{"id":2429,"date":"2013-01-09T09:23:59","date_gmt":"2013-01-09T16:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=2429"},"modified":"2013-01-09T10:20:23","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T17:20:23","slug":"the-data-center-gang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=2429","title":{"rendered":"The data center gang"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"factory\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Writing, as fate would have it, in the first wholly disembodied edition of Newsweek<\/em>, Tom Wolfe ponders<\/a> the disembodiment of property, from factory to trading floor to data center:<\/p>\n

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that stocks and bonds are \u201cevaporated property.\u201d Everybody thought of that as such a witty aphorism, but Schumpeter meant it as a lament. \u201cSubstituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls and the machines in a factory,\u201d he said, \u201ctakes the life out of the idea of property.\u201d The new owners, i.e., the stockholders, lose the entrepreneur\u2019s, the founder\u2019s, will \u201cto fight, economically, physically, politically, for, \u2018his\u2019 factory and his control over it and to die if necessary on its steps.\u201d Instead, at the first whiff of a problem the shareholders bail out and sell their share of the ownership to whoever will buy it on the stock market\u2026 and couldn\u2019t care less who it is.<\/p>\n

That was how stocks and bonds evaporated property. What the quants had in mind was a quantum leap (so to speak) forward to the next stage: evaporating the\u00a0stocks<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0bonds<\/i>\u2026 not the property\u2014that was long gone\u2014but the very stocks and bonds\u00a0themselves<\/i>\u00a0and making some\u00a0real<\/i>\u00a0real money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By 2000, the game was over.<\/p>\n

Onward! Onward! Faster! Faster! At a thousand, two thousand, three thousand banking operations, investment funds, and exchanges, quants kept adding computers and servers and servers and computers row above row above row on floor-to-ceiling racks that stretched on infinitely like the stacks of the biggest library in the world\u2026 wrapped in miles of white fiber-optic cables that interconnected the machines\u2026 But these stacks were by no means quiet as a library\u2019s. There were aisles between the stacks so that someone, presumably someone from IT, could get to any machine, every cable connection, if he had to. But any human being who entered, even an IT guy or a quant, was engulfed, oppressed, unnerved, spooked out by an overwhelming\u00a0droning\u00a0<\/i>sound and an X-ray-blue fluorescent light that made your skin look posthumous. The droning seemed to create a pressure upon your skull. Sometimes the drone would rise slightly, then lower\u2026 and rise\u2026 and lower. It made you think this enormous robo-monster was\u00a0breathing<\/i>\u2026 If you were knowledgeable enough even to be allowed to\u00a0enter\u00a0<\/i>one of these huge server rooms, you knew that most of the droning came from air-conditioning units high as a wall\u2026 that ran constantly to keep this concentration of machines from auto-melting because of their own ungodly heat. In some gigantic facilities they let the heat rise into plenums and piped it from there to heat the entire building. You could know all that, but the robo-monster would ride your head so hard, you would turn anthropomorphic in spite of your superior brain\u2026 The robo-monster\u2014it\u2019s breathing\u2026 it\u2019s starting to move\u2026 it\u2019s got me\u00a0by the head<\/i>\u2026 it\u2019s\u00a0thinking<\/i>\u00a0with its CPU (Central Processing Unit) mind,\u00a0thinking<\/i>\u00a0in algorithms, sequences of programmed decisions along the lines of \u201cIf A261, then G1432, and therefore B5556 or QQ42\u2014\u201d spotting discrepancies, making buy-sell decisions, even deceptive looks-like-a-buy feints to trick competing robo-brains into making foolish calculations. The monster\u2019s human\u2026 No, he\u2019s\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0human\u2026 No human brain could possibly think or act as fast, as accurately, as cunningly as a robo-brain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Photo from Wycombe Museum<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing, as fate would have it, in the first wholly disembodied edition of Newsweek, Tom Wolfe ponders the disembodiment of property, from factory to trading floor to data center: In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that stocks and bonds are \u201cevaporated property.\u201d Everybody thought of that as such a witty aphorism, but Schumpeter meant it as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2429"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2440,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429\/revisions\/2440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}