Workin' for the Man

So I work for a bank, right? I like to say I work for a software company owned by a bank, but since it's a wholly owned subsidiary of said bank then really, who am I kidding? I work for a bank, a big bank. A fuckoff big American bank. The kind of bank that gets called up in front the US Congress to explain just what the fuck they think they're doing with all that goddamn money. I'm not gonna name names just to avoid random bad-luck googling (especially given todays Metro front page story about a bus driver fired for keeping a blog), but if you know me you know the bank, and if you don't know me...wait you don't know me and you're reading my blog? Who the fuck are you?

So yeah, the bank thing. It's weird, reading about your company in the news, following random internet people speculating on your company's outlook on Google finance, or for that matter, watching your company's stock plummet or rise on a daily basis. Weird because it's so amazingly far removed from my day-to-day work life, completely detached from my influence, yet at the same time very real in it's influence. News story about layoffs...yeah seen those before...then the guy down the hall get's layed off. He's got two kids and a wife.

Sometimes I read things and it sounds like we've got our fundamentals a lot stronger then other banks (we, our...simple pronoun's and then all of a sudden you're identifying with an abstract legal entity, a bundle of business interests? No weirder than identifying with a sports team or a country, and hey at least these are my employers. The relations pretty direct really, but nonetheless, so easily is my linguistic allegiance bought.) And then other times I look at this whole mess, I see countries across the world scrambling to plug holes in their sinking economies and no two countries are plugging the same holes the same way and I think "all these economic oracles got us in to this mess in the first place, and they're expected to get us out?" The say 09 will be rough but after that it'll get better but most of them also thought 08 would be great and that didn't really turn out so well.

Just as few really understood the complex, layered securities that started this current crash, I don't think anyone has a true grasp one what our current economy has become. Particularly in the financial sector, abstractions have been based on abstractions, then split apart, wagered upon and insured, and then abstracted again. These are the hallmarks of extreme technologization. The wonder of abstractions is that each layer need only understand the layer below it. The weakness is thus that each layer is completely dependant on the assumptions of the layer below, such that if one fails, they all fail. The financials already have a name for this in their catalogue of risks: Systemic Risk. The inevitble stupidity in the face of unanticipated errors by computerized systems is only exacerbated by the difficulty in anticipating errors as systems become increasinlgy complex and interconnected. Computers are only as smart as the people who design them, and right now our world economy is essential a vast interconnected software system written by the highest bidder to feed the howling maw of unending quarterly growth.

I vacillate between confidence in my banks overall stability and horror at the blind mutant beast that is our economy, thrashing wildly while we prod and plead, suckle and suffer.