With “Capitalism, time is money, so too is
information.” In the USA, we live in a society that sells goods and services on
an open market. To make buying and selling stocks in the public market, Alan
Greenspan took the risk control factor out of the hands of humans and placed it
in the hands of machines. Contemporary capitalism became connected to the
digital infrastructure. A utopian fantasy of machines is that they will solve
all of humanity’s problems by working autonomously to calculate risks in
trading so humans can work less and prosper. 
This is a false claim. “While the industrial
societies of modernity depended on thermodynamic machines, whose passive danger
is entropy and active danger comes from sabotage, contemporary societies of
control express themselves in terms of cybernetic machines handling information
flows. Information interference, piratism and computer viruses are the dangers
of this machinery, disrupting the flows of information.” 

“Digital
flows- be it entertainment products, information services or computer mediated
communication- construct the essential backbone of a global economic regime.”

From studying cybernetics, we see systems and
networks that are distributed. By putting the global marketplace in the hands
of machines, they become susceptible to control. The utopian fantasy of total
cybernetics is crushed by the corruption of politics. Individuals will use
whatever tool they can to stay in power. Some use their power to harm others.

Capitalism
as a Virus?

Like
human immune systems, computer networks are susceptible to viruses. They infect
one node, replicate itself and spread to the next host. “Computer viruses can
be conceived as internal to the media ecology of digital capitalism.” Viruses
for computers became popular during the early 1990’s during the first stages of
the world wide web for consumers. Viruses are a reaction to the digitization of
they economy. In the previous society, we had are bank accounts and personal
information saved somewhere physically. Once everything became digitized,
hackers tried to steal personal information on servers that were not encrypted
yet. “Through an effective feedback loop and short-circuiting of disruptions
and interruptions, threats of capitalism are turned into general fears and
risks, which in turn are translated into consumer products that aim to control
that fear and deliver safety.” To combat viruses, companies like Norton and
McAfee came up with remedies to this influx of spam, Trojan horses, phishing
and spyware. Viruses created antiviral software which is a form of consumer
capitalism. “Capitalism is viral in itself,” because it has capabilities of
infecting the outside in order to replicate itself. The deterritorialization of
capitalism to encompass the whole globe depends on the networks of connection
and communication that computerization and telecommunications have brought about.
When capitalism is deterritorialized the ideology catches a wider group, in
this case the global market, thtat begins to create goods and services. Once they
invest in capital to create their production of goods and services, they are in
debt to the bankers and investors. It is a way for countries to export goods
and services for the world, but it also keeps the Western bankers and investors
in greatest power.

“The
money commodity has found its ultimate form in the digitalization of money in
the form of e-money and e-commerce.” E-commerce has evolved to the point
where digital currencies, or crypto-currencies, are used to trade for goods and
services. Some of these include Bitcoin and Darkcoin. They are similar to the
dollar or the yen where they are used to buy and sell goods and services, but
they worth fluctuates with the market due to supply and demand. They may be
worth something today, but they are an unstable form of currency Here is a
daily market chart for digital currencies:

Knowledge
or information is central to the “new economy” both to its organization and to
the production of wealth. Information is the society’s raw material because
Internet services run off of the information of the consumer. Examples of these
are Facebook, Paypal, Twitter, Vine, all social networking sites and
applications. Most websites sell premium services to better help you but
require more information like bank accounts and social security numbers. Most
sites share your personal information, but the former systems administrator for
the NSA leaked the extent of the sharing to the public.

Edward
Snowden stole thousands of documents from the NSA to show the extent of the
capabilities of the United States intelligence agencies on their citizens under
protection of the Patriot Act. While most acknowledge his bravery for exposing
government lawlessness, the administration he worked for has tried to make him
go to trial. He currently lives in Moscow, Russia under protection of asylum
for one year.

video of NBC News anchor Brian Williams interviewing Snowden
recently in Russia explaining the reasoning behind his actions:

   

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