The Nasdaq system that helped to facilitate the flow of capital towards
these technological revolutions also modulated alongside them, enveloping
technologies and network forms into the operation of financial markets while 18. Karl Marx.
dramatically expanding its own market share. Grundrisse:
Foundations of the
As Marx famously put it in the beginning of the Grundrisse that ‘human Critique of Political
anatomy is the key to the anatomy of the ape,’ we can see from the first Economy. Trans.
Martin Nicolaus.
moment of the Nasdaq, the seed of the informatised, financialised, and Penguin Classics,
networked present.18 The financial interface introduced by the Nasdaq London 1993, p105.

came to engulf previous forms of financial markets and modes of life. By

examining the Nasdaq we can see, concretely, the ways that contemporary
19. The idea that
Internet and digital culture finds its origins not only in US Department of networks are
not inherently
Defence research and development, a well-established narrative in media democratic is
history, but also in financial markets. Though a military contractor originally forcfully made in
Alexander Galloway
built Nasdaq, it marks one of the earliest and most elaborate expansions of and Eugene
these technologies into civilian life. Nearly a decade before the development Thacker’s book The
Exploit: A Theory of
of ARPANET and the early days of the internet, the Nasdaq was connecting Networks, University
of Minnesota Press,
traders in a network delivering real-time financial information, allowing for
Minneapolis 2007.
user input, and enabling the formation of networked ‘communities’ around
trading practices. Though these kinds of transaction processing systems were 20. Terranova
discusses the
being simultaneously implemented in a number of areas in the 1960s -public enclosure of free
utilities, airline systems, and NASA - the unprecedented reach and impact digital labour in
much of her work,
of the Nasdaq spurs us to ask the following question: what would it mean to most notably
understand networked, digital culture as inextricable from financialisation as ‘New Economy,
Financialisation, and
a cultural and historical process in the late-twentieth century, and vice versa? Social Production
If we tell the story of financialisation through the Nasdaq, then we must in the Web 2.0’,
in Crisis in the
attend to the ways that the financialisation of computational networks and Global Economy:
Financial Markets,
the computational networking of finance are central features of the neoliberal Social Struggles,
era. Contrary to early utopian visions of the internet, such an argument and New Political
Scenarios, Andrea
would necessarily undermine any residual notion that digital networks are Fumagalli and
inherently democratic entities.19 Sandro Mezzadra
(eds), Trans. Jason
To be sure, I do not mean to suggest that the Nasdaq market was itself the Francis McGimsey,
creative engine behind the New Economy. Rather, it was its counter-image, Semiotext(e), Los
Angeles 2010.
a technical, financial interface of the New Economy capable of continually Henceforth Crisis in
the Global Economy.
capturing the creative energies of post-Fordist society, much in the manner
in which Tiziana Terranova discusses Web 2.0’s ability to capture the creative,
21. By capitalist
collective energies of the internet, harvesting and re-territorialising them.20 realism, I am
referring to
The ‘dream-machine’ of the New Economy, the Nasdaq’s boom in the 1990s Mark Fisher’s
is also fuelled by a kind of wish fulfilment of capital that it had found a way development of the
concept that there is
to overcome limitations endemic to the market economy - that technology no alternative to the
and the information economy had finally ended the business cycle. In his neoliberal agenda
in his book Capitalist
2003 book After the New Economy, Doug Henwood charts the generation of Realism: Is there no
what we might call a new, utopian genre of ‘capitalist realism’ 21 about the Alternative? Zero
Books, Winchester
promises of the New Economy and takes great pleasure in mocking the many 2009.

Markets Without subjects 81

 outlandish presuppositions of its advocates in the wake of its collapse, citing
figures as early as Ronald Reagan who declared in 1988:

In the new economy, human invention increasingly makes physical

resources obsolete. We’re breaking through the material conditions of
existence to a world where man creates his own destiny. Even as we explore
the most advanced reaches of science, we’re returning to the age-old
wisdom of our culture, a wisdom contained in the book of Genesis in the
Bible: In the beginning was the spirit, and it was from this spirit that the
22. Henwood, After material abundance issued forth.22
the New Economy,
New Press, New York
2003, pp8-9. Two years after the success of Microsoft’s IPO, Reagan predicts the erasure
of all material antagonisms in what Henwood rightly calls a new form of
‘mysticism’ that propelled the New Economy (p9). Similarly, in his 2002
account of the ascent and collapse of the dot-com bubble, Robert Brenner
cites figures such as Alan Greenspan whose belief in the New Economy and
its capacity to function as something like a dream machine drove the frenzied
inflation of equity prices. Greenspan repeatedly justified the rapid rise in
equity prices through the invention of what he called the ‘virtuous cycle,’ in
which, as Brenner describes it:

