Читать книгу Standing on the Sun - Christopher Meyer - Страница 12

On May 6, 2010, Jack Ablin, a Chicago-based investor, sat stunned as he watched the price of his Procter & Gamble holdings drop more than 40 percent within half an hour, from the mid-$60s to $39.97. It was part of a larger event that came to be known as the flash crash; in those same few minutes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged almost 1,000 points, losing nearly one-tenth of its value. Ablin told a reporter he quite literally fell out of his chair; it was not only the biggest drop he'd ever seen during a trading day, but it was also the biggest one (in absolute terms) the Dow had ever experienced. Even more amazing, no one seemed able to determine exactly why it had happened. Early theories centered on the possibility that a trader who meant to sell $16 million worth of futures made a typographical error and placed the order at $16 billion. In any event, something kicked the sell-off into motion, and, as automated orders were activated, it quickly snowballed.

For us it was a dramatic reminder of another way that capitalism's environment has changed. It is now situated in an electronic world of ubiquitous, fast-moving information, increasing transparency, and strong feedback effects.¹² Technology is always advancing, of course, and that doesn't usually spell fundamental changes for capitalism. But sometimes, it does. Futurists like to say that when an important technology arrives, “we expect too much in the short run, and too little in the long run.” We've been through the former. The dot-com bubble was an expression of faith that “The Internet changes everything”—a belief that proved premature. It was succeeded by a Dark Age. Following the 2000 dot-com bust, there was a certain amount of relief on the part of those who chose to believe that the Internet was much ado about nothing—until Google's phenomenal stock performance, starting in 2004, turned geeky talk about “Web 2.0” into an “eyeball bubble,” driven by social networks, with investors eager to buy in to the new world of advertising-supported business models.¹³

Now the long run is arriving. It's not about better targeting of marketing. Rather, it's about the democratization that was promised at the dawn of the Web, because, as promised, information technology is empowering smaller economic entities—including individuals.

Three current developments really do have that power. Cloud computing is one, because it changes not only the economics of data storage but also the risk profiles and capital requirements for new businesses. The mobile Internet device is another, because it allows rich information not only to be received but also to be created and transmitted by anyone, anywhere. And what has been referred to as “the Internet of things” is a third, because it allows remote and dispersed phenomena to be sensed and reported and because it automates another class of labor. Each of these trends can be and has been explored at book length, and there's no need to do full justice to them here. We're interested only in the ways they change capitalism.