The New Economy justified ever higher profit expectations that were
naturally reflected in unstoppable equity prices; in turn, rising equity
prices, by way of the wealth effect, incited ever higher consumption and
investment growth, which sustained New Economy technological advance,
23. Robert Brenner, which justified higher profit expectations, and so on.23
The Boom and the
Bubble: The US in
the World Economy, The tautological nature of the New Economy dream machine and its ‘virtuous’
Verso, London
2003,p177. cycles marks again the clear fantasy of a friction-free capitalism that had
overcome its contradictions - especially since the abandonment of Keynesian
effective demand with the broad implementation of neoliberal policies -
though a quasi-mystical technological fix. The new financial interface born
through the Nasdaq was central to the production of these dreams, or better
fantasies, that fuelled the dot-com boom.
It was precisely the machinic nature of the new financial interface that
allowed for figures like Reagan and Greenspan to champion the New
Economy as a new capitalist utopia that was ushering in the end of history
and limitless growth. At the same time, subjects and segments of the economy
were increasingly being linked to the new financial interface. The Nasdaq
was the vehicle that stimulated the boom (and bust) of the New Economy,
but perhaps more importantly it effected the realisation of ‘a trading floor
that was 3,000 miles long and 2,000 miles wide’ through the so-called
‘democratisation of finance,’ the unprecedented participation in financial
markets by the general public. In his prescient 2002 account of financial

82 NeW ForMatioNs
practices in the New Economy, The Financialisation of Daily Life, Randy
Martin traces the cultural effects of the new financial interface in an manner
that anticipates Lazzarato and others’ turn to Foucault’s entrepreneurial
subjectivity to explain a new financial subject: ‘Without significant capital,
people are being asked to think like capitalists’ (Financialisation, p12).
However, beyond this entrepreneurial subjectivity, Martin reads this cultural
landscape that emerged in the late 1990s as, among other things, ‘a friendly
interface so simple and secure that it reduces financial self management
to child’s play’ (p1). In his account of the emblematic figure of the New
Economy, the day trader, Martin writes:

Day trading seems to vacate the self of all human attachments. It eludes
roles, old or new, stable or blurred. The pulse is set to modulations of the
market, and then only to stocks that show dramatic movements in price
that can be joined before they change direction. All else is distraction.
Attention is frazzled in wanton anticipation (p47).

The day trader of the 1990s embodies the new aspects of machinic subjugation
of the financial interface as they produce a group of functionaries reacting
to the constant relay of financial information that was engendered by the
so-called democratisation of finance during the boom of the New Economy.
Expanding the financial interface to envelop increasing economic activities
and populations is a central aspect of the financialisation of daily life and
proliferates the dynamic of machinic subjugation that comes to undergird
all other cultural aspects of the New Economy.
What is important to emphasise about the accounts of the New Economy
by Henwood, Brenner, and Martin written in the immediate aftermath of
the Nasdaq crash of 2000 is that they give us insight into the dynamics of
this boom and bubble that are essential to an understanding of the 2007-
08 crisis. It is the fascination with the new channels for generating wealth
that are emphasised in these accounts. In returning to these texts, I seek to
foreground this earlier crisis of the New Economy dream machine and the
ways that its emergent features laid the groundwork for the sub-prime crisis
to follow. As Carlo Vercellone notes in his discussion of the becoming rent of
profit, ‘the crisis of March 2000, tied to the fall of the NASDAQ, sanctioned
the end of the myths of the New Economy. In doing so, it reveals the structural
limits that capital meets in the attempt to subjugate the immaterial economy
and the Internet to the logic of commercialisation’.24 Vercellone makes the 24. Carlo Vercellone.
‘The Crisis of the
observation that what gets revealed at the moment of crisis with the Nasdaq Law of Value and the
market is the relationship between cognitive capitalism and financialisation, Becoming Rent of
Profit’ in Crisis in the
which is a relationship of capture and of the proliferation of financial rents Global Economy.
targeted at the labor of communicative networks, but also the limits and
volatility of such a strategy.
While sub-prime and European sovereign debt crises have prompted a

Markets Without subjects 83

 great deal of reflection on the problem of debt, subjectification, and new
forms of resistance like jubilee and debt strike, we must also account for
the prehistory of these crises by way of the New Economy and the financial
interface that gives material form to the neoliberal counterrevolution. We
cannot begin to apprehend the most recent financial crisis without evaluating
how its conditions of existence were laid out by the crisis that followed the
(somewhat temporary) collapse of the dream machine. As Leo Panitch and
Sam Gindin account in the Making of Global Capitalism, the dot-com crash
prompted the Fed to adopt a very loose monetary policy, lowering interest
25. Leo Panitch and rates from six to two percent in 2001, thus fuelling the mortgage boom.25 To
Sam Gindin. The this end, it is evident that the contradictions endemic to the New Economy that
Making of Global
Capitalism: The led to its collapse did not simply end, but were transferred to another bubble
Political Economy
of American Empire
and bust that was, in many ways, even more contingent on the elaboration
Verso, London 2013, of the financial interface and its growing machinic operations. Taken as a
p305.
form of capital accumulation that promises to smooth over the contradictions
of neoliberal capitalism - producing wealth by way of financial rents and
accumulation by dispossession while creating ever-greater inequality - the
financial interface is central to analysing the shape of the counterrevolution
we have witnessed since the 1970s.

SUPERMONTAGE AND THE CYBERNETIC HYPOTHESIS

If the Nasdaq and the New Economy that it propelled are to be foregrounded as
key developments in the ascent of financial capitalism in the past half century,
then we must attempt to dissect the implications of the ‘dream machine’
as indicative of a more insidious techniques of control based on machinic
subjugation that are endemic to the neoliberal project. In their 2001 piece The
Cybernetic Hypothesis - yet another piece written in the immediate collapse of
the New Economy - the Tiqqun collective puts forth a dystopian vision of the
present order of capitalist production that offers a radical, if not overstated,
argument against the belief that the information networks that compose digital
culture are democratic entities. The ‘cybernetic hypothesis,’ for Tiqquin, is a
‘fable’ born in the post-war era that supplants the liberal hypothesis and, for
26. Tiqqun. them, indicates ‘both a paradigm and a technique of government’.26
‘The Cybernetic Charting the development of cybernetic and systems theories of
Hypothesis.’ Trans
Anonymous. Tiqqun engineering, information, and social management from figures such as
2, 2001, p8.
Norbert Weiner and Frederic Hayek, they argue that cybernetics is a ‘new
technology of government’ that pervades contemporary culture:

Cybernetics is not, as we are supposed to believe, a separate sphere

of the production of information and communication, a virtual space
superimposed on the real world. No, it is, rather, an autonomous world of
apparatuses blended with the capitalist project that has become a political project
[…] (p3).

84 NeW ForMatioNs
 Tiqquin is quick to highlight the military origins of cybernetic theory and
their deployment in the construction of what is perhaps the most important
vehicle of social engendering in the contemporary era of capitalism: the
Internet.27 While I am working to depart from both this genealogy of the 27. For Tiqqun, the
Internet is not a
internet which emphasises the centrality of the military and the kind of top- utopian promise,
down planning of mechanisms of social control that is implied by Tiqqun’s but a ‘war machine,
invented to be
cybernetic hypothesis, their account of the New Economy is percipient in like the highway
its diagnosis of how a neoliberal discourse of ‘spontaneous order,’ Fredrick system, which was
also designed by
Hayek’s reading of the de-centralised and self-organising nature of markets, the American Army
as a decentralized
intersects with machinic subjugation: internal mobilization
tool’ (10).
What people call the ‘New Economy’ today, which brings together under
the same official nomenclature of cybernetic origin the ensemble of the
transformations that the Western nations have undergone in the last thirty
years, is but an ensemble of new subjugations, a new solution to the practical
problem of the social order and its future: that is: a new politics. Under the
influence of informatisation, the supply and demand adjustment techniques
originating between 1930 and 1970 have been purified, shortened, and
decentralised. The image of the ‘invisible hand’ is no longer a justificatory
fiction but is now the effective principle behind the social production
of society, as it materialises with computer procedures. The Internet
simultaneously permits one to know consumer preferences and to condition
them with advertising. On another level, all information regarding the
behaviour of economic agents circulates in the form of readings managed by
financial markets. Each actor in capitalist valorisation is a real-time back-up
of quasi-permanent feedback loops. On the real markets, as on the virtual
markets, each transaction now gives rise to a circulation of information
concerning the subjects and objects of the exchange that that goes beyond
simply fixing the price, which has become a secondary aspect […] (p21).

Tiqqun’s cybernetic hypothesis lacks a fundamental understanding of the

mechanisms of wealth accumulation in the New Economy, both with regards
to labour and class antagonism, and thus runs the risk of reproducing the
same fantasy of the ‘dream machine’ we saw earlier. Nevertheless, their
discussion of the informatisation of market practices helps to expand the
notion of the financial interface within the New Economy by indicating that
its function extends beyond the operation of financial markets themselves
to our pervasive and quotidian interactions with internet technologies: ‘all
information regarding the behaviour of economic agents circulates in the
form of readings managed by financial markets’. The production of machinic
subjugation through the financial interface, then, pervades the entire
functioning of a market based on these cybernetic principles.
The dystopian cybernetic world described in The Cybernetic Hypothesis
presents a bleak vision of the totalising nature of the financial interface

Markets Without subjects 85

28. Jonathan Beller. that leaves little space for resistance. While I do not want to conclude by
The Cinematic
Mode of Production: uncritically confirming Tiqqun’s hypothesis, it is worth exploring how
Attention Economy contemporary financial markets, and the Nasdaq in particular, conform
and the Society of the
Spectacle (Hanover, to this dystopian vision. In 2002, Nasdaq introduced its latest innovation
N.H: Dartmouth,
2006. This point
in trading called the ‘Supermontage’. Supermontage is a market platform
that is not unlike capable of integrating global financial information into a single interface,
Lev Manovitch’s
discussion of the while enveloping independent Internet trading networks into the Nasdaq
waning of temporal fold. If it is the montage of images that defines the what Jonathan Beller calls
montage with the
rise of the digital the twentieth century’s ‘cinematic mode of production’, 28 in which meaning
interface in The is derived from sequential images that unfold in duration, then it is perhaps
Language of New
Media, The MIT supermontage that defines the simultaneity of the of technical images at
Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 2002.
the volatile beginnings of the twenty-first century.29 The Supermontage is
indicative of the non-organic network of technical images triggering a series
29. The idea for the of automatic responses aimed at the infinite expansion of market power
‘technical image’
comes from the
capable of reproducing capitalist relations into a measured infinity while
writings of Vilém sucking living labor into its technical infrastructure. In a very real way, every
Flusser. Technical
images, for Flusser, time we purchase an iPhone, log onto Facebook, perform a Google search, or
are electronic retweet information, our activities are registered within the Supermontage.
images that are not
representations of a Though we can occupy Wall Street and resist the kinds of subjectivities
pre-given reality, but produced by debt, neoliberalism, and the like, we must also learn from the
concrete abstractions
made visible that insights of media studies and accounts of new technology. In order to start to
command response
and interaction in
imagine resistance in the era of Nasdaq, it is crucial to construct a genealogy
a feedback relay contemporary finance that takes into account the coevolution of technical
between themselves
and their human infrastructure and mechanical subjugation.
functionaries. In her conclusion to Out of the Pits, Caitlin Zaloom argues that in
‘Technical images
are not mirrors, the expansion of electronic markets and the perfection of their rational
functioning, ‘designers attempt to evade the social world’ (Out of the Pits,
Figure 4: p177). In the face of the Nasdaq revolution, the political challenge, following
Caption: Zaloom, would be to somehow work to reinsert the social and the collective
Supermontage into the abstracted networks of financial infrastructure. However, as I have
interface tried to argue throughout, the invention of electronic trading networks should

86 NeW ForMatioNs
not be thought of as an attempt to evade the social world; rather, the Nasdaq but projectors,’
writes Flusser,
revolution is a transformation of the social-technical assemblage through ‘they function by
the production of a new financial interface that has been mapped onto the means of feedback
between themselves
totality of social life. The point of exploring the Nasdaq and the ways its and their receivers.
evolution helped to shape contemporary global capital is to intervene in both People pattern their
behaviour according
a theoretical and tactical impasse we face in the present. I would argue that in to the images, and
the images pick up
addition to occupying Wall Street, if we are to confront the power of finance on their behaviour
we need political and spatial imaginaries that are also capable of contending to function better
and better as
with MarketSite, Trumbull Connecticut, and the Supermontage. Getting models.’ Vilém
beyond ideas that electronic financial networks are somehow removed from Flusser. Into the
Universe of Technical
social life is essential if we are to take up the project of cognitively mapping Images, Trans. Nancy
contemporary capitalism. The point of elaborating a theory of the financial Ann Roth, University
of Minnesota Press,
interface is not only to describe its effects, but also to generate political Minneapolis 2011.
imaginaries that might allow us to identify new spaces of intervention or p51.

modes of exodus. Perhaps the neoliberal dream machine has not yet run out
of steam, but it is clear that the contradictions of capitalism it was meant to
ameliorate are still alive and well.

Many thanks to Bruce Braun, Sara Nelson, and anonymous reviewers for
their helpful comments in the process of revising this essay.

Morgan Adamson is Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at

Macalester College. Her work engages film and media theory, documentary
and avant-garde cinema, and critical finance studies. She has published on
these topics in a number of scholarly and popular venues, including South
Atlantic Quarterly, Film-Philosophy, and Ephemera. She is currently working on
a manuscript, Enduring Images on New Left Cinema, which is a comparative
evaluation of films emerging from New Left social movements of the 1960s
and 1970s.

Markets Without subjects 